I'm John Batchel, visiting with Jonathan Healy and a social professor of history, social history at Oxford University, most importantly the author of a book, I highly recommend to understand where America comes from.

The Blazing World, a new history of Revolutionary England, 1603 to 1689, to my reading as an amateur,

the cases and the presentations and the passions in Jonathan's book will reappear as if by magic

in the founders of the United States of America. And the arguments that are in the 17th century are still with us.

I understand we've done a deal of learning since then,

but the same idea of regents versus the people.

And what is the correct way to govern?

Is it for the safety of the people? Is it for the absolute power of the

king? Is it somewhere in between? We go now to Charles I, a young region, and his most important

minister is the man he went dashing off to Spain with, Buckingham, who's in charge of the fleet.

And yet that matter of money causes again and again the problems with Charles' early days of Charles's reign. He's trying

to deal with Parliament. A deal here, I noted Edward Koch is still with us. He's a very aged

man at this point. Do I have that correctly, Jonathan?

He's still alive.

Yes, no, and Edward Cook is, he's, I mean,

a man of a very interesting career path,

former Attorney General to Queen Elizabeth,

but who fell foul of James I when he was Lord

Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. And he's now sort of in his, in his older years, he's,

he's kind of reinvented himself almost as a sort of, you know, opposition politician. And he's

one of the kind of leading figures in Parliament.

He gets elected in Parliament in the 1620s, pushing for a sort of, you know, a kind of

...