This is John Batchel, a conversation with Professor Jonathan Healy of Oxford University,

professor of 16th and 17th century.

The book is The Blazing World, a new history of Revolutionary England, 1603 to 1689,

the very same years in which the English colonists at first a trickle and then a flood

poured into colonial America in the Caribbean, in the south, the tidewater, and in New England.

This is the period of challenging the king. And in this passage, Jonathan describes the

regicides in London, who cut off Charles I's head and how they do it and their explanation for

it. Regicide is always popular and then condemned century after century. Regicide is still

with us, cutting off the king's head, and then afterwards regretting it, blaming, fighting about it,

civil war. Regicide.

More of this later on tonight.

Oh, hugely so.

Huge to say. I mean, they realized that this is a very shocking, a shocking moment.

And that as much as a very, very large proportion of the English population were in favour of, you know, parliamentary

power and supported the parliamentarians in the Civil War. A very, very small number of people

actually believed that the king could be put on trial or that England should become a republic. So

they absolutely knew how dangerous this was. It is quite interesting to sort of think about what happens in London, because throughout the 1640s, there's constant popular upheaval in London.

There's, you know, there's protests, there's petitioning, there's riots, there's everything.

And yet, during the King's Trail, there isn't.

Now, one way that you can read this is that there's a whopping great army in the middle of London,

and people don't want to, you know, put their heads above the parapet.

But another one is to say that, well, maybe London is broadly in support of putting the king on trial.

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