I'm John Batchel with my good colleague Gregory Copley, who's teaching me how to be observant of the

Commonwealth of the British Empire once upon a time of kingship. He's the author of New Book,

Noble State, about the success of constitutional monarchy, which is a product of the 17th century and the civil

wars and the disputes between not only Catholics and Protestants, but between royalists

and the roundheads, so-called because of their haircuts, or the Puritans, so-called because

of the way they practiced religion. There's Scotland in this mix, too, the

Covenanters, is Irish, it's Catholic. James I first takes the throne in 1603, having been

James I's 6th of Scotland for many years up to that point. He was king at 13 months because his

mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was deposed, and he had many regions,

but he took control in his teenage years, and he's accustomed to being king. He's the man

who gave us the understanding of the divine right of kings. He's also the man who invented

Great Britain. He was very smart, the intellectual of all the kings that I've ever read. I've just enjoyed a biography

about him. But there's this twist. King James I saw Britain as a benighted progressive force.

Parliament stood up against him, and the result was difficulties that led to the revolution in the 1640s and finally the execution of the king,

Charles I, James' son, and the civil war that followed.

Gregory, does that haunt Britain?

Is that part of the difficulty of moving in one direction,

that they've had this tension for 400 years now? I certainly could make the case that

America was born out of that tension. That's when the colonists arrived in great number,

not only in the Pilgrim North, but also in Jamestown and the Chesapeake Bay.

Did that dispute with the king saying that the king is a creature of parliament, not parliament as a

creature of a king?

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