S8 Ep697: 3. The Personal Rule and the Legal Challenge of Ship Money Guest Author: Jonathan Healey Charles I’s early reign was marked by intense struggle with Parliament over taxes and religion, leading to the 1628 Petition of Right. Following the assassination of
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John Batchelor
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🗓️ 5 April 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
3. The Personal Rule and the Legal Challenge of Ship Money Guest Author: Jonathan Healey Charles I’s early reign was marked by intense struggle with Parliament over taxes and religion, leading to the 1628 Petition of Right. Following the assassination of his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, Charles dismissed Parliament in 1629 to begin eleven years of "personal rule". To fund the state, he employed controversial methods like "ship money," extending a maritime defense tax to inland counties. This sparked a landmark legal battle where lawyers like Oliver St John argued against taxation without representation, a principle that would later resonate deeply with the American founders who eventually used these same arguments. (3)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Baxter, visiting with Jonathan Healy and a social professor of history, social |
| 0:09.0 | history at Oxford University, most importantly the author of a book, I highly recommend to |
| 0:14.0 | understand where America comes from. |
| 0:17.0 | The Blazing World, a new history of Revolutionary England, 1603 to 1689, to my reading as an |
| 0:23.3 | amateur, the cases and the presentations and the passions in Jonathan's book will reappear |
| 0:30.3 | as if by magic in the founders of the United States of America. |
| 0:35.5 | And the arguments that are in the 17th century are still with us. |
| 0:39.3 | I understand we've done a deal of learning since then, |
| 0:43.3 | but the same idea of regents versus the people, |
| 0:47.3 | and what is the correct way to govern? |
| 0:50.3 | Is it for the safety of the people? |
| 0:53.3 | Is it for the absolute power of the king? |
| 0:57.0 | Is it somewhere in between? We go now to Charles I, a young region, and his most important |
| 1:03.0 | minister is the man he went dashing off to Spain with, Buckingham, who's in charge of the fleet. |
| 1:09.0 | And yet that matter of money causes again and again the problems with Charles's 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 a lot. Yes. No, and Edward Cook is, |
| 1:31.3 | he's, I mean, you know, a man of a very interesting career path, former Attorney General to Queen |
| 1:38.4 | Elizabeth, but who fell foul of James I when he was Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. |
| 1:45.7 | And he's now sort of in his older years, he's kind of reinvented himself almost as a sort of, you know, opposition politician. |
| 1:55.7 | And he's one of the kind of leading figures in Parliament. |
| 1:58.2 | He gets elected in Parliament in the 1620s, pushing for a sort of, you know, a kind of restriction on the power of the monarchy. And he's very central behind the petition of right of 1628. So yeah, a very interesting, very interesting career. And a man whose legal judgments still get cited in |
| 2:18.2 | common law countries even today, very interesting. His grievances are, to my mind, inspirational |
| 2:25.4 | to all the other remonstrances that we will talk about over the rest of the century. |
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