I'm John Dutcher with Jonathan Healy, Professor Jonathan Healy, a social historian

at an associate professor at Oxford University.

His new book is The Blazing World, a New History of the Revolutionary England,

1603 to 1689.

Jonathan mentions the Scottish Revolt, but that's the first of many, rising

up against the absolute power of the king.

We need now to go quickly through the 1630s and the 1640s, because the king's power is

challenged not only by religionists, but also by people who have been disappointed about his way of

exacting penalties, exacting taxes, and what is an effect tyrannical. The word tyranny is used

all the time. Jonathan, the fighting begins almost casually in the early 1640s,

with the king riding around with retainers, that is to say, his private army traveling with him.

At the time, there was no standing army. Is that correct? When the king needed men to fight with him, he'd called to his lords and they'd raise the army.

So is the king understood to be, at this point, ordinary riding with his protectors,

or is this seen to be a step back, a weakness on his part?

Well, I mean, he's, if you like, the sort of, the kind of Rubicon moment, if you like, is when in, at the very, well, the winter of 1641, 1642, where, essentially, so what's happened is that Charles has been forced to call Parliament. Parliament has pushed him down a sort of, you know, a path of reform. As part of that, they have put William Lord in prison and they've put Stratford on trial, eventually had him executed against the King's wishes. The King wasn't able to do anything about it. And after that period of reform, which the king has basically sort of broadly been forced to accept,

he then stages a bit of a fight back. He tries to build up his own party within Parliament.

So that by the end of 1641, Parliament is basically split. There's sort of, you know, reformists, future parliamentarians,

and then there's royalists in Parliament. That sort of 50-50 split. And then it all comes to a head

in the winter of 1641, 1642, where there's kind of huge street protests about the presence

of bishops in the House of Lords.

And as part of Charles' kind of fight back, he basically gathers an army around him of sort of loyal soldiers,

mostly sort of demobilized soldiers who'd been part of the army which had fought against Scotland,

...