Episode 9 traces the Levellers, the print-and-petition network of London radicals and army agitators who took Sir Edward Coke’s defense of English liberty and moved its foundation out from under it.

The war that ended in 1647 had begun five years earlier as a quarrel over exactly the questions the previous article left unresolved: whether the king’s power ran only as far as the law allowed, or whether the crown held reserves of authority above the reach of Parliament and the courts.

This is a companion episode — a teaching hour, whiteboard and all — built to sit beside the middle stretch of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. The arguments of Articles 8 through 15 each follow a mind: a lawyer insisting the common law bounds the king, a regiment debating the vote in a church at Putney, a philosopher justifying revolution, a generation of Scots and Frenchmen asking what a free society requires...