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...

Articles 8 through 15 follow arguments. They follow a lawyer insisting that the common law bounds the King, a regiment debating the franchise in a Putney church, a philosopher justifying revolution, and a generation of Scots and Frenchmen asking what a free society requires. What those articles do not do, because they cannot do it without losing their subjects, is keep a running account of who held the throne while the arguments were made, and what that person was doing.