The philosopher who drew the blueprints for modern liberty, human rights, and the separation of church and state also invested in the transatlantic slave trade and calculated that impoverished three-year-olds should be put to work. This episode presents John Locke's life as a historical thriller: a Puritan childhood in Somerset, a father who fought for Parliament in the Civil War, a teenage arrival at Westminster School as King Charles I was beheaded nearby, and a turn from Oxford's scholasticism toward experimental medicine alongside Robert Boyle.

A mundane errand delivering medicinal water in 1666 brought Locke into the orbit of Lord Ashley, later the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose life Locke saved by overseeing a risky abdominal surgery and a custom silver drainage tube. That debt pulled Locke into government, where he helped draft the Funda ...