The bronze statue of Charles I on horseback on the corner of Trafalgar Square had been boxed off for the day, with armed police stationed above it. The symbolism was not lost on the protesters from the Republic organisation, those latter-day parliamentarians, who had chosen that spot on the coronation procession route to voice their opposition to the monarchy.
They had come for the day dressed in spring yellow, in contrast to the uniform red, white and blue of the hats and waistcoats and umbrellas of the crowds around them. As the royal procession passed on its way to Westminster Abbey they made sure that the three-word opinion of perhaps a quarter of the British public was heard above the clatter of the Household Cavalry, at a volume unfamiliar from previous state occasions: “Not my king!”
The Republic protest had been organised with the full cooperation and blessing of the Met. Security minister Tom Tugendhat referred to it as evidence that the coronation day would present Britain to the world as a “showcase of liberty”. That had not stopped the chief executive of Republic, Graham Smith, and five of his supporters from being arrested at 7.30 on Saturday morning as they arrived in the square to unpack placards. Those who witnessed the arrest were unsure about the basis on which they had been held. It was assumed that the police were exercising the vague new powers against protest that had rushed through to royal assent on Wednesday.
About 1,700 protesters had pledged to come but – perhaps deterred by Twitter mutterings from the authorities earlier in the week that there would be “low tolerance” of those seeking to “undermine the celebration”, and the decision to shut off Trafalgar Square at about 9am – they numbered only a few hundred. Most did not understand the mechanics of facial recognition, employed for the first time by the Met here. Still, most took the opportunity to smile for the database.
The banners and placards that had not been confiscated expressed various strands of opinion. A few were in support of those dangerous radicals Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and Diana, Princess of Wales. Other homemade efforts included, “Let them eat quiche”, “King parasite” and, as the dressing-up box pageant rolled by: “Don’t you think it’s all a bit silly?” One man raised a laugh with the shouted declaration “We all love the police!” followed by, after pause for effect, “At least they had to apply for their jobs!”
Like the overnight campers on the Mall, the protesters had put in the hard yards. Loretta Caughlin runs a restaurant in Penzance; she was holding a large yellow “Abolish the monarchy” banner with Amanda Hawkes, a librarian down from Cambridge. They had only just met but could already agree on a few things. “Really the whole nonsense of an unelected head of state,” Caughlin said. “Despite what they claim, they have their political influence, shrouded in secrecy. And we have long known that they censor what the BBC puts out…”
Kevin John, a sales rep, was also up from the south-west – Brixham in Devon – where the vast tracts of land controlled by the Duchy of Cornwall in the region focus attention on the inequalities of land ownership.
John said that there could have bene no better recruiting sergeant for republicanism than the arrest of Smith and his fellow peaceful protesters. The stubborn enemy to their cause, he said, was not diehard monarchist sentiment but that “most important British emotion: indifference”.
The protesters were mostly corralled together during the procession but a few people made a point of wandering through, singing the national anthem, or responding to “not my king” with a shrill “is my king”. These playground standoffs – or opening salvoes in the oldest of culture wars – were generally good-humoured. Two women from Northamptonshire dressed in homemade crowns and ermine stoles winced when I told them I was writing about the protest. “I would prefer they didn’t come at all because it’s a lovely, happy day!” they said.
Sisters Beth Glass and Wilma Patton had come over from Ballymoney in Northern Ireland for the occasion, in matching union jack beanies. Both work for the NHS, one a carer, the other a nurse. They had little sympathy for those singing “you can stick your coronation up your arse, sideways” within their king’s earshot. “I know a good republic they can go and live in, just over the border from us,” Glass says. “I’d strongly suggest they move over there.”
Among the protesters were a few representatives from other monarchies, Norway, Sweden and Eswatini, whose heads of state were blinged up and in town. Bram van Montfoort had come from the Netherlands to show solidarity with his British counterparts. He was shocked to witness the arrest of Smith that morning. “There is very much more tolerance towards this debate at home,” he said. The various European republican groups, he said, had a friendly rivalry. “We have got support [for the Dutch royal family] down to 51%,” he said. “Here I think the best result is 55%.”
Paul Powlesland, a barrister who has defended free speech, was among those who had been due to address the protesters before the arrests scuppered that possibility. Loudhailers had been confiscated.
“Charles is saying he wants this to be a coronation for everyone,” he said, “but 25% of his subjects, as he sees them, don’t agree with him. If it really is for everyone, shouldn’t they have made space for that in the ceremony? He could at least have gone to the Met Police and the government and said: I want peaceful dissent to be tolerated. By not doing so, he has shown he is prepared to be crowned as a sort of petty despot rather than a constitutional monarch.”
If dissent is just as British as the monarchy, then republicanism remains the strand of parliamentary opinion that mostly dare not speak its name. Nic Lawley was among the crowd as the spokesperson for Labour for a Republic. He said that plenty of MPs told him in private that they would be in favour of conversations about reform of the institution, but they knew it was still not an election winner.
Lawley had also been due to speak. “It was just about how we are not radicals. We are a minority, but certainly not a tiny one,” he said. “At the moment, our group is trying to focus energies on what can be achieved. The royal family has an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, for example, and we think that’s wrong.”
One piece of information that proved hard to come by as the afternoon wore on was the whereabouts and fate of the protesters who had been detained. I’d spoken to Smith, 49, earlier in the week when he and some of those supporters who were later arrested were hand-painting their signs in an office space in King’s Cross.
He told me then that he had been thinking of this coronation day for most of the 20 years he had been involved with Republic. “It was always going to be an important moment,” he said. They had done some protests at the 2012 jubilee, “but that was on the Thames, and harder to navigate”. They obviously did not promote the cause at the Queen’s funeral as a mark of respect. But this time, he could sense a groundswell – and not only of very British apathy.
“I think what’s interesting is it has coincided with the fag-end of a very unpopular Tory government, the cost of living crisis, and all the other hardships the country is going through,” he said. “For the first time, mainstream journalists have linked royal expenditure with things like the financial scandals around Boris Johnson’s wallpaper.
“That has certainly changed the mood. I also think people are tired of the tone of the coverage.” Charles, he said, inherited a great deal – but not necessarily all the sycophancy.
Smith can measure the change in terms of donations, mostly ten and twenty quid a time from likeminded supporters. “Our income was £106,000 in 2020. Last year it was £286,000.” He was the only member of staff for many years, but now they number seven.
Predictably, he said, the more rigid the efforts of the crown and the government to impose bunting and oaths, the more their support grew. “We did very well after the wedding [of William and Kate] in 2011,” he said. “That brought a lot of attention from the foreign media, in particular.”
Saturday’s arrests, no doubt, will provide another growth opportunity.
• This article was amended on 7 May 2023. An earlier version called Eswatini by its former name, Swaziland.
