There are times when it is rather overwhelming to be a citizen of Oxford, that impossibly ancient city. Sunday was one of them. Amazed to have lived long enough to see my third monarch, I attended the Proclamation of the new King Charles III at Carfax, which has been the name of the crossroads at the heart of the town since before anyone can remember. Yellowing photographs are still displayed in our Town Hall of previous such ceremonies, the older ones containing men with majestic beards, firemen in polished brass helmets, county yeomanry with fixed bayonets on parade, and undergraduates in straw boaters. I suspect everyone present in these pictures has long ago found his way to the cemetery.
And here I was, present at the identical occasion, surrounded by a casually-dressed crowd and the colours and shapes of another age. When it was over, the terrible buskers would switch their loudspeakers back on and the merchants of tourist tat would resume their trade. But for a few minutes we could step out of normal time into the slower, quieter rhythm of tradition, to acknowledge (all too briefly) the Sovereignty of God over all of us, and the breathtaking origin of earthly power and law. It was one of the moments when George Orwell’s summary of English continuity, in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ is still true:
And so here we all were in the September sunshine listening to the very same words as the other crowds had heard in 1901, in 1910, in 1936 and in 1952. And then an unscripted voice called out. I could not make out the words, but they were obviously some sort of protest. Almost immediately, other voices called out, including one in the authentic tones of the British common people, advising “Shut up, you berk!”, an utterly obscene insult whose true brutality is concealed by rhyming slang (you will have to look it up if you don’t know).
Soon afterwards we were all asked to exclaim, with heart and voice ‘God save the King!’ and I think we did so with that bit more force and power because of the protest. I thought complacently that the episode was a beautifully English moment in which liberty, dissent, protest and tradition were happily mingled. Only later did I discover that the shouting man, Symon Hill, had in fact been arrested and handcuffed by the police. He has given a full account of the matter here.
The strangest thing in his account is his complaint that some of those attending the Proclamation were ‘in clothing more suited to the sixteenth century’. I am puzzled as to why he thinks there is anything wrong with people getting up in the clothing of the 16th century if they want to. In Oxford we are happily surrounded by architecture from that era and from much earlier, which is startlingly superior to the things we build today. Why live in Oxford if you don’t have at least some liking for the past? We have a lot to learn from the 16th century, and I do not find the clothing styles of the 21st century especially appealing. But that is republicans for you, faddish, and all-too-often using the foolish argument that the new is automatically better than the old.
But I am hugely pleased that republicans exist, and that they have the guts to raise their voices against monarchy, just as I am pleased that monarchists are available to call them rude names — and I am furious that any ‘security’ person or police officer thought it necessary to move or arrest Mr Hill. Dissent is the essential ingredient of freedom, and dissenters do not have to be correct to be valuable. As J.S. Mill puts it in his mighty condemnation of censorship, a people loses greatly by suppression:
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