When the queen died last year, republicans balked at the fawning response to the succession. Some even found themselves under arrest for minor acts of protest, such as heckling. Ahead of next week’s coronation, three tell their tales
ymon Hill was walking back from church on a sunny autumn Sunday when he realised his route was blocked; the roads around Carfax Tower in Oxford were closed off. It was 11 September, the day after Charles Windsor had been officially proclaimedin London, and local events were being held nationwide. This ceremony, organised by the council, typified the pomp and pageantry. Hill is a quiet, thoughtful man of 46, but it doesn’t take much to rile him when it comes to the monarchy.
Perhaps the most alarming story to emerge was that of a barrister threatened with arrest after holding up a blank piece of paper outside parliament. It felt like something we might read about in China or Russia. What was happening to Britain and its much vaunted democracy? In the days after the queen’s death, as TV stations cancelled regular programming and sombre music was played on the radio, only supine monarchism seemed acceptable.
Hill called out something else to make his point: “Something like, ‘Let’s not bow down to our equals.’ Then the security guards pushed me backwards. I thought they were going to knock me over. As the band started playing God Save the King, the police rushed in and said to the security guards, ‘We’ve got this’ or, ‘We’ve got him’, something like that.” Hill is fastidious about the facts to the point of pedantry. “Then the police grabbed me, twisted my arms back and handcuffed me.
He says it was more alarming than the three previous occasions he had been arrested for protesting. In 2013, he was among a group of Christian activists charged with aggravated trespass after blocking an entrance to a London arms fair by kneeling in prayer. “We were found not guilty on a technicality because the police hadn’t read the warning in the proper way before arresting us. The second time I was not charged; the third time the charges were dropped.
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