Thread by @Joe_Cozens

1/ Today’s coronation will see anti-monarchists in Britain using the #notmyking hashtag.

It is worth remembering that, historically, Britons haven’t always held the freedom to openly criticise the King/his family.

2/ Under the laws of seditious libel and seditious words, writing/speaking against the Crown were serious criminal offences.

3/ Perhaps the most infamous seditious libel in the English language was penned by radical republican, Tom Paine.

His pamphlet, The Rights of Man (1791-2), which sold 250,00 copies, had some choice things to say about hereditary monarchy...

4/ 'All hereditary government is in its nature unjust, and an imposition on society. An heritable crown ... [has] no other significant explanation than that mankind are heritable property. To inherit a government is, to inherit the people, as if they were flocks and herds ...

5/ We have heard the ‘Rights of Man’ called a levelling system; but the only system to which the word levelling is truly applicable is the hereditary monarchical system. It is a system of *mental levelling* ...

6/ It indiscriminately admits every species of character to the same authority. Vice and virtue, ignorance and wisdom ... Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals ...

7/ Hereditary monarchy is a burlesque upon monarchy. It puts it in the most ridiculous light, by presenting it as an office which any child or idiot may fill ...

8/ It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a king requires only the animal figure of a man – a sort of breathing automaton'.

(Paine, RoM, pt II, chap 3).

9/ Paine fled to France shortly after the second part of his pamphlet was published. He was prosecuted in absentia for seditious libel and 'outlawed'.

Loyalist associations across the country then publicly and ceremonially burned Paine in effigy, along with copies of his book.

10/ Despite this climate of repression, many ordinary Britons risked prosectution (and getting the sack) by voicing their contempt for the monarchy. #notmyking

Take Edward Swift, a 'slop seller' from Clewer (nr Windsor), sentenced (1794) to 1 year in prison for saying...

11/ 'Damn the King and Queen they ought to be put to death the same as the King and Queen of France ... I will always say so if I have a sword run through me for so saying ... I will go down to Birmingham and bring up a set of rioters and make Windsor worse than France ever was'.

12/ Or what about James Hollis, tried at the Sussex Assizes (1793), for saying 'What business have we with a King? France is now the happiest power under heaven except America ... Tom Paine is a very sensible clever fellow'.

13/ Even soldiers, like William Peever of the 44th Regiment, can be found articulating their disaffection: 'Damn King George ... and God bless Tom Paine. Damnation seize the 44th Regimen and all belong to them, though I am one of them'.

14/ Prosecutions for seditious libel and seditious speech continued into the 19th century. There were 1,700 cases in the Chartist decade (1838-1848).

(Chartisit #twitterstorians perhaps you can reply with some examples on anti-monarchist sentiments from the 1830s and 40s?).

15/ By the 1880s the sedition laws had largely fallen into disuse and they were finally repealed in 2009.

16/ Yet even under the draconian laws of the past, the threat of prosecution did not prevent certain subjects of the Crown from imagining a different political culture, nor did it stop them from saying #notmyking