Allegiance to King Charles & the Freeborn Englishman
As part of the Coronation ceremony people will be invited to swear an oath of loyalty to King Charles 111.
It has of course been defended by a clean shaven man in a suit- some Tory Minister or another and supported by hard right Labour MP Shabana Mahmood. Others have been more critical at best.
Historically the act of swearing an allegiance to the King is at more or less at complete odds with the figure of the Freeborn Englishman.
The Freeborn Englishman was certainly patriotic but this meant an allegiance to a constitutional monarch who acted through Parliament and basic liberties and rights. When Governments fell short of this the right to riot was asserted, based on the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
As E P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class, the Freeborn Englishman in practice claimed few rights except the right to be left alone and not bothered by or intruded on by the State. The proposed oath breaks that
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