During one of the royal pageants that periodically choke the streets of London, a conservatively dressed American approached me.
“You must be so proud,” she trilled, and she became quite truculent when I told her I felt nothing but shame. “How can you hate your country?” she snapped. “What’s the matter with you?” “I don’t hate my country,” I replied, “and there’s nothing the matter with me. Like you, I am a republican.”
Foreigners rarely realize that British republicans have always opposed monarchy because they love their country and want to end the humiliation of a Hanoverian state’s smothering our best democratic impulses. When the 18th century English dissenter Richard Price, friend of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, warned that fawning before royalty produced “idolatry as gross and stupid as that of the ancient heathens,” he aptly titled his denunciation “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country.”
