A headline says a corner of the King’s realm has declared itself a new principality, and whatever the details, it joins a long line of home-made kingdoms that the law has learned to ignore
Home-Made Kingdoms in Britain
My favourite royal headline of the week has nothing to do with Windsor. A royal news site reports that the King has seen a small part of his realm near the Cotswolds set itself up as a new principality.
I have only that line. I do not know which village, or field, or public house is involved, who the prince is or what grievance moved him. I intend to find out. In the meantime I can say with confidence that he is not the first, and that the King is unlikely to send troops.
Declaring independence from the United Kingdom, on a small scale and with a flag designed at the kitchen table, is one of the country’s more endearing pastimes. It has a history.
The Fort
The best known is Sealand.
In the war, the government built a number of anti-aircraft platforms in the sea off the east coast. Concrete towers with a deck on top. Afterwards they were abandoned.
In 1967 a former army major who had been running a pirate radio station occupied one of them, about seven miles off Suffolk. He declared it the Principality of Sealand. He was its prince. His wife was the princess.
The following year his son fired a warning shot at a vessel that came too close. They were summoned to court in Essex. The judge ruled that the platform was outside British territorial waters, as they then stood, and that the court had no jurisdiction.
The family took that as recognition. It was nothing of the kind, but it was not nothing either. Sealand has since issued passports, stamps and coins, survived an attempted coup by a German businessman, and sold titles of nobility to the public at very reasonable rates. The founder’s son reigns to this day.
Britain later extended its territorial waters to twelve miles, which takes in the platform. Nobody has bothered to do anything about it.
The Street
My own favourite was in London.
In 1977 the council planned to clear a few streets of squatted houses in Notting Dale. About a hundred and twenty residents held a meeting and voted to secede. They called their country Frestonia, after Freston Road.
They did it properly. They applied to the United Nations for membership and warned that peacekeepers might be needed. Every citizen adopted the same surname, so that the council would have to rehouse them as a single family. There was a minister of state for foreign affairs, who was an actor, and a minister of education who was two years old.
They printed stamps. A film was made there. A shadow minister of the day, later a Chancellor, wrote them a letter of support.
It worked, in the way that mattered. The publicity made demolition impossible. A housing co-operative was formed and the residents stayed. The Free and Independent Republic was a joke with a serious purpose, and it won.
The Town
Then there is Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh border.
A bookseller there had spent years filling the town’s empty shops, cinema and fire station with second-hand books. On the first of April 1977 he declared Hay an independent kingdom and himself its king.
He was crowned with a home-made crown and carried an orb fashioned from a lavatory ballcock. He appointed his horse prime minister. He sold peerages.
It was a publicity stunt, and one of the most successful in the history of British retail. The town became known around the world. Its literary festival now draws a hundred thousand people a year. The king reigned until his death and is remembered with real affection.
What the Law Says
Nothing, mostly. That is the secret.
You cannot, in law, remove a piece of land from the United Kingdom by announcing that you have. Sovereignty rests with the Crown in Parliament. A declaration of independence by a householder has the same legal force as a declaration that he is a teapot.
But there is no offence in making it. You may call your garden a grand duchy, design a flag, issue stamps that the Royal Mail will not carry and give your friends titles. The state will take no interest whatever.
Until you stop paying tax. That is where every such venture meets reality. The Crown is relaxed about your flag. It is not relaxed about your council tax. Micronations that understand this last for decades. Those that do not last until the first letter from the Revenue.
Why People Do It
Looking across the examples, there seem to be three motives.
Protest. Frestonia was a way of fighting a council. Others have seceded over a planning decision, a road or a wind farm. The declaration is a means of saying: you are not listening.
Promotion. Hay wanted visitors. A principality is cheaper than an advertising campaign.
And play. A good many are simply people enjoying themselves. A man in a London flat once declared his living room a kingdom for a television series and acquired tens of thousands of citizens. There is something appealing about a country with no army, no debt and a national anthem written on a Tuesday.
My guess, and it is only that, is that the new one near the Cotswolds will prove to be a mixture of the first and second.
What It Says About the Real One
I find these stories oddly reassuring about the monarchy they mimic.
Every home-made state reaches for the same furniture. A prince. A crown. Titles. A coat of arms. Nobody secedes from Britain and sets up a federal republic with a rotating chairmanship. The joke works only because the forms of kingship are so deeply understood that a ballcock on a stick is instantly recognisable as an orb.
And the response is telling. A less secure state would prosecute. Ours shrugs. The King, I imagine, was told about his new neighbour over breakfast and was amused.
There is an old British film in which a London district discovers it is legally part of Burgundy. The residents tear up their ration books, and after a few glorious weeks they vote to come back. It is the truest thing ever made about this country. We like the idea of leaving. We like it even more as a way of getting noticed. And then, on the whole, we would like the buses to keep running.
I shall report on the new principality when I know more. If it is selling dukedoms, I may enquire.
There is always, incidentally, a full diary of the more established monarchies for those who prefer their thrones with a longer pedigree.
The London Prat, a sovereign entity in its own estimation, covers breakaway states in its UK satirical news on declaring independence and its British satirical news about a principality in a field. Bohiney Magazine covers a country that did the same thing in 1776 and took it rather further.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
