MTHEGM. "But Jim, Fred, et al, none of you has really answered my point, which I think I have demonstrated many instances to support:~ that the vast majority of the folk for the vast majority of the time actually liked being ruled by a monarch"

Whhhhaaaattttt!!!!!!!!! This crowd of uneducated thickos, sorry, peasants, sorry, feeling sensate human beings actually enjoyed paying rents and tithes and taxes to the richest entity in the land while they pesonally starved. Come off it. You'll be telling me next that they just couldn't wait to be press ganged, flogged and carted, and hauled off to be shot in foreign wars. What a splendid lot of noble unself-serving lot of chaps. A pity the ruers of our land couldn't have followed their example.

But that is to miss the point. I hate the monarchy and I will continue to sing anti-monarchist songs. And that is irrespective of whether the latest MtheGM revelation, sorry, opinion, has a shred of historical veracity. What's more, irrespective of whether I'm in a minority or not, I will continue to campaign for the abolition of the monarchy while I have breath to do so.

It's called democracy, doncha know. and there's precious little of it around these days.

Oh yes, and I note that you very quickly dropped the subject when I corrected your assertion that Alexander Somerville 'only' received 50 lashes of the whip. Yes, I know I got my own account wrong, but that just shows the importance of consulting an unimpeachable source, rather than relying on Wikipedia or memory.

In fact, Brian Behan's introduction to the MacGibbon & Kee edition of Somerville's memoirs claims that because Somerville was given 100 lashes of a cat of nine tails, and each tail had 6 strands, he was actually lashed 5,400 times.

"Here's a health to King George"? Not for me buddy.