SEVENTY years ago, when the previous monarch was crowned, posters were put up around the country which offered a £2,000 reward for information that could lead to the identification of Elizabeth I of Scotland.

Post boxes and royal mail vans were altered in the same spirit.

The controversy around Elizabeth's regnal number also inspired one of our greatest republican songs: The Scottish Breakaway, or The Coronation Coronach.

The lyrics were written by Morris Blythman under his pen name Thurso Berwick, a nom de plume designed to promote a form of collective authorship that would represent the whole of the Scottish mainland.

In an explanation of the pseudonym, Blythman said he had always believed in mass creation.

It was at a recent meeting of the Radical Independence Campaign that rewriting the lyrics was first suggested.

What's in a name?

Something considerable apparently, when reflecting on an institution with little left to offer but titles and honorifics. The folk tradition has been at the forefront of my mind in the build up to the pageantry that lies before us, perhaps because I spent the weeks surrounding the Queen's death travelling around the country going to gigs and sessions.

During one, in the wake of the event and before the queue had even began to form, a performer paused to wipe tears from their eyes and say: 'It's just so beautiful, that after all these years we finally have our King Charlie.'

Ironically, the song before had been 'Ye Jacobites by Name'. However unpalatable, this incident emphasised to me the complications bound up in Scotland's relationship with the regnal name on the horizon.

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From the adoption of Charles II as King of Scots in 1649, over a decade before the restoration, through the military campaign to return the Stuart line to the throne with Bonnie Prince Charlie, Scotland is very much tangled up in the history of the new sovereign's nominal predecessors.

It does not suffice to replace the 'nae Liz the twa' in Blythman's song with a 'nae Chuck the thrie', because the suggestion that Scotland should have had another ruler that bore the name feels at cross-purposes with the republican conviction that nae Chas wull ever dae.

All of that being said, Jacobitism held within it a quiet radicalism that may help us in developing an anti-monarchical politics that goes beyond liberal platitudes. We must interrogate suggestions that we replace his majesty with another head of state that serves the same purpose, and adopt a model of governance that functionally bears resemblance to the existing crown powers.

Thankfully, while constituting a more radical perspective we have a wealth of resources to consult from the traditions of Scottish republicanism. Blythman, as well as writing the titular tune and other legendary protest songs like Ding Dong Dollar, was a tireless advocate for the legacy of John Maclean.

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In 1973, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he edited Homage to John Maclean. The collection contains only a small sample of the verse written in tribute to the founder of the Scottish Workers Republican Party.

Included of course is the text of Hamish Henderson's 'John Maclean's March'. A song written in 1948 to capture the meeting of 2,000 people on the twenty-fifth anniversary, taking as its subject the 10,000 strong funeral procession.

It is remarkably serendipitous that the coronation has fallen in the same year as we acknowledge that a century has passed since this event. Maclean himself was always emphasising that the true enemy was not the king himself, but the 'propertied class that, out of the plunder taken from us, is prepared to spend the sum needed to maintain the royal family.'

Poetry on royal subjects has a long and illustrious history in Scotland, from nineteenth-century weavers like Janet Hamilton to Lindsay's Satyre, or even Barbour and Blind Harry.

Recently a comrade from the US asked if I could express my understanding of left republicanism in haiku form, an effort towards unpacking a word that long ago took on a new meaning in an American context. I made an attempt, but I found it challenging. With syllable limitations, it was tricky to put forward a definition that did not come across as facile or reductive.

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I sent over my paltry effort with the caveat that the poet William Soutar already did more with four lines than I could with a whole fleet of tankas. I finished off our exchange, as I will this brief article, by quoting from his poem 'Nativity':

“There is more freedom from a flower

Than from the charter of a king

How frail a grace can bear the power

Of liberation on its wing.”

James Barrowman is a writer and PhD student at the University of Dundee. His project, 'Counterfooting the Conjuring of a Ghaist', attempts to reimagine two lost plays by James Wedderburn from the sixteenth-century, by weaving together fragments and anecdotes from Dundonian history. He is a member of the Radical Independence Campaign.