As a Guardian-reading Catholic monarchist, I must disagree with your royal wedding leader (29 April). You may wish Prince William and Catherine Middleton all the best, but your sympathies lie elsewhere. The Guardian wants Britain to replace its constitutional monarchy with a republic. The majority of Britons wish to retain it, while repealing parts of the Act of Settlement. You say it is wrong to have a lavish ceremony during a recession. Should the wedding of Britain's future king be done on a shoestring? Has the Guardian not heard of soft power? Pageantry and history are what we do best. As for costs, the wedding will more than pay for itself with a huge worldwide TV audience, and all the attendant income from tourism.
Finally, you mention "that spiteful symbolic snub" of not inviting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to the wedding. This is easily explained by one person, Cherie Blair. As the prime minister's wife she breached protocol by refusing to curtsey to the Queen. Then her boorish behaviour at the Braemar Games (yawning while sitting behind the monarch) made her persona non grata. Of course the Queen would have liked to have invited the former Labour prime ministers, but she could not invite one without the other.
Justin Kerr-Smiley
London
• As a staunch non-royalist and a humanist, I have a confession to make: I really enjoyed and was moved by the royal wedding. Kate looked fabulous and William is clearly a really decent bloke.
The impact of Lady Di was there for all to see, though was not mentioned by the impressive array of commentators wheeled out by the BBC. Di's transformation of the old creaking monarchy meant that the occasion had a flavour of genuine warmth and relaxation that Di herself, as the blushing bride almost 10 years Kate's junior, was not able to enjoy back in 1981.
The imprint of Di sits strongly on William and Harry, not only in their facial expressions but also their warmth and empathy for other people. Without Di, of course, we would not have had Elton John in attendance, though it was puzzling to see him looking like a novice as he tentatively picked his way through the stirring rendition of Jerusalem. Tony Blair's absence was clearly explained by his telling the queen a home truth or two about the Palace's silence following Di's death in 1997. The many glimpses of David Cameron and Nick Clegg contrasted sharply to none of Ed Miliband.
What a long way the monarchy has come in just a short time and how much more accessible and durable it is now. We all know who we have to thank for that, and we should never forget it.
David Monk
Kings Langley, Hertfordshire
• I was absolutely sickened to read of the pre-emptive arrests of Prof Chris Knight and Love Police activist Charlie Veitch, to name but two. It seems to me that this sort of police brutality belongs not in the United Kingdom, but in tyrannical dictatorships. Knight's pre-crime was supposedly for being part of a street theatre group planning to perform a pro-democracy piece. In a video I've watched, one man was arrested because he was in a costume. Veitch, held at Cambridge police station, was also arrested for "conspiracy to commit public nuisance" – with no evidence whatsoever to back this up.
To me, this is oppression pure and simple. It is vile, to put it mildly. Thanks to the last Labour government, we now have draconian laws giving scarily large powers to the police forces in our country. This has got to change.
Cllr Adam Pogonowski
Green, Cambridge
• In his paean to the kings and queens of England (Should a democracy have a King Wills and Queen Kate? You can do worse, 28 April), Timothy Garton Ash describes the thousand-year history of the monarchy as "an amazing thing … the stuff of poetry", and we are invited to "imagine Shakespeare purged of all references to kingship". Why should we? So far as I know, no modern republican has proposed censoring Shakespeare. Tudor England was ruled by a monarch; it is not evident what bearing that has on the desirability of the monarchy in 2011. "Before you abandon a thousand years of poetry," we are told, "you should be very certain that you will fare better in prose." In other words, on the Principle of the Dangerous Precedent, nothing should ever be done for the first time.
Peter Thonemann
Wadham College, Oxford