I'm not keen on the idea of using this submission to flame the Queen, I obviously agree with the general rule of avoiding flamebait, what I mean is that other HN submissions on the deaths of people certainly didn't get this special treatment. It is also not at all enforced in both directions when looking at the obviously and comically over the top positive comments of low quality which contain no real substance.
Edit: I used the wording "stop negativity" which might be misleading, since (as far as I am aware) no comments are being deleted. What I'm talking about is moderation giving out a lot of warnings and keeping a closer watch on "flamebait" violations than I've ever seen before on any submission.
It was because, when the thread was getting going, it flooded with crap comments (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769222, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769043). I decided to come down hard on those to try to ward off a shitshow. It would have been the same in any thread that was filling up that way, but which we weren't going to downweight off the front page. And we weren't going to do that because (a) the story was on-topic, and (b) it's such a big story that we couldn't get rid of it if we wanted to—people would just repost it until one got past us.
I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769925 at the top of the thread as a bulwark against the crap comments. That's also standard moderation. At some point, though, the thread started to fill with plenty of more substantive comments and then it looked to people like I was taking a side on the royalist question. Nothing was further from my mind.
It took me a long time to figure this out, probably because after 4 hours of doing nothing but refreshing this page and posting moderation scoldings, my brain was fried. Eventually I got it and the fix was simply to unpin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769925 from the top and demote it as offtopic. That seems to have calmed things down (except maybe for https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=theirishrover).