One of the most outrageous libels in recent years, was brought into court during the Hilary sittings, 1911, when, before the Lord Chief Justice and a special jury, Edward Frederick Mylius was criminally indicted for libelling his Majesty the King. The actual printing of the libel was carried out abroad, in the comparative safety offered by the French capital. Edward Hilton James was the person chiefly responsible for the offence. _Liberator_, a name one associates with Jabez Balfour, the assassination of a Russian Emperor and various other unsavoury events, was the title chosen for the organ in which the libel appeared. The _Liberator_ libel on the King was wholly unjustified from every conceivable standpoint. In the first place, had his Majesty chosen to go through forty ceremonies of the kind so falsely alleged, no one of them would have been legal, not even the first. The Royal Marriages Act, Geo. III.,[16] makes it illegal for any member of the Sovereign’s family to contract a binding marriage without first obtaining the consent of the Sovereign, or, failing that, without giving twelve months’ notice to the Privy Council. Marriage is a purely legal tie, and if it does not conform with the requirements of the law it must perforce fail. That is to say, there is no marriage where the law forbids it. Obviously, had his Majesty chosen to go through any ceremony of marriage without the sanction of the late Queen Victoria, or, without giving twelve months’ notice to the Privy Council, such ceremony would have been just as void as if it had never taken place. This is merely the way the law views the contingency. In actuality, the King never went through any form of marriage at all and the libel was a cruel and a wicked one. To be a popular or celebrated figure at the present day is to be the target for every form of foul abuse, criminal concoctions and cruel lies. Whether a person’s life is blameless or blameworthy, he only has to reach a certain degree of public attention to be douched with the vile outpourings of a cesspool, or blinded by the volcanic lava of jealousy and spite. The individual who yearns for fame had better first well calculate his power to endure its concomitants! To the monarch, born to it, there is no choice. He must go ahead as best he can, sickened with humanity, with his own troublous lot, almost envious of the stagnant peace of obscurity, with its mediocre associations and perpetual monotony.