Edward Mylius

Edward Mylius was a journalist jailed in 1911 for criminal libel for publishing a report that King George V of the United Kingdom was a bigamist.

Mylius alleged in a Paris-based Republican paper The Liberator in 1910 that George V had been already married to Mary, the daughter of a British Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, while serving in Malta as a young man. This would have been not only scandalous but also illegal, contravening the Royal Marriages Act 1772.

Normally royalty avoid suing over lies told about them, but in a break with precedent. the King decided that in this case, he had no choice. The rumours accused him of the crime of bigamy, of breaking the law, and questioned both the legal status of the Queen and the legitimacy of all his children. The King, with the advice of home secretary Winston Churchill, issued proceedings against Mylius for criminal libel and said he was prepared to go into the box to disprove the allegations. Sir Rufus Isaacs, the attorney-general, advised the king that it would be unconstitutional for him to give evidence in his own court.

Mylius was arrested for criminal libel and tried before the Lord Chief Justice of England and a jury. Sir Richard David Muir, prosecuting, showed that the claims about the King were a complete fiction. It was shown

Mylius was convicted and jailed for 12 months.

The King recorded his feelings on the affair in his diary.

His mother, Queen Alexandra, wrote to him

After he was released from prison, he went to live in the US. There, beyond the reach of British libel law, he published another version of the claim, bolstered by finding a Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle report of Mary Culme-Seymour dancing with the prince at a ball at Portsmouth Town Hall on 21 August 1891. (This was on the occasion of Queen Victoria reviewing the French fleet, which had come on a friendly visit to Portsmouth.) She had testified at the trial that she had not seen him between 1879 and 1898.

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