of the recognition of Imperial sovereignty in the visit made by their Majesties to India, and the coronation ceremonies at the ancient capital of Delhi (Dec. 12 1911). They left England on Nov. ii and did not return till Feb. 5 1912.
From the very first, King George and Queen Mary showed in all their actions their earnest desire to use their royal position in the most public-spirited manner. At the death of so active, popular and influential a sovereign as King Edward VII., in the midst of grave parliamentary difficulties, and conditions of social-economic unrest and industrial conflict, the country was fortunate in the fact that so much had already been done to establish the Throne in the hearts of the people as a central and unifying national and Imperial force, distinct and aloof from sectional interests of party or class. Under King George, the Sailor- King, whose exhortation " Wake up, England!" in the speech he had made in 1901 at the Guildhall, when return- ing from his colonial tour as Duke of York, had never been for- gotten a further strengthening of this conception of the func- tions of the Throne was steadily pursued. King George and Queen Mary, assisted by other members of the royal family, devoted themselves on every available occasion, public or private, to the task of making the influence of the court a pure, useful and kindly one in the life of the country. It may briefly be noted that in the summer of 1912, for the first time, State visits were paid to a London music-hall (the Palace) and to Henley Regatta, while the King also went to Lord's on the occasion of the test-match between Australian and South African cricketers, and had the teams presented to him. But the King and Queen were not content with lending themselves, constantly though unostentatiously, to the scenic side of royalty: they mingled graciously and sympathetically with different classes of society, and were ever active in accepting new oppor- tunities of service. Thus Queen Mary, after a royal visit to the Dowlais steel works at Merthyr (June 27 1912), took tea with a Welsh miner's wife, and during a tour through the industrial districts of Yorks. King George went down the Elsecar colliery (July 9 1912), and showed himself no less handy in wielding a pick than in bringing down grouse on a Scottish moor. Such incidents, which naturally attracted attention early in the reign, became too familiar with the public in later years to need chronicling in detail. The personal tastes both of King George and Queen Mary were known to lie in characteristically British domestic directions, while the King's well-known hobby of stamp-collecting 1 and his long-standing reputation as one of the best shots in the country, were typical links with popular interests of one sort or another. Facilities were wisely extended to the press to give contemporary publicity to the royal doings. Enhanced confidence resulted in the British Throne and its occupants, whose happy domestic relations were, moreover, universally appreciated. 2
"From his midshipman days on the " Bacchante," the King had been a keen stamp-collector, his uncle the Duke of Edinburgh having even then been hon. president of the Philatelic Society, London, and being succeeded in that position by King George (while Duke of York) in 1896. The royal collection is the compietest in existence, and in 1920 the King, in a message to the Junior Philatelic Society, assured its members of his " unabated interest in stamp-collecting." 2 It is now purely a curious episode in the history of scandal- mongering that, at the time when King George came to the Throne, a story was current in various quarters that he had been secretly married before his marriage with the Queen, and that this earlier wife was alive, though for dynastic purposes the union was ignored. In 1893 this cruel allegation had been privately contradicted, at Queen Victoria's desire, by confidants of the royal family such as Sir Theodore Martin and Canon Daltpn, in letters to various people of influence and newspaper editors (including the present writer) ; but it was revived, to the King's natural annoyance, and with the danger of public misconception and ill-feeling if it were not finally disproved, in 1910. It was hoped that the public contradictions authoritatively given by the Dean of Norwich (Dr. Russell Wakefield) in a speech in July 1910, by Mr. W. T. Stead in the Review of Reviews for that month, and by Sir Arthur Bigge (afterwards Lord Stamfordham) in Reynolds' Newspaper (Oct. 30 1910) would put an end to it; but it was repeated in a definite way by a certain Edward Mylius in Nov. and Dec. 1910 in a " republi- can " paper called the Liberator, published in Paris and circulated in England under the auspices of the Indian revolutionary Krish-
The political history of the period from 1910 onwards is dealt with in the article ENGLISH HISTORY (see also BRITISH EMPIRE). With a less popular sovereign on the throne, the development of the domestic political crisis which was obviously impending when King Edward died might have created more embarrass- ment than actually was produced in the public mind, as regards the functioning of the Crown in relation to parliamentary government. It was generally felt, indeed, that Mr. Asquith's use of the royal prerogative in 1911, however justifiable on political grounds, in securing the King's assent to the creation of enough new peers, if necessary, for overcoming the resistance of the House of Lords to the Parliament bill, involved a more un- comfortably violent disclosure of the domination of the par- liamentary executive than had ever before been regarded as convenable in the working of English party government. But the responsibility for the use of the royal prerogative for such a purpose was, by common consent, put upon the Government; and the political bearing of the incident on the constitutional position of the Crown was effectively minimized in the con- troversy between the parties. On the other hand, the value of the influence of the Crown as standing above and outside domes- tic party politics, continued to be emphasized, alike by such incidents as the Buckingham Palace conference in 1914 on the Irish deadlock, though unhappily abortive; by the increased momentum given throughout the British Empire to the progress of its conception as an Imperial Commonwealth of self-govern- ing nations with a common sovereign; and by the events of the World War, during which the King and the royal family in various ways consolidated their hold on the loyal affections of the British people.
From the opening of the World War in Aug. 1914 the King and Queen, jointly and severally, set themselves to make the royal influence an encouragement to every form of national activity in aid of the fighting forces. The nation found in the Throne, from the moment when war started, the embodiment of its will-to-victory and of its patriotic devotion. Queen Mary herself gave a lead to the war work of women, details of which are given elsewhere (see WOMEN'S WAR WORK), in many no- table directions. King George's own messages to the nation, during the war years and afterwards, were admirably conceived
navarma. In this the writer declared that the King, when a midship- man, had in 1890 married at Malta a daughter of Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour ; that his subsequent marriage in 1893 was therefore bigamous and shameful, and the Church, by conniving at it, had been guilty of subordinating its own principles to reasons of State. Copies of the Liberator were seized by the police, and Mylius was arrested and on Feb. I 1911 tried for criminal libel before the Lord Chief Justice and a special jury. Evidence was given by Sir M. Culme-Seymour and others absolutely contradicting the whole fabrication. The admiral had no daughter whom the King could have married in 1890; one of his daughters died unmarried in 1895 with- out ever knowing the King, the other (Mrs. Napier) had not met him between 1879 and 1898; the King was not at Malta between 1888 and 1901 ; the Maltese registers were produced, and contained no record of any such marriage. Mylius refused to give evidence, his claim that the King ought to appear as a witness to be cross-examined by him being overruled; and the jury promptly found him guilty. He was sentenced to the maximum penalty of a year's imprisonment; and the attorney-general then read a statement signed by the King that he had never been married to anyone but the Queen and that he would have attended in person to give evidence if the law officers of the Crown had not insisted that it would be unconstitutional for him to do so. The whole affair caused naturally a great sensation, but the effect was excellent, and the straightforward action taken by the King for it was known that the Government doubted the ex- pediency of bringing the matter into court confirmed public opinion as to the character of the new occupant of the throne. He had insisted on having the truth told, and was not prepared to forgo his rights as a man simply because, as a king, he was above the law. The exposure of this malicious libel may indeed be said to have put an end, once for all, to all forms of personal aspersion on the King's private character; for, coincidently, no less absurd stories had been current that he drank too much, a charge which was utter nonsense to all his personal friends and acquaintances, who knew him ever to have been the most abstemious of men. Still, in spite of its gross absurdity, the charge was made, and had been publicly de- nounced as unfounded by the Dean of Norwich in the speech already referred to in July 1910. After the Mylius case this calumny, too, sank into the oblivion it merited.
