One of Britain’s most extraordinary and carefully orchestrated criminal show trials ran for just a single day on 1 February 1911. The new King, George V, had been called a bigamist. His Coronation was imminent. For his spouse Queen Mary’s sake as well as his own, this libel had to be addressed and expunged. Its cause were rumours of an earlier marriage by him, in Malta to an Admiral’s daughter, during his time serving as a Naval Officer there. Edward Mylius was his 31-year-old accuser. A former clerk turned international pamphleteer, Mylius was arraigned before the Lord Chief Justice and a Special Jury at the High Court in London charged with criminally libelling the King. He pleaded not guilty. He said he would prove that what he had said was true. Mylius wanted the King to come to court and give evidence under oath so he could be cross-examined. Despite the backing of his publisher, wealthy Paris-based US philanthropist Ned James, at the trial Mylius insisted on representing himself. Arrayed against him were the greatest legal personalities of the age. The King's two legal officers - Sir Rufus Isaacs KC, the charismatic Attorney General, and Solicitor General Sir John Simon KC - headed the prosecution team. They were supported by the doyen of the prosecution Bar - Richard Muir - whose skill, a few weeks earlier, had sent Dr Henry Harvey Crippen to the hangman. Yet on the day of the trial King George was forced to stand mute in the wings, forbidden by his advisors to go into his own court and confront his accuser. The result was a Society Trial that helped define the new Georgian era. This novel looks at the turns and twists of the plotting by Winston Churchill, the thrusting new Home Secretary, and the King's Secretary Sir Arthur Bigge, as they sought to engineer a conclusive success for the King without allowing him to utter a word. It also examines what drove Edward Mylius to confront the power of the State and its new King Emperor. Observing these real characters and events in the novel is a newly qualified barrister, Frazer Kerr, who joins the prosecution team to cut his teeth on vital background legal research. His Smithfield household has just been adopted by an orphaned street urchin for whom he finds a governess who turns out to be an ardent Suffragette. His Paris-based American friend, Ray Atherton, and his voraciously promiscuous socialite wife Constance, descend on London as the trial begins. The novel reflects the harsh, unequal social attitudes, conditions and prejudices of the post-Victorian world in London, Paris and New York before everything was plunged into the chaos the First World War. It is also a courtroom and political drama that had to be refought in America after Edward Mylius tried to relocate in New York City after serving his sentence in England. The author, Robin Callender Smith, is a former journalist who became a barrister. He works as a newspaper and media lawyer on The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The Sun on Sunday. He is Honorary Professor of Media Law at Queen Mary, University of London, has worked as both prosecution and defence counsel, a criminal Judge and dealt with Asylum & Immigration cases as a Tribunal Judge. He discovered Edward Mylius, and the Rex v R conundrum about whether the British sovereign can ever be forced to give evidence in his own courts, when he was researching the problems of royalty, celebrity and the media for his PhD. The first royal patron of Queen Mary, University of London - in the heart of London's East End - is the same Queen Mary that Edward Mylius claimed was bigamously married to King George V.