The Sexual History of London (33 page)

This scoop would have been enough to impress Parke's readers; it certainly irritated more conservative newspapers, such as the
Birmingham Daily Post
, which commented ‘the less that has to be said in these columns of the terrible scandal in London the better we shall be pleased'.
²⁷
One Tory MP even referred disparagingly to the case as ‘hideous and foetid gangrene'.

Although Lord Arthur Somerset had fled to the continent, Parke was mistaken when he wrote that the Earl of Euston had left the country. The Earl was still in England and had no intention of leaving. Instead, he launched a libel action against Parke on 26 October. Parke was not in the least perturbed and was convinced this was a case he could win. He knew that the Earl had visited Cleveland Street and that he had been acquainted with Lord Somerset.

The Earl had indeed visited Cleveland Street, but his account of the proceedings was somewhat different from that of the male prostitutes, or ‘renters'. According to the Earl, he had been walking in Piccadilly late one May evening, when he had been offered a card inviting him to a display of
poses plastiques
(striptease) in Cleveland Street. He had retained the card and, several nights later, called on the house to watch the said display. When he knocked on the door, he was asked for a sovereign, which he paid. And then the man who had answered the door made ‘an indecent proposal'. At this point, according to the Earl, he had called the man a scoundrel, threatened to knock him down if he did not allow him to leave and had stormed out of the house in a mood of self-righteous indignation.
²⁸
Several newspapers believed the Earl's version. The
New York Herald
pointed out that several such gentlemen had probably visited the house in all innocence, curious to see what happened there and believing it to be a casino.

Parke was convinced that the jury would believe his version of events and that when he won this case, he would be striking a blow for the freedom of the press. Other newspapers had fought shy of the case, he observed. Notable scandal sheets such as William Stead's
Pall Mall Gazette
and
Lloyd's Newspaper
had remained silent;
Reynold's Newspaper
had only quoted, reticently, the first stories of the
North London Press
. Parke could also take consolation in the fact that a ‘Fair Trial Fund' was being raised on his behalf by H. W. Massingham (later one of the most famous journalists of his day) with signatories such as the Liverpool MP T. P. O'Connor, another journalist and a campaigner for Irish nationalism. Nothing could go wrong, could it?

The case opened in January 1890. Lord Euston was cross-examined, with the lawyers insinuating that there was something degenerate about his decision to go to watch a striptease act at his advanced age (Euston was then aged forty-one). Lord Euston replied with exasperation that such displays could be quite artistic, actually, and created the impression of being a suave heterosexual man about town. And then Parke's witness was called. This was John Saul, a rather camp twenty-six-year-old with ‘a stagey manner and a peculiar effeminate voice'. Saul told the court that in May 1887 he had taken Lord Euston to 19 Cleveland Street, and he knew Lord Euston as ‘The Duke'.

But far from being the star witness, Saul was torn apart by the prosecution. Where, they demanded, had Saul come by the ring on his finger? Surely it must be worth a pretty penny. Was it a gift from a rich protector? No, replied Saul in some confusion, the ring was paste, and as to having a protector, he lived with a Mr Violet, a respectable man, in Brixton. And what about the silver-headed cane? Was that a gift from a grateful admirer? No, replied Saul, he had bought it for one and six in the Brixton Road. And finally, the prosecution wanted to know, what exactly was Mr Saul's occupation? When Saul replied that he had been an actor at the Drury Lane Theatre, the prosecutor rubbed his hands in glee. As a witness, Saul appeared perverted, histrionic and unreliable. Parke, realizing that the case was not going his way, interrupted the proceedings and said that other witnesses could testify to events at 19 Cleveland Street. But when Lord Justice Hawkins invited him to bring them to court, Parke stalled: he could not produce these witnesses, he said, as this would mean betraying his sources.

Lord Justice Hawkins, in his summing-up, declared that Lord Euston was accused of ‘heinous crimes revolting to one's common notions of all that was decent in human nature',
²⁹
but invited the jury to come to their own conclusions and decide whether Parke's allegations were correct. The jury's verdict proved Parke correct: there was a conspiracy, and there was one law for the rich and one for the poor; Parke was found guilty of libel and Lord Euston was exonerated. Parke received a year's imprisonment, regarded as harsh by the
North London Press
, which, without its editor, swiftly went under. Far from being acclaimed as a campaigner for free speech, Parke was condemned by other newspaper editors. He was ‘a miscreant' who should be whipped at the cart's tail from one end of London to the other, according to the
People
; and the
Labour Elector
, which had supported Parke's campaign for better pay and conditions for dockers and postmen, complained that his sentence was not severe enough and ‘if Lord Euston had gone into the
Star
office and there and then physically twisted the little wretch's neck, nobody would have blamed him'.
³⁰

Parke's conviction exonerated Euston, but another trial began on 12 December that proved Parke's conspiracy theory. The prosecutor charged Arthur Newton, Newlove's defence lawyer, with obstructing justice by warning Hammond to flee the country. When the case went to trial, Newton was easily convicted. After the verdict was reached, the presiding judge addressed the court and concluded that Newton had helped Hammond escape to prevent him from testifying against his aristocratic clientele. Then, he sentenced Newton to six weeks in prison.

Henry Labouchère, the radical Member of Parliament who drafted the law against Gross Indecency in 1885, watched the Newton trial closely. He suspected that the cover-up went beyond a lawyer's efforts to protect his clients and believed that the Prime Minister had arranged for Lord Arthur Somerset to be warned of his impending arrest to give him time to escape. Labouchère voiced his suspicions in Parliament on 28 February 1890 and moved that a committee be formed to investigate the government. The ensuing debate was so fractious and Labouchère was so provocative that he was suspended for a week, but his efforts to expose the government failed. By a vote of 204 to 66, Parliament rejected his motion. At the highest levels, the cover-up had succeeded.

The Cleveland Street affair gradually faded away as the English press and public turned their attention to more routine news stories, but the uproar had lasting effects on the public perception of homosexuals. The prostitutes were ‘innocent' telegraph boys who had been ‘corrupted' by Hammond in service of the unrestrained lusts of a wealthy aristocratic clientele. ‘Working men,' proclaimed one radical, John Knifton, ‘are free from the taint' (of homosexuality), although he did grudgingly admit that ‘for gold laid down our boys might be tempted to their fall'.
³¹
However, the most significant impact of the Cleveland Street scandal was to intensify the hatred for homosexuality which culminated in the sensational trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

 

When Wilde arrived at Oxford in 1874, it was clear that a brilliant career awaited him. He had already made his mark, winning a scholarship to Magdalen College after studying classics at Trinity College, Dublin. An excellent scholar, he soon fell under the spell of Walter Pater, an eccentric don who had endured endless bullying in his youth on account of his wizened, hunch-backed appearance. Pater delighted in surrounding himself with attractive young men ‘of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them', among whom ‘exotic flowers of sentiment' expanded.
³²
Pater was at the forefront of the Aesthetic Movement, which could be summed up in the phrase ‘Art for Art's sake'. Aestheticism constituted a complete rejection of the Victorian notion that art should be pressed into the service of morality to provide edification for the middle classes and the poor. Instead, the role of the aesthete was to burn with a clear, gemlike flame, and turn his own appearance, personality and even life into a work of art. This artistic sensitivity went hand in hand with a Platonic appreciation of male beauty, particularly young male beauty. Exotic friendships flowered under these hot-house conditions, and being perceived as homosexual was no great drawback; indeed, Platonic tendencies were almost mandatory for young men entering aesthetic and artistic circles. The worst they had to fear was a mild form of gay-bashing consisting of being ‘debagged' (having one's trousers ripped off) by ‘hearties' (jocks) and dumped in the college fountain. The young Oscar Wilde was kidnapped by such a group and deposited on a hill outside Oxford, but seemed to have been little the worse for it, confiding to his tormentors that he had enjoyed the experience and that the view was very charming.

Wilde threw himself into the aesthetic scene with characteristic gusto, decorating his college rooms with sunflowers and peacock feathers, growing his hair long and dressing flamboyantly in velvet coats with silver buttons, white stockings and buckled shoes. Just how far he went with his Platonic tendencies is debatable. Although he may have been aware of his own sexuality, Wilde was cautious enough to be shocked when he saw a fellow undergraduate, Charles John Todd, ensconced in a private box with a choirboy.
³³
And yet, just over a decade later, it was Wilde who threw caution to the winds and became Britain's most scandalous homosexual.

In many respects, Oscar Wilde was the first modern celebrity. On graduating from Magdalen, his mission statement was: ‘I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.' In the words of Wilde's rival, the painter James McNeill Whistler, it was a matter of ‘You will, Oscar. You will.' But Wilde was to fall from grace like Icarus, flying too close to the sun. One of the first players of the fame game, Wilde was ignorant of the golden rule: Pride goeth before a fall.

Arriving in London with the intention of becoming a ‘professional aesthete', Wilde soon found himself with a stalled career, two young sons from his marriage to Constance Lloyd, and increased financial responsibilities. Far from being an overnight success, he bowed to the inevitable, became the editor of a women's magazine and seemed like many a middle-aged journalist, beaten into submission by domesticity and artistic failure. But Wilde was beginning to find satisfaction elsewhere. His flamboyant, charismatic personality ensured a devoted entourage, and in 1886, Wilde was introduced to a seventeen-year-old fan, a Cambridge drop-out named Robbie Ross who idolized Wilde and intended to seduce him. Somewhat embarrassed by Ross's persistence, Wilde permitted him to do so. As for the sex itself, this would probably have fallen into the category referred to in the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 as ‘gross indecency', for which read mutual masturbation and fellatio.

Once Ross became his lover, Wilde began to accept his own sexuality and have multiple male partners. He avoided sex with Constance by telling her that he had contracted syphilis. The affair with Ross provided more than sexual release; it inspired the novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, published in 1890. This was a stylish tale of a hedonistic young man who retained his youthful beauty while his portrait, hidden in the attic, grew daily more hideous with every act of vice committed; it was also an aesthete's handbook, every line endorsing Wilde's world view, such as ‘all art is quite useless'
³⁴
and ‘there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.'
³⁵

Dorian Gray
became a best-seller, and Wilde attracted ever more besotted admirers. One of these young men was Lord Alfred Douglas or ‘Bosie', an Oxford undergraduate who had been so enthralled by
Dorian Gray
that he claimed to have read it fourteen times. He first visited Wilde's home in Tite Street in 1891, and Wilde was entranced by the combination of Bosie's flaxen hair, alabaster skin and total infatuation. What Wilde did not realize at this point was that Bosie was a spoilt brat, a manipulative hysteric who enjoyed living in a permanent state of emotional meltdown. Far from being the love of his life, Bosie was to become Wilde's nemesis.

Bosie proved to be Wilde's
bête noire
in more ways than one. It was not merely his histrionic personality which brought trouble; it was also his subterranean private life. In the spring of 1892, Bosie was at his wits' end, because an indiscreet love letter he had written to another young man had fallen into a blackmailer's hands. Unbeknown to Wilde, Bosie was a regular customer of young male prostitutes. Many had police records, which should have been enough to deter him, but instead it only added to their appeal. As an experienced man of the world, Wilde knew exactly what to do. He instructed his solicitor to pay the blackmailer £100 and Bosie was rescued. It seems that at this point, they became lovers, but the pair were not exclusive, and soon Wilde found himself initiated into the twilight world of renters; Wilde was ‘feasting with panthers' and enjoying the experience every bit as much as Bosie.

Bosie and Wilde were soft targets for the renters. Bosie was naive, and mistook the renters' easy camaraderie for true friendship; he was also careless. When he gave one of the boys, Alfred Wood, one of his old suits, he had overlooked the fact that the pockets were stuffed with passionate love letters from Wilde. As soon as he discovered the letters, Wood planned to blackmail the pair, but Wilde was able to resolve the matter with a one-off payment of £30. This time, he did not involve his solicitor. There can be no doubt that Wilde enjoyed the additional frisson that criminality brought to his liaisons. Like his creation Dorian Gray, Wilde believed that he was leading a double life, indeed that he had almost elevated it to an art form. A wife and two sons formed an effective smokescreen. But Wilde's personality was so flamboyant that rumours about his relationship with Bosie circulated around London, and worse was to come. One of the love letters to Bosie which Alfred Wood had discovered somehow found its way to Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry.