The Sexual History of London (34 page)

Wilde had observed that ‘a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies';
³⁶
he had certainly followed his own advice by offending John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. An eccentric little man, so belligerent that his colleagues in the House of Lords would have nothing to do with him, Queensberry's only claim to fame was to agree the Queensberry Rules for boxing championships, and to secure the adoption of weight differences, so that boxers might be evenly matched.
³⁷
Queensberry's first wife had deserted him on grounds of cruelty and, just to complete the picture, he was a raving homophobe. Queensberry was the boyfriend's father from hell. Queensberry's relationship with his own son was scarcely any better. He regarded Bosie as a sissy, and he also suspected that his oldest son, Drumlanrig, was having an affair with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Rosebery. When Queensberry saw the love letter from Wilde to Bosie, he flew into a rage and demanded that Bosie break off the relationship there and then. Bosie, who also had a filthy temper, responded in kind, and an exchange of letters concluded with Queensberry threatening to thrash him and Bosie offering to take him on, with a pistol.

Queensberry believed that Wilde had led Bosie astray, whereas, of course, it was Bosie who had initiated Wilde into the delights of ‘feasting with panthers'. The relationship between father and son deteriorated, not helped by the fact that Bosie proved to be an indifferent student and dropped out of Oxford without sitting his Finals. In an effort to break up the relationship with Wilde, Bosie's parents sent him abroad; but these trips did nothing to curb his appetites, as he spent his vacations in France and Egypt cruising for rough trade.

At one point, in 1894, however, it looked almost as if the Marquess had started to relent and accept the relationship between Wilde and Bosie. Chancing upon the pair lunching at the Cafe Royal, he was invited to join their table and was completely overwhelmed by Wilde's charisma. As he got up to leave, the Marquess commented to his son: ‘I don't wonder you are so fond of him. He is a wonderful man.'
³⁸
But this mellow mood did not last. The same day, he returned home and wrote to Bosie that his relationship with Wilde was ‘loathsome and disgusting' and that it must cease or he would be disinherited.
³⁹
Queensberry had heard rumours that Wilde's wife was planning to divorce him, and, if this was true, Queensberry felt that he would be entirely justified in shooting him on sight.
⁴⁰

Bosie, who could not tolerate even the mildest form of criticism, fired back a brief response in the form of a telegram ‘of which the commonest street-boy would have been ashamed'
⁴¹
as Wilde put it. Addressed to his father, it read, simply: ‘WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE MAN YOU ARE.' Provoked beyond endurance, Queensberry replied, threatening to give Bosie a good thrashing and warning that if he caught him again with Wilde, ‘I will make a public scandal in a way you little dream of.'
⁴²
Queensberry was as good as his word: it was a scandal of nightmare proportions.

Queensberry visited Wilde's house in Tite Street unannounced on 30 June. Wilde later described the scene to Bosie: ‘in my library at Tite Street, waving his small hands in the air in epileptic fury, your father, with his bully, or his friend, between us, had stood uttering every foul word his foul mind could think of, and screaming the loathsome threats he afterwards with such cunning carried out'.
⁴³
Wilde faced him down on this occasion, and threw him out, commenting that ‘I do not know what Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight.'
⁴⁴
Queensberry was not to be stopped. He went from restaurant to restaurant, looking for Wilde, forcing him into a confrontation where Wilde would either retaliate ‘in such a manner that I would be ruined' or ‘not retaliate in such a manner that he would also be ruined'. It is a real testimony to Wilde's powers of concentration that, in the middle of such constant pressure, he was able to sit down and write his masterpiece,
The Importance of Being Earnest
. Far from being the flamboyant dilettante, Wilde had a strong dose of the Protestant work ethic. ‘Work never seems to me a reality,' he wrote to a friend, ‘but a way of getting rid of reality.'
⁴⁵
As Wilde put the finishing touches to his production, Queensberry
père
grew more unhinged by the minute, planning to disrupt the first night of
The Importance of Being Earnest
by pelting the stage with rotten vegetables and inciting a protest which would lead to a press investigation into Wilde's private life. Mercifully, his plans were detected in time and thwarted.

Events in October 1894 conspired to drive the Marquess over the edge. He was already in the throes of a divorce from his second wife, who accused him of impotence, when news came that his eldest son, Drumlanrig, heir to the title, had been found dead. The official verdict was a ‘shooting accident', but the Marquess saw straight through this euphemism for suicide. Drumlanrig had killed himself after a blackmailer threatened to reveal his affair with Rosebery.
In extremis
, Queensberry's attacks on Wilde escalated, culminating in a letter on 28 February 1895 addressed ‘To Oscar Wilde, ponce and sodomite', or ‘posing as a sodomite', as Queensberry later interpreted it. Finally, it appeared that Wilde had been forced to retaliate. But Wilde was a shrewd man. He was aware that the law of libel rests on one basic principle: if the allegation is found to be true, then it is not libel. If Wilde lost the case, and the allegation of his homosexuality was proved to be correct, he faced the loss of his reputation and two years in jail at hard labour, as spelt out in the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Although Wilde's theatrical success had brought some wealth, he did not command the vast financial resources of the Marquess, who could afford to instruct the most experienced counsel. Wilde refused to take the matter to court, and it might have ended there, had it not been for Bosie. When Wilde complained that he did not have the funds to fight a libel suit, Bosie declared that he and his mother, the Marquess's first wife, Lady Queensberry, would be delighted to pay the costs.
⁴⁶
Bosie also embarked on a campaign of scenes, sulks, tantrums and downright nagging which eventually drove Wilde into suing Queensberry for libel.

Wilde engaged his solicitor, Humphreys, to represent him, and instructed him that he was innocent of the charges. Humphreys, for his part, was somewhat naive. He cannot have been ignorant of Wilde's sexuality, but he undertook the case as a great career move: what lawyer could resist a courtroom battle between two celebrities over a sensational sexual innuendo? Wilde was also confident that the prosecuting barrister, Edward Carson, would prove sympathetic, as he had been a fellow student of Wilde's at Trinity College, Dublin. Surely the fact that they shared this august Alma Mater counted for something?
⁴⁷
Trusting that the case would go in his favour, Wilde whisked Bosie off to Monte Carlo, where they could forget their troubles in the casino, although a news story in the
Observer
claimed that they were thrown out of their hotel at the request of other guests.
⁴⁸
On his return, Wilde sought the advice of two good friends, the writer Frank Harris, and George Bernard Shaw. Over lunch at the Cafe Royal, Harris urged Wilde to drop the case. ‘You are sure to lose,' Harris told him. ‘You haven't a dog's chance. Don't commit suicide!' Harris's advice was for Wilde to depart for Paris immediately, taking Constance Wilde with him, and Shaw agreed. Wilde rose to his feet, ready to leave. He was convinced by their arguments and wanted to go home and pack, but, at the last moment, Bosie overruled his friends' suggestions and persuaded Wilde to stay and fight.
⁴⁹

Events began to develop the ghastly momentum of a nightmare. On 1 April, like a sick April Fool's joke, Wilde was shown Queensberry's plea of justification for the charges he had made against him. The document was absolutely damning. Queensberry's legal team had hired detectives to look into Wilde's private life, one of whom, named Littlejohn, had spoken by chance to a West End prostitute during the course of his routine investigations. When asked how business was, she had replied, dourly, that it was bad for the girls at the moment as there was so much competition from rent boys, under the influence of Oscar Wilde.
⁵⁰
‘All you have to do is break into the top flat at 13 Little College Street, and you will find all the evidence you require,' she told him.

Littlejohn went to the flat, which turned out to be the home of Alfred Taylor, a former pupil of Marlborough College who had introduced Wilde to dozens of renters. Taylor was arrested, and the names and addresses of the renters found at his flat meant that they were easily tracked down, locked in a house, and ‘terrified into giving evidence against Wilde'.
⁵¹
The resulting evidence consisted of fifteen different counts accusing Wilde of soliciting more than twelve boys, of whom ten were named, to commit sodomy. It is, however, noticeable that the alleged offences were not in date order, and that apparently testimony varied as to the number of offences and the number of boys involved, which suggests that much of the evidence was indeed faked or tampered with. There were so many holes in the prosecution case you could have driven a carriage through it, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Wilde was set up.

1. Edward Shelley, between February and May 1892.
   
2. Sidney Mavor, in October 1892. (Mavor testified that Wilde had done nothing wrong.)
   
3. Freddie Atkins, on 20 November 1892, in Paris. (His evidence was thrown out.)
   
4. Maurice Schwabe, on 22 November 1892. (Did not testify.)
   
5. Certain (unnamed) young men, between 25 January and 5 February 1892, in Paris.
   
6. Alfred Wood, in January 1893.
   
7. A certain young man, about 7 March 1893, in the Savoy Hotel.
   
8. Another young man, on or about 20 March 1893, in the Savoy Hotel.
   
9. Charles Parker, in March and April 1893.
   
10. Ernest Scarfe, between October 1893 and April 1894. (Did not testify.)
    
11. Herbert Tankard, in March 1893 at the Savoy Hotel. (Did not testify.)
    
12. Walter Grainger, in June 1893 in Oxford and in June, July and August at Goring [Wilde's country house].
    
13. Alfonso Harold Conway, in August–September 1894 at Worthing and about 27 September in Brighton.
    

Any qualms Edward Carson might have had about prosecuting Wilde were dispelled by this wealth of evidence. Carson knew he would win this case, and it would be the making of him. As for Wilde, who had expected to go into court to defend his reputation as an aesthete and as the author of a handful of love letters, nothing could have prepared him for such a damning indictment. But, given the choice between leaving the country, which he regarded as a cowardly retreat, or going to court, Wilde resolved to face down his enemies. When he entered the courtroom on 3 April 1895, he knew that he had no chance of winning the case. But he embraced martyrdom with courage and wit, comparing himself with St Sebastian. Carson set out to demolish Wilde's reputation by condemning
Dorian Gray
as an immoral book, although Wilde had already countered that argument in print.

After reading an extract from the novel, Carson asked Wilde: ‘Did you write that?' Wilde replied that he had the honour to be the author. Carson put down the book with a sneer and turned over some papers. Then he read out a verse from one of Wilde's articles. ‘And I suppose you wrote that also, Mr Wilde?' Wilde waited until you could have heard a pin drop in the court. And then, very quietly, he replied, ‘No, Mr Carson, Shakespeare wrote that.'
⁵²
Carson turned scarlet, and then read another extract. ‘And I suppose Shakespeare wrote that also, Mr Wilde?' ‘Not as you read it, Mr Carson.' There was such an uproar that the judge threatened to clear the court.

Carson regained his composure and returned to the topic of
Dorian Gray
being a ‘perverted' book. Surely the nature of the book, and its sensational subject matter, might lead the ordinary reader to suppose that its author might have ‘a certain tendency'? Wilde responded that the novel would appear perverted only to ‘brutes and illiterates'; he had ‘no knowledge of the views of ordinary individuals', a response which must have alienated many of his more conventional supporters. Carson persevered with his interrogation, but he was up against the most formidable wit in England. When he enquired, ‘Have you ever adored a young man madly?' Wilde instantly hit back with: ‘I have never given adoration to anybody except myself.' It was clear that Carson would never get the better of Wilde in this verbal fencing match. However, when it came to presenting the evidence, Carson gained the upper hand. As he began to enumerate the number of young men who had given evidence against Wilde, it was clear that Wilde would lose the case. The list of names was read out, with instance after instance of illicit sex with ‘homeless and shiftless boys'.
⁵³

As Wilde's biographer Richard Ellman states, the panthers had been defanged by Queensberry's men; toothless pussycats, they had been ready to say anything to stay out of jail. If they could not tell the difference between what they had done with Bosie and what they had done with Wilde, so much the better.
⁵⁴
Further damning evidence took the form of Queensberry's letters to Bosie, in which he had pleaded with his son to end the relationship with Wilde, and accounts of Wilde's relationships with Charley Parker, a valet, and his brother, a groom. When Carson suggested that a valet and a stable boy were strange companions for an artist, Wilde retorted that he had not known what they did for a living, but if he had known, he would not have cared. ‘I didn't care twopence what they were. I liked them. I have a passion to civilize the community.' Whatever the evidence he was confronted with, Wilde had a talent for discounting points against him which in different circumstances would have been the making of him as a Queen's Counsel. Unfortunately, Carson had one card left to play, in the form of Walter Grainger, a servant at the house in Oxford where Bosie had rooms.