Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

by Franny Moyle

  An Ideal Husband quickly provided an excuse for widespread national debate on the nature of marriage. What constituted an ideal husband, and what was an ideal wife? The title of the play was like a red rag to a bull for the hordes of so-called ‘New’ or ‘Advanced Women’ emerging by the mid-1890s, a group of proto-feminists in whose cultivation women such as Constance and magazines such as The Young Woman played their part. These women, many of whom were associated with the latest craze for bicycling around London, expected more from men than their mothers had done. Not only did they challenge the dominance of men in society; they also challenged the assumption that moral divergences and duplicities were acceptable when perpetrated by men, but not by women. Husbands should adhere to the same moral rules as their wives, and marriages become transparent transactions. Wilde’s farce could not have been better timed for them, and many of them reached for their pens, using the play’s topicality to get letters and opinions into print.8

  After the success of An Ideal Husband at the Haymarket, the actor–manager of the St James’s Theatre, George Alexander, had decided that if you can’t beat the opposition, you should join it. He had produced Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan three years previously, and now, with a play by Henry James foundering, he decided to rush Oscar’s latest work, The Importance of Being Earnest, into production. Billed to open on 12 February, it finally enjoyed its prèmiere just two days later, on St Valentine’s Day. A week after opening, The Illustrated London News proclaimed to its readers ‘the eclipse of Mr George Alexander’s fortunes at the St James’ theatre has been very brief. To the delicate but unhappily obscure comedy of Mr Henry James has succeeded a piece of delightful nonsense by Mr Oscar Wilde.’9

  A nonsensical tale of assumed identities, hilarious duplicities and babies left in handbags on station platforms hit the spot again, and within just six weeks of the new year Wilde found himself with two huge successes on his hands. This was something quite unprecedented. But then 1895 had been extraordinary from day one.

  It had been a strangely momentous year. As if the old world was being prematurely washed away to make way for a new century still five years off, pillars of the cultural and political establishment tumbled within the first few weeks. The poetess of the nation, Christina Rossetti, passed away, as did everyone’s favourite storyteller, Robert Louis Stevenson. Then the great statesman Randolph Churchill died too.

  Britain was being bombarded by some of the most extreme -weather for nearly half a century. New-year gales had cost ninety men their lives in the port of Hull, the Channel mail steam-packet had run aground in storms just off Calais, and Gravesend was drowned in flood water. Conditions had failed to improve by February, when wet conditions were replaced by a freeze over Europe the likes of which had not been seen for four decades. For the first time since 1854 the mouth of the River Medway, from Sheerness dockyard to the Isle of Grain, froze over. The Mersey and Thames were solid, and in Oxford coaches were running along the Isis. London had been transformed into a different city, and its parks were unusually busy with skaters packed ten-a-penny on to the frozen lakes and ponds.

  Oscar had missed much of January’s arctic conditions. After the opening of An Ideal Husband he had escaped to the warm sunshine of North Africa for a rest, at his wife’s bidding. Since before Christmas, Constance had been worrying that her husband was overworked, and had suggested a recuperative visit to her great friend and Cyril’s godparent, the adventurer Walter Harris, in Tangiers.10 Oscar had embarked on such a trip on 17 January, although, rather than tracking down Harris in Morocco, he had decided to head to Algeria, so persuaded by his travelling companion Lord Alfred Douglas, or ‘Bosie’, as he was called. Constance, meanwhile, stayed behind, battling with the elements to return her children to their respective schools before closing up the house in Tite Street and heading off on her own holiday.

  The day before she left, she hurriedly wrote a note to her and Oscar’s great friend Robert Ross. Could he make sure Oscar reserved tickets for The Importance for her friends the Lilleys? And could he arrange for Oscar to send her some money on his return, since she was £38 overdrawn at the bank? ‘I am writing this to you as you know what Oscar is about correspondence,’ Constance explained. ‘He would forget the Lilleys’ address and send me no money!’ ‘My servants will be on board wages,’ she added, ‘and if he wants to come home tell him he must let them have a day’s notice!’ Knowing she herself would miss the first night of The Importance, Constance also asked Ross to send her ‘some of the many papers Oscar will have about the play’.11

  On 29 January Constance boarded the Great Western steam train from Paddington and made the journey down to Torquay, on the Devon coast. There she made her way to Babbacombe Cliff, the beautiful seaside home of her great friend the elderly Georgina Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount-Temple. If Constance felt a degree of disappointment at having to read the accounts of her husband’s second first night in as many months in the press rather than enjoy them first-hand, she must have also felt her trip to Babbacombe was worth the sacrifice. For Constance’s visit was not a mere escape. It was also intended to be recuperative.

  Despite her relative youth, for some time Constance had been plagued by pains in her back, arms, legs and face. She had also been suffering headaches. What she commonly referred to as her ‘neuralgia’ had more recently developed into intermittent paralysis in her right arm and leg. She had sought relief from her symptoms with increasingly desperate measures, but the ‘electricity treatment’12 in which she had most recently invested was proving ineffective. By the end of January Constance was complaining that she could barely walk.13

  Constance’s intense friendship with Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple, had begun some five years earlier, and she had come to rely on the therapeutic effects of the calming, retreat-like holidays she would take at Babbacombe with its septuagenarian occupant. Constance adored Georgina’s country home, and she also loved its lush, wooded gardens, which culminated in cliffs reaching out over the sea. In the summer she and Georgina would walk in the grounds and feed the birds, which Georgina had such a passion for. Often then they would slip into Torquay and indulge in Turkish baths together, an activity that seemed to improve Constance’s aches and pains no end, and Georgina would massage Constance’s aching limbs.

  Even when the weather was freezing, as it was that February, and the garden paths too slippery to risk, Constance was able to find much to please her. She and Georgina could talk for hours on the subjects in which they shared a deep interest. Constance had a formidably inquiring and studious mind. She was entranced by knowledge. And in Georgina she had found a partner in conversation without comparison. Their interests in literature, the supernatural, religion and art were perfectly aligned.

  All in all, Georgina Mount-Temple had become more than a friend to Constance. She was almost a second mother, whom Constance would playfully address as ‘mothery’, ‘santissima madre’, ‘madre dolorosa’ or ‘darling Ani’. Georgina had become a drug that Constance needed on a regular basis. If Oscar could be accused of an apparently insatiable appetite for fine champagne, cigarettes and the company of his young, adoring fans, in her own way his wife pursued her relationship with Lady Mount-Temple with a similar voracious hunger.

  Constance’s trip to Babbacombe had always been envisaged as a month’s sojourn. And so, as February drew to a close, she came home, probably on that 28 February, to find 16 Tite Street empty and the servants still on board wages, as she had left them a month earlier. Her husband had not set foot in the place, a fact that is unlikely to have surprised her greatly.

  But the problem Constance faced in February 1895 was that she had grown very much out of touch regarding her husband’s recent activities. With their respective holidays and Oscar’s recent need to stay in the West End rather than at home, the pair of them had barely seen one another since the first night o£ An Ideal Husband.

  To have Arthur press a worrying note into her hands the minute she was throu
gh the door must have brought home to her how isolated from events she had allowed herself to become. Her decision to steal herself away that February may not have been the wisest one, all things considered, not least because the life of the golden and celebrated Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde had, in fact, been going noticeably awry over the course of the previous year.

  Oscar had always been ridiculed. He had often suffered worse than ridicule from those envious of his talent. But in the last year Constance knew all too well that there had been terrible accusations levelled against her husband, worse than anything any critic or detractor had attempted before. Cocooned away in Babbacombe, she must have hoped that such accusations had died down, that the swell of her husband’s recent success and public popularity had washed away the voices of those who had been trying to harm him. But now she must have sensed, in that hurried pencil note, a warning of imminent scandal.

  On stage at the Haymarket the popular actress Julia Neilson, playing Lady Chiltern, was reminding her audience that ‘We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything’. Talking to the man she has considered up to that point her ideal husband, Lady Chiltern begs him: ‘Oh! don’t kill my love for you, don’t kill that … I know that there are men with horrible secrets in their lives – men who have done some shameful things, and who in some critical moment have to pay for it … Don’t tell me you are such as they!’ With Oscar’s note in her hands, Constance must have wondered whether her husband’s play was about to prove some form of sickening rehearsal for their own impending drama.14

  1

  The sins of the parents …

  IF YOU HAPPENED to dine at the Café Royal or the Savoy in the early 1890s, you might well have glimpsed the great Oscar holding court. A cigarette and wine glass in hand, enthroned in a corner, with a group of acolytes in attendance, he was the embodiment of blatant decadence. And many who witnessed this bacchanalian version of the man wondered how he and his political, campaigning but nonetheless far more temperate wife had ever determined to marry. But Oscar and Constance were far more similar than has been generally acknowledged. The key to their compatibility was rooted in their own personal histories. On both of them the influence of Ireland, the scars of scandal and the impression of a domineering mother had made their mark. Their connection was Oscar’s home town of Dublin, from where Constance’s mother, Ada, also hailed.

  Adelaide Barbara Atkinson, to give her her full name, was the daughter of Dublin’s Captain John Atkinson, once with the 6th Rifles and subsequently Receiver-General of the Post Office there,1 who with his wife, Mary, had brought up their family in an elegant Georgian town house, 1 Ely Place. Mary’s brother Charles Hare, the first Baron Hemphill, Sergeant and QC, lived close by at 65 Merrion Square, where his neighbours included Oscar’s parents, Sir William and Lady Wilde.

  Ada Atkinson was a selfish and difficult woman, who when she was just nineteen married her cousin Horace Lloyd, an English barrister eight years her senior. Lloyd was the son of the eminent QC and one-time Radical MP John Horatio Lloyd. In choosing a husband from this branch of the family, Ada was marrying into a considerable fortune and perpetuating an already impressive lineage.2

  The entrepreneurial Lloyds had grown rich on the back of the industrial revolution. John Horatio Lloyd was the son of the attorney John Lloyd, who played a leading part in suppressing the Luddite riots in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Educated at Stockport Grammar, John Horatio went to Oxford and took a double first in Classics before being called to the bar and being elected Liberal MP for Stockport. He became an exceptionally wealthy man indeed, not least because his legal practice had become the favoured counsel for the fast-developing railway companies, but also because he invented a type of investment bond on which the development of the railway system became particularly dependent: the Lloyd’s Bond.

  Ada and Horace initially lived in 3 Harewood Square in Marylebone, close to Regent’s Park and north of the busy Marylebone Road. On Wednesday 12 November 1856 the Morning Chronicle announced that ‘On the 10th inst at 3 Harewood Square the wife of Horace Lloyd Esq., barrister at law’ was delivered of ‘a son and heir’. This was Otho Lloyd. Two years later the same column announced his sister Constance’s arrival into the world, and the family was complete.

  The birth of two children in quick succession did not, alas, signify domestic bliss in Harewood Square. Horace Lloyd’s sense of his marital obligations quickly waned. As his professional success grew, so did his appetite for the pleasures of various gentlemen’s clubs and his ambitions to rise to a position of prominence within the strange business of Freemasonry. Part of the Prince of Wales’s social set, he developed the reputation for being a stop-out who could ‘have taken on any expert in one of the three games, chess and billiards and whist, and beaten him in two out of three’.3

  If a guiding paternal hand was absent in Harewood Square, so was maternal warmth. Ada also failed to show much interest in her offspring. Otho Lloyd would later suggest that he and Constance were brought up ‘against the will and determination of two most selfish and egotistical natures’.4

  The one thing Ada Lloyd did do, however, was introduce her children to Dublin. Resentful and lonely, Ada’s marital unhappiness prompted regular visits to her mother, ‘Mama Mary’, in Dublin’s Ely Place. After Captain John Atkinson died in 1862, these trips became yet more frequent.

  And so the young Constance and Otho found themselves often leaving the modern villas of West End London to spend time in the calmer, quainter Georgian environs of Dublin’s Ely Place and Merrion Square. Here they had their cousin Stanhope Hemphill to play with as well as their youthful aunt Ellena, born in 1853. The Atkinsons, Hemphills and Wildes all moved within the same tightly knit Dublin community, and it is highly likely that the young Lloyd children would have encountered or heard tell of Sir William and Lady Wilde in Merrion Square, and of their two sons, Willie and Oscar.

  Constance was not an entirely healthy child. Her brother described her as ‘somewhat bilious’. Nevertheless she survived bouts of the standard juvenile maladies of the era, chickenpox and measles, and by the age of ten, by which time her father had become a QC, she found herself living with her family in the grand surroundings of London’s Sussex Gardens.

  The upwardly mobile Lloyds lived first at 9 Sussex Gardens and then, in line with Horace’s burgeoning practice, they moved to an even larger villa at no. 42, where they enjoyed five servants: two housemaids, a cook, a kitchen maid and a butler. As the level of domestic help suggests, Sussex Gardens, just off Hyde Park, was an area associated with the well-to-do. It was also close to grandpa John Horatio, who lived in another huge and imposing villa at 100 Lancaster Gate.

  Here Constance enjoyed a thorough education. Otho Lloyd remembered his sister as being able to play the piano well, able to paint in oils, a fine needlewoman and well read.5 She also spoke French and could read Dante in the original Italian. The censuses of both 1871 and 1881 describe her as being a scholar. Although she was almost certainly tutored by a governess with her brother when they were small, when her brother was sent away to Clifton School in Bristol she clearly attended one of the few schools for girls that had been founded in London since the mid-century.

  By the 1870s there were a number of colleges open to young women who wanted to continue their education, cherry-picking the courses and classes that appealed. The academic standards the mature attendees of the colleges were expected to meet were in fact very high. Young women, although unable to hold a degree, could, via these schools, study under the tutelage of university staff for examinations that were marked by the University of London.

  Constance took one such course and university examination in English literature, specializing in the work of Shelley.6 The intensity of the study required to pass the examination is suggested by Constance’s complaint that the course ‘ought to have been stretched over a year at least’, although, practical as ever, Constance added that she was not going to
bother ‘worrying over it’. ‘I intend to take it very quietly,’ she told Otho, relaying that ‘I shall not do any singing next week’ in order ‘to get what time I can for reading’. This strategy clearly proved successful, since Constance also noted that her tutor, a Mr Collins, was barely able to make a single comment on her Shelley essay, it was so good.

  But regardless of their education, their impressive address and financial comfort, the emotional home life of the Lloyd children never stabilized. Horace Lloyd’s weaknesses were not limited to billiards and cards: he also had a soft spot for women. Years later Constance witnessed a scene at her grandfather’s house when a woman presented her son at Lancaster Gate and a ‘row’ ensued. Later Otho saw a young man at Oxford who caused him concern. Although Constance’s correspondence regarding this is not explicit, the implication is that Otho felt sure he had spotted his illegitimate half-brother, the product of one of Horace’s unwise dalliances.

  [Y]our letter distressed me very much for it seems so very probable, and yet I thought the boy was only about 16 or 17, also I thought she could not have afforded to send him to the University. After all if she can, surely they [sic] is less fear of any ‘rumpus’ since they could only make an exposure in order to get money. Try and see him and see if you can trace any likeness – I tried a short while ago to find out something more about him, but grandpapa evidently thought I would tell Mama or someone about it so he said it was not a subject for me to talk about and shut me up completely, but he has heard nothing of them since they made the row at Lancaster Gate.7

  The Lloyd family was particularly prone to the odd sexual deviation. It was not just Horace who had succumbed. John Horatio had also been at the heart of a sex scandal, of sorts. In the 1830s, when, as a politician, he had been assisting Lord Brougham in piloting through the House of Commons the first Criminal Law Amendment Act, a piece of legislation that would abolish capital punishment for certain offences, John Horatio was working until the small hours of the morning on a regular basis. His hard graft was not unnoticed, and he had, according to Otho, secured the promise of being appointed Solicitor-General in due course. But late nights and early starts wreaked havoc with John Horatio’s well-being. ‘His health gave way under the strain,’ Otho explained, and then he did a very odd thing indeed. He ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens … he ran naked in the sight of some nurse maids’.8 Not surprisingly, John Horatio’s career took a tumble. He lost the opportunity of becoming Solicitor-General and was forced to retire from political and legal work for four years, during which time he went abroad to Athens and became a director of the Ionian Bank.