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

by Franny Moyle

  Constance also became involved in Oscar’s work again. This time she used her not inconsiderable talents as a linguist to translate a review of Salome that had been noticed in a Dutch newspaper and sent to the Wildes. She and Oscar suspected that a Dutch translation of the play had been published without Oscar’s permission. Constance turned detective, tasked with trying to acquire a copy of the book.

  Oscar even paid Constance the compliment of attending some of her dinner parties. ‘To-night I have some friends to dinner only 4, but this is quite an excitement to us, as Oscar never cares to have anyone,’ a delighted Constance boasted to Georgina.7

  As the Wildes worked to re-establish the family routine they had once enjoyed, Vyvyan was recalled from Rottingdean and reinstalled with his brother in the nursery they had scarcely seen over the last twelve months. Oscar took rooms in St James’s Place, where at 11.30 each morning he could sit down to write, undisturbed by his sons. And Constance renewed her search for a large London family home. She persuaded Oscar to view one in Elm Park Road, which, she explained to Georgina, although ‘not so near to you as Tite Street is, still I could get to you even from there’. Oscar decided he did not like the house, but the fact he had viewed it must have felt like an achievement to Constance.

  The children had not been oblivious to the stresses in their parents’ relationship. Cyril certainly just wanted his mother and father to be happy together again. Constance related a poignant story to Georgina without perhaps grasping the full significance of it. Just before Lilias’s wedding Cyril and Constance began playing a game together which centred on the idea that Cyril’s toy donkey should perhaps get married too. Over the next few days they bought another toy donkey to play the bride (‘black but comely’) and a toy tea set for the wedding tea. Finally, on 21 October, they staged the donkey wedding in Tite Street.

  Cyril wanted the ceremony to be religious, Constance explained to Georgina, ‘so I read him the psalm about the wild asses quenching their thirst in the wilderness with the streams of water that God had made … and this satisfied him, and he said “That’s enough, now they are married”. He refused to have donkey in bed with him last night “No he’s married now, and must look after his wife!” ‘8

  It’s hard not to read this game as an expression of Cyril’s own wishes: for his father to look after his wife. And for a few brief months this childhood wish was answered. ‘We are both of us very happy at these times and he is writing a wonderful little play (not for acting but to be read).’9

  By the end of November people were noticing the improvement in the Wilde marriage. Constance put Oscar’s good behaviour down to more than just Bosie’s absence. She felt supernatural forces were at play. In fact Oscar had been altered by a ‘communication from ghost-land if you care to call it so (I do not) given thro’ raps by a father to his son’, Constance revealed to Georgina. ‘The father had appeared at a seance to his son, but this communication was given when he was alone, and has so altered his life that his friends are noticing & commenting on the change, which I trust will last. What was said I will tell you when I see you alone; it seems to me so wonderfully true.’10

  Whether or not it was the benign influence of Sir William Wilde from beyond the grave, nevertheless while Bosie was abroad between November 1893 and February 1894 Oscar finished An Ideal Husband, his third major play, which he had been struggling with throughout the holiday in Goring, and he also wrote both A Florentine Tragedy and most of La Sainte Courtisane. His behaviour most certainly changed, his excesses moderated, and he reinvested in his marriage.

  And then Constance made a terrible mistake. Throughout his exile Bosie had been attempting reconciliation with Oscar, bombarding him with letters. Oscar had stood firm and resisted them. But in February 1894 Bosie changed tactics and telegrammed Constance, begging her to use her influence on her husband and persuade Oscar to see him. Quite why Constance acquiesced to the demands of the man who had nearly destroyed her marriage is a mystery. It may have been that the four happy months she had spent with Oscar back in Tite Street had lulled her into a false sense of security. But for whatever reason, Constance, in at once an act of extraordinary kindness and pity and incomparable stupidity and naivety, encouraged Oscar to travel to Paris and meet Lord Alfred Douglas there.

  ‘Our friendship had always been a source of distress to her [Constance],’ Oscar would later recall; ‘she saw how your continual companionship altered me, and not for the better; still, just as she had always been most gracious and hospitable to you, so she could not bear the idea of my being in any way unkind – for so it seemed to her – to any of my friends … at her request I did communicate with you.’11

  Within days Constance must have realized her folly. Taking advantage of Oscar’s trip to Paris, she took Vyvyan to stay with her cousins, Mr and Mrs Harvey, who lived in Torquay. With her retreat there, all her former suffering resumed. The version of Oscar that she thought she had reclaimed over the Christmas season evaporated. The man who could write to her daily once more fell silent. Suddenly communications from her husband ceased. With no news in the post she had no idea whether he had yet returned from Paris.

  Aware that Constance was hunting for a family home in London, and experiencing some financial worries of her own, Georgina Mount-Temple suggested the Wildes take a lease on her large London house in Cheyne Walk. In correspondence with Constance on the matter, Georgina must have read with some alarm the letters she was receiving from Torquay. Despite Oscar’s recent successes, the Wildes were oddly still without means, and Oscar had vanished again.

  ‘Alas! Your delightful suggestion is, I fear, impossible for us,’ Constance explained.

  Both the boys must have to go to school this year, and this will cost me at least £200 a year, and O is making nothing. I wish we could take your lovely house not only for our own sakes, but to help you, and to have you to stay with us. I don’t know where Oscar is; I have not had a line from him since he went to Paris, but when I can I will ask him about it.12

  Finally, at the very end of February or in the first few days of March, Constance discovered that Oscar had returned home. ‘Oscar is in London again,’ she relayed to Georgina, ‘but I know nothing about his doings and he does not write!’ With the issue of renting the latter’s house in Cheyne Walk still unresolved, Constance promised to ‘write to him, but I know he will see the impossibility of it all even more than I do!’13

  But dealing with family homes and the boys’ schooling had lost its appeal for Oscar as he renewed his company with Bosie. In the week that Bosie and Oscar were in Paris they fell back into their former decadent ways. They had lived it up at the Hotel des Deux Mondes in the Avenue de l’Opéra. Their lavish wining and dining did not cease on their return to London.

  ‘I am storm driven, but it is the storms of my heart that drive me more than the world’s storms,’ Constance wrote miserably from Torquay, ‘and I am like the city without walls “because I rule not my spirit”.’14 By mid-March, Constance had returned to Tite Street. Oscar was once again icy. She was unaware that in the month Bosie and Oscar had been in town while she had been with her cousins, new, worrying events had occurred.

  Bosie’s father was beginning to make trouble for Oscar. John Sholto Douglas, the Eighth Marquess of Queensberry, was a noisy, notorious, brutish aristocrat. He disliked ‘effeminacy’ in men and particularly in his son. By 1894 Bosie’s association with the notoriously effete Oscar had been well noticed, and he was becoming almost as much a star as Oscar himself. Bosie was now a rival for those column inches that, as the intimate of the successful playwright, had once been reserved for Constance. The Marquess was horrified by this and felt sure that Oscar was having an unhealthy influence on his son.

  In the spring of 1894, just days after Oscar and Bosie returned from Paris, Queensberry saw them in a carriage together and thought he saw Oscar caress his son inappropriately. He also saw them at the Café Royal together. This prompted a letter to Bosie in which
the Marquess threatened to stop Bosie’s allowance unless he gave up his ‘loathsome and disgusting relationship’ with Oscar. The Marquess alleged terrible things in the letter: he had heard that Constance was to petition for divorce from Oscar. This last allegation seems to have had little firm foundation but probably reflects the level of society gossip that had been gradually growing since the previous year, when Bosie and Oscar stayed at the Savoy together. Certainly over the Channel, Pierre Louÿs contributed to gossip in Paris that Oscar had left his wife and children and was living with Bosie instead. Combine this with perhaps comments from some of Constance’s female friends who were aware of her distress, and it is not hard to imagine how ‘divorce’ would quickly spring to the lips of scandal-mongers.

  Bosie did not care a fig for his father’s concern and rebutted the Marquess’s letter with a short telegram that read ‘What a funny little man you are’. Queensberry’s fury erupted into new threats to make public what was ‘already a suppressed’ scandal.

  Constance and Oscar had been discussing the need to send the boys to school for some time, and now, with their parents’ relations once again deteriorating, the spring of 1894 was a good time to pack them off to their respective establishments. Constance had taken the lead in the search for the right school for Cyril and Vyvyan. Her letters to Georgina Mount-Temple in September and October 1893 make mention of options under consideration, including Eton and an establishment at Ascot where her friend the socialite and journalist Lady Jeune sent her son. News that Constance was making the decisions about her sons’ education spread far and wide. It was usually the prerogative of the male head of the household to determine where sons and heirs would get their grounding in life. But, of course, Constance and Oscar had always been pioneering and liberal in their approach to life, and this moment was no exception. Bizarrely, the press as far afield as America picked up on the story: ‘Mrs Oscar Wilde … has won a place for herself in her husband’s brilhant circle,’ the New York Times noted, adding ‘an hour’s talk with her shows that she has read and thought on the problems of the day. Entirely to her Mr Oscar Wilde has left the training of their two sons.’15

  Constance, as in so many other aspects of her life, proved faddish and pioneering in her choice of school, for Cyril at least. In mid-November she noted to Georgina that she had spotted a school described ‘in the Pall Mall last week, of which I have now got full particulars … it seems to me to be on the proper lines of a school, tho’ quite unlike the present system’.16 The school was Bedales, the subject of an article entitled ‘Schooling without Tears’ in the 5 October edition of the Pall Mall Gazette. This ‘new school’ was billed as combining the virtues of ‘Greek Particles and Potato Digging’. The brainchild of one J. H. Badley, Bedales in Haywards Heath was to be an alternative school where study was combined with manual work such as carpentry and gardening. Bedales set itself outside the traditional school system which, Badley felt, specialized far too early. Instead, boys at Bedales would learn good personal habits, character training and general culture alongside the more traditional scholastic disciplines, which would be limited to a mere four hours a day.

  For Vyvyan, on the other hand, Constance selected a more traditional preparatory school, Hildersham House in Broadstairs. The estuary air was probably considered beneficial for the perpetually unwell Vyvyan, and the headmaster, Mr Snowden, was kind.

  Oscar did eventually head out for the city of which Constance had become so enamoured the previous year – Florence. But in a move that must have felt particularly hurtful, he did not go with her. He travelled out to join Bosie there in May 1894. Lady Queensberry had dispatched her son to Italy in an attempt to weaken his revived relationship with Oscar. But the separation did nothing but strengthen resolves – a point not lost on Bosie’s father, who decided to take matters into his own hands.

  On the afternoon of 30 June 1894 Queensberry turned up at Tite Street, accompanied by a rough, burly bodyguard. Oscar was forced to confront the irate Queensberry, who had been shown into his study by the Wildes’ hapless butler, Arthur. Oscar suggested that Queensberry had come to apologize for the statement he had made about Constance in the letter to Bosie. But far from it: Queensberry parried with new accusations. He suggested that Oscar and Bosie had been kicked out of the Savoy Hotel the previous year for disgusting conduct, and had consequently taken rooms together in Piccadilly. Oscar asked the Marquess outright if he was accusing him of sodomizing his son. The Marquess replied that he did not make that direct accusation, but that the couple posed as if that were the nature of their relationship, which he considered as bad as the real thing. He finished with a threat to thrash Oscar in public. Oscar retaliated with a threat to shoot Queensberry, and then ejected him from the house.17

  Constance was in London that June. She may well have been at Tite Street to witness the confrontation at first hand. Oscar’s study, on the ground floor of their home, was directly under that summer drawing room, with its Japanese vases and peacock feathered ceiling, where she spent much of her time. If Constance had been at home, it’s inconceivable that the Marquess’s ranting would not have been heard in that room at least. But even if she had managed to miss this spectacular confrontation, Constance could not have been blind to the wider emerging brouhaha that was being whipped up.

  Throughout July, Queensberry made a point of hunting for Bosie and Oscar in their preferred restaurants, with a view to making a scene if he caught them together. Bosie bought a pistol, which he carried loaded. It went off in the Berkeley, an accident that only served to heighten gossip.

  Despite his bravado, Oscar was genuinely concerned that the Marquess might carry out his threats. A public accusation of sodomy would ruin him. And so that July he sought to have the ranting aristocrat gagged. He approached his old friend and associate the solicitor Sir George Lewis to see if he could have a restraining order placed on the Marquess.

  Lewis, who had after all attended Wilde’s wedding, and who had over the years provided plenty of paternal advice and legal assistance, as well as representing Oscar in some of his earliest professional engagements, delivered a piece of shattering news. Oscar’s adversary, the Marquess, had in fact already retained him in connection with the allegations.

  Shocked, and no doubt feeling betrayed by an old colleague, Oscar was forced to engage the services of another lawyer, recommended by Robbie Ross, Mr Charles Octavius Humphreys. Humphreys duly wrote to Queensberry asking him to retract his libels or risk litigation. The letters was utterly ineffectual. The choice of Humphreys as his legal counsel would prove one of Oscar’s worst mistakes.

  There seems little doubt that Constance had sunk into utter despair in the spring of 1894. The man she adored clearly infatuated with Bosie again, her boys away at boarding school, and now with the Marquess threatening terrible things, it is not hard to see how she might for once turn for solace not to one of her elderly ladies but to another man. And this is exactly what she did. The gentleman in question was someone she met professionally.

  Constance had never been afraid of earning money. Far from it, she relished paid work. And in 1894, when, despite her husband’s apparent success, the Wilde coffers were once more empty, she rolled up her sleeves again in an attempt to bring in more cash. She had been trying for a while to expand her repertoire as a writer beyond her theatre reviews and children’s stories. As far back as 1892 she had suggested to Otho that they collaborate on a book structured around letters between ‘a fiancé and fiancée … or a husband and wife, or brother and sister’,18 but this project was yet to take shape. In the meantime, however, another idea had presented itself: to compile a collection of Oscar’s sayings and epigrams, under the title Oscariana. Determined to make this project her own, she approached the publishers she had been working with in connection with her Rational Dress Gazette, Hatchard’s in Piccadilly.

  Arthur Humphreys, who was the general manager of Hatchard’s at the time, agreed to take on Oscariana and to oversee the
publication. Meanwhile, Oscar, who had turned down similar proposals in the past, was clearly only too happy to give his blessing to anything that at once kept his wife occupied and brought in more cash.

  Humphreys and Constance began work together. It’s worth remembering just how beautiful Constance was at this time. She is rarely mentioned in the press or in memoirs without being noted as particularly pretty. Her tendency to coyness and her deep sonorous voice had already proved massively attractive to a number of men, both before and since her marriage. Humphreys, like several before him, quickly fell under her spell.

  The timing of Humphreys’ interest in Constance is crucial. She had rebutted advances in the past quite easily. But in the early summer of 1894 Constance was perhaps as unhappy as she had ever been. The interest that Humphreys expressed in Constance, otherwise neglected, must have reminded her of that interest that the young Oscar Wilde once had in the shy and much ignored Miss Lloyd. Moreover, she had not had a sexual relationship since the birth of Vyvyan in 1886. Constance fell madly in love.

  In June, after one session working on the book, Constance and Humphreys began to talk about their respective marriages. Clearly the dissatisfaction with Oscar that she had shared with her female friends was now recounted to a man. And he in return revealed his own unhappy marriage. Constance wrote to him afterwards.

  Dear Mr Humphreys

  I feel as though I must write you one line to emphatically repeat my remark that you are an ideal husband, indeed I think you are not far short of being an ideal man! Forgive me if this seems in any way rude. You know that I am a hero-worshipper down to the tips of my fingers, and somewhere near the head of my list I now put you!

  It must have seemed horribly inquisitive of me to ask you so many questions, but I am not inquisitive, as you will see for yourself when you know me better, and I cannot explain what made me ask – certainly not any outside influence! But I liked you & was interested in you, & I saw that you were good. And it is rarely that I come across a man that has that written in his face. And so I stepped past the limits perhaps of good taste in the wish to be your friend and to have you for my friend. I spoke to you very openly about myself, & I confess that I should not like you to repeat what I said about my childhood; I am afraid it was wrong to speak as bitterly as I did. But if we are to be friends as I hope we may be, you must trust me. Indeed I can be trusted, as I believe that you can be. I am the most truthful person in the world, also I am intuitive.19