The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Towards the end of August Lord Arthur quietly went abroad with his servant. He took four months leave of absence from his regiment and conveniently forgot to leave a forwarding address. It all seemed very suspicious. A flurry of letters passed between Whitehall departments, all of which seemed to advocate delay or doing nothing against Lord Arthur, and all of which had his name pasted over. Why? What possible reason could there be for such frenzied and secretive political activity, all designed to delay any arrest or charge against him? Lord Arthur Somerset was on terms of intimacy with the Royal Family. But this cannot adequately explain the extraordinary lengths the government of the day went to, to avoid any whiff of a scandal involving Lord Arthur. He was an important, even influential, man. But not so important, not so influential as to be above the law. There had to be another explanation.

  The reason became clear in September when Arthur Newton, Lord Arthur's solicitor, dropped a bombshell. Significantly, Newton was also acting for Henry Newlove and for George Veck, who was also mixed up in the Cleveland Street affair. Newton quietly let it be known that any prosecution of Lord Arthur would mean that the name of a very important person would be dragged into the scandal, and that this very important person would be exposed as an habitue of 19, Cleveland Street, and as a sodomite. The very important person was none other than Prince Albert Victor, known to his family and friends as Prince Eddy, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, grandson of Queen Victoria, heir presumptive to the Crown Imperial.

  On 16 September 1889, the Honourable Hamilton Cuffe, Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions, gave the game away when he wrote:

  I am told that Newton has boasted that if we go on a very distinguished person will be involved (P.A.V.). I don't mean to say that I for one instant credit it - but in such a case as this one never knows what may be said, be concocted or be true.

  Lord Arthur Somerset stoutly denied having ever introduced Prince Eddy to Cleveland Street, but significantly did not deny that Prince Eddy was a regular visitor to the premises, only saying obliquely `Prince Eddy and I must both perform bodily functions which we cannot do for each other.' It was a strange comment. Was Somerset suggesting that the reason he and Prince Eddy visited Cleveland Street was because they both liked to bugger young men, and could hardly bugger each other?

  Newlove and Veck were sent for trial. Their case was the last of the day and took less than half an hour. They were both given light sentences, just four months for Newlove and nine months for Veck. Justice, of a sort, had been seen to be done. Hamilton Cuffe called it `a travesty' and described the sentences handed down to Newlove and Veck as `ridiculous'. It was a coverup. Hammond was still at liberty abroad and had received a large sum of money to emigrate to New York, handed to him by the solicitor Newton. Some of the boys involved were offered money to go to Australia and the United States, again by Newton. Lord Arthur Somerset slipped back into England under the impression that the worst was now over. Most importantly Prince Eddy's name had not been mentioned publicly in connection with Cleveland Street.

  But this seemingly neat and tidy ending to the scandal was unsustainable. There was still pressure from some quarters in the government, notably from Hamilton Cuffe, to prosecute Lord Arthur Somerset. Throughout September and October there were frenzied communications between the government law officers, the Prime Minister and Sir Francis Knollys and Sir Dighton Probyn, courtiers and fixers to the Prince of Wales. Knollys and Probyn were energetic in trying to quash any chance of a prosecution of Lord Arthur Somerset, calling on Hamilton Cuffe at the Treasury, who wrote an account of the meeting to the Lord Chancellor:

  This afternoon Sir Dighton Probyn and Sir Francis Knollys called here and stated that they were directed by HRH the Prince of Wales to make inquiry as to the rumours about Lord Arthur Somerset, that the matter ought to be cleared up and that the present state of the case was unjust and cruel to Lord Arthur Somerset.

  The Prince of Wales was desperate not to see a prosecution of Lord Arthur Somerset. He knew that if such a prosecution were initiated, Prince Eddy's name would inevitably be dragged in. Probyn and Knollys had their orders. The Prince of Wales had directed them to `see Lord Salisbury if necessary'. On 17 October, Lord Arthur wrote to a friend:

  Just seen Francis K. The Treasury refuses all information at present and so it is likely they will be some time before they can say anything. So K has wired to Lord Salisbury making an appointment for Probyn tomorrow.

  The meeting between the Prime Minister and Sir Dighton Probyn took place the next day at King's Cross railway station, where Lord Salisbury was waiting to catch a train to his country seat, Hatfield House. What was actually said is not known, but, later that evening, Lord Arthur fled abroad once again. Was it merely a coincidence, or had he been tipped off that a warrant was about to be issued for his arrest? And if so, by whom? Later, in the House of Commons, Henry Labouchere directly accused Lord Salisbury of tipping off Probyn so that he could warn Lord Arthur to flee.

  Even after Lord Arthur's flight abroad, Sir Dighton Probyn, acting for the Prince of Wales, sought to have the charges against Lord Arthur dropped. He wrote directly to Lord Salisbury making it clear that he was acting with the authority of the Prince of Wales: `I felt that in writing to you I am only doing what the Prince would wish,' Probyn wrote. `I write now to ask you, to implore of you if it can be managed to have the prosecution stopped':

  It can do no good to prosecute him. He has gone and will never show his face in England again. He dare never come back to this country. I think it is the most hateful, loathsome story I ever heard, and the most astounding. It is too fearful, but further publicity will only make matters worse.

  But a warrant was issued for the arrest of Lord Arthur Somerset, even though it was unlikely that he would ever face a jury in England. And Sir Dighton Probyn and the Prince of Wales were right. Further publicity did make matters worse. Much worse.

  On 16 November, the North London Press carried the following paragraph:

  THE WEST END SCANDALS NAMES OF SOME OF THE DISTINGUISHED CRIMINALS WHO HAVE ESCAPED

  In an issue of the 28th September we stated that among the number of aristocrats who were mixed up in an indescribably loathsome scandal in Cleveland Street, Tottenham Court Road, were the heir to a duke and the younger son of a duke. The men to whom we thus referred were the Earl of Euston, eldest son of the Duke of Grafton, and Lord H. Arthur G. Somerset, a younger son of the Duke of Beaufort. The former, we believe, has departed for Peru. The latter, having resigned his commission and his office of assistant Equerry to the Prince of Wales, has gone too.

  The paper then went on to accuse the authorities of a conspiracy designed to protect a very important person:

  These men have been allowed to leave the country, and thus defeat the ends of justice, because their prosecution would disclose the fact that a far more distinguished and more highly placed personage than themselves was inculpated in these disgusting practices.

  The use of the word `personage' was deliberate and calculated. In the late nineteenth century, the word meant a person of very high rank or importance. So `a far more distinguished and more highly placed personage' than an earl or the son of a duke pointed directly to a member of the royal family. There had already been rumours about Prince Eddy's involvement in the Cleveland Street affair; now it looked as if the truth was about to come out. But Ernest Parke, the editor of the North London Press, had got it wrong. The Earl of Euston had not fled abroad to Peru. Indeed, he had not been abroad for several years. He promptly issued a writ for libel against Parke and the North London Press. Parke was determined to fight the charge, and the case came to the Old Bailey on 15 January 1890.

  Parke was confident of justifying his story and winning the case. He had, he believed, incontrovertible proof of the Earl of Euston's involvement in the Cleveland Street menage, in the form of a written statement made by a notorious male prostitute, Jack Saul. This was the very same Jack Saul whose bawdy memoirs, The
Sins of the Cities of the Plain; or the Recollections of a Mary Ann, were a classic work of Victorian homoerotica, and the same Jack Saul who had been caught up in the 1884 Dublin Castle Scandal.

  In his statement to Inspector Abberline of the Metropolitan Police, taken in August, but seemingly not acted upon, it is clear that Jack Saul had fallen on hard times: `I am still a professional Mary Ann,' he told Abberline. `I have lost my character and cannot get otherwise. I occasionally do odd jobs for gay people.' By `gay people', Jack Saul meant the prostitutes, mostly female, and their pimps, who seemed to form a community of their own in the West End of London.

  Jack Saul, it transpired, had known Hammond, the proprietor of 19, Cleveland Street, for just over ten years, `since the 1st May, 1879', he said. `We both earned our livings as Sodomites.' It seems as if Saul and Hammond were lovers - certainly Hammond seems to have acted as Saul's pimp. `I used to give him all the money I earned, often times as much as £8 and £9 a week.' By 1889, Saul was in his late thirties, and with looks that were starting to fade. Saul resented the fact that Hammond had a ready supply of teenage telegraph boys working for him. `I complained to Hammond of his allowing boys of good position in the Post Office to be in the house while I had to go and walk the streets for what is in my face, and that is my shame.'

  When the libel case went to court, Jack Saul was the star witness for the defence. It was while walking the streets looking for punters, Saul said, that he first met the Earl of Euston, `a tall, fine-looking man with a fair moustache'. `I picked him up just as I might have picked any other gentleman up,' Saul told the court. `Where did you meet this person?' Parke's counsel, Frank Lockwood, asked. `In Piccadilly, between Albany Courtyard and Sackville Street,' Saul replied. `He laughed at me and I winked at him. He turned sharp into Sackville Street.' Jack Saul followed him and their encounter followed the classic pattern of such street cruising:

  The Duke, as we called him, came near me, and asked me where I was going. I said `Home' and he said `What sort is your place?' `Very comfortable', I replied. He said, `Is it very quiet there?' I said yes it was, and then we took a hansom cab there. We got out by the Middlesex Hospital, and I took the gentleman to 19 Cleveland Street, letting him in with my latchkey.

  Saul took Lord Euston into the `back parlour or reception room', the same room in which Charles Swinscow and George Wright subsequently entertained their gentleman clients, and Hammond `came and knocked and asked if we wanted any champagne or drinks of any sort, which he was in the habit of doing'. The sexual encounter between Jack Saul and Lord Euston was peremptory, little more than masturbation. Lord Euston was not, according to Jack Saul, `an actual Sodomite. He likes to play with you and then "spend" on your belly.' The Earl's parting words to Jack Saul were, Be sure, if you see me, don't speak to me in the street.'

  Lord Euston's version of events was naturally very different. One evening around midnight in May or June 1888 a man had come up to him and handed him a card printed with the address of 19, Cleveland Street and with the words `Poses Plastiques' handwritten at the top. Poses Plastiques was a euphemism for live displays of nudity, where women, singly or in pairs, would display their naked bodies in a variety of erotic postures. Sometimes, these events went further than mere display, involving live sex acts and prostitution. Having kept the card on his chimneypiece for a week or so, Lord Euston, `prompted', as his counsel Sir Charles Russell put it, `by prurient curiosity which did him no credit', took a hansom carriage to Cleveland Street where Hammond answered the door:

  I rang the bell and the door was opened by a man of medium height, clean shaven except for a dark moustache, and with hair that was getting thin on top. He took me into the first room on the right of the passage. He asked me for a sovereign, which I gave him, and then I asked him where these poses plastiques were going to take place. He said `there's nothing of that sort here', and then stated the real character of the house. I asked him what he meant by saying such a thing as that to me, and told him if he did not let me out I should knock him down.

  The case came down to who was to be believed: the Earl of Euston, an upright member of the aristocracy without a trace of obvious vice about him, or Jack Saul, a self-confessed male prostitute, obviously effeminate, who had lived a life of vice and dishonesty. In his summing-up, Mr Justice Hawkins said of Jack Saul that he could not imagine `a more melancholy or a more loathsome object'. The jury was out for just forty minutes and returned a verdict of `Guilty of libel without justification'. Parke was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment without hard labour.

  By a strange irony, many of those involved in the political and legal aspects of the Cleveland Street affair and in the prosecution of Ernest Parke were to reappear five years later when Oscar stood in the dock. Hamilton Cuffe, by 1895, had been promoted to Director of Public Prosecutions. Charles Gill, who held a watching brief for Lord Arthur Somerset during Ernest Parke's trial, prosecuted Oscar in his first criminal trial at the Old Bailey. And Frank Lockwood, who defended Parke, became Sir Frank Lockwood, and by 1895 was a senior Liberal politician in Lord Rosebery's government. Lockwood prosecuted Oscar with terrible ferocity. Herbert Henry Asquith, junior defence counsel for Parke, was another senior Liberal politician and by 1895 had risen to become Home Secretary; he would eventually become Prime Minister. All these men experienced at first hand the complex conspiracy of the Cleveland Street Scandal. Five years later, they would all be involved, in one way or another, in what some would claim as another conspiracy, another cover-up.

  Even before the publication of Dorian Gray, Oscar's name had been mooted in connection with the Cleveland Street Scandal. At the time of the scandal, Henley, the Scots Observer's editor, had asked his reporter Charles Whibley what was the nature `of this dreadful scandal about Mr Oscar Wilde?' There is no evidence that Oscar ever visited 19, Cleveland Street, but then again, there is no evidence that he did not. He had certainly read and enjoyed Jack Saul's Recollections of a Mani Ann, and it is quite possible that the two men had met. Now, whether he liked it or not, Oscar's name was inextricably entwined with the most appalling scandal. His novel had been categorised as `a filthy one', and was widely regarded as being in some way connected with the events of Cleveland Street.

  Apples of Sodom

  `In the study hall, in the classroom -nay at very prayers - I have known masturbation carried on. Such was the daily regime, and yet the powers that be never made an attempt to check the mischief. Of its existence they could not have been unaware, for soiled bed clothes and torn trousers' pockets, apart from the pimpled foreheads and emaciated appearance of the boys, told their sad tale.'- A Schoolboy' in Reynolds's News, May 1895

  The Picture of Dorian Gray was the most explicit novel about love and sex between men that had ever been published - at least by a respectable publisher. There had been works of pornography like The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, but these had never had the mass audience reached by Dorian Gray. The novel was a rallying cry for men who loved men, a Uranian clarion call to arms, a sexually political manifesto, `designed', `intended' and `understood', as Lord Queensberry's `Plea of Justification' had it, to be a novel about sodomy and sodomites.

  Max Beerbohm, not himself a lover of men, but someone who was fascinated by Uranian love, wrote a poem, `Ballade de la vie joyeuse', in praise of Dorian Gray, as well as composing a witty mock examination paper with knowing questions like:

  What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life had he at this period? Give the name of any gentleman who would associate with him. Is any one, besides Dorian, credited with a moue? Write down as accurately as possible Lord Henry's terrible panegyric on youth.

  And Lionel Johnson, a precocious young poet at New College, Oxford, also wrote a poem in Latin, `In honour of Dorian and his creator'. Johnson's poem left no doubt about the novel's locus of interest for him and for the other young men who surrounded Oscar. `Bless you, Oscar,' the poem went, `for honouring me with this book for friendship's sake. Casting in the Ro
man tongue praises that befit Dorian, I thank you':

  This lovely rose of youth blossoms among roses, until death comes abruptly.

  Behold the man! Behold the God! If only my soul could take his part.

  He avidly loves strange loves and, fierce with beauty, he plucks strange flowers.

  The more sinister his spirit, the more radiant his face, lying - but how splendidly!

  Here are apples of Sodom, here are the very hearts of vices, and tender sins.

  In heaven and hell be glory of glories to you who perceive so much.

  Lionel Johnson was a comparatively new recruit to Oscar's circle of disciples. Oscar had sought his acquaintance in February 1890, on the very day that John Gray was being received into the Roman Catholic Church. Oscar was in Oxford, ostensibly to watch a production of Browning's Stafford with Henry Irving in the title role, and to see Walter Pater, though the physical charms of Oxford's undergraduates may have been a much stronger draw.

  Walter Pater and Lionel Johnson had become very close the previous year, when Johnson went to visit Pater at the house in London he shared with his sisters. `I lunched with Pater, dined with Pater, smoked with Pater, went to Mass with Pater and fell in love with Pater,' Johnson had written to his friend, Campbell Dodgson, also a lover of men. Pater had told Oscar about his new young friend and shown him some of Johnson's poems, including one which was dedicated to Johnson's schoolfellow, Lord Alfred Douglas. It oozed homoeroticism, and in the last three lines contained a rather clumsily buried reference to bending over for anal sex:

  Oscar was eager to meet Lionel Johnson. His first attempt to call on him was unsuccessful: Johnson was either not in, or he was still asleep, as he kept notoriously irregular hours. Oscar left a note. `Dear Mr Johnson,' he wrote. `I called to see you as I wanted so much to know you as well as I know your poems. Are you really invisible?' The next day, Oscar essayed another call on Johnson. This time he was successful. Johnson wrote to a friend about his first encounter with Oscar: