by Neil McKenna
On the same day that Oscar was checking into the Savoy, Alfred Taylor found himself yet again in the bar of the St James's Restaurant, a place he regularly liked to trawl. His friend and former lover, Edward Harrington, was already there, chatting to a pair of fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked likely lads with thick dark hair slicked down. They could have been country boys. They were reasonably smartly dressed, but Alfred Taylor could sense that they were down on their luck. He noticed the fraying cuffs, the greying linen, the crumpled jackets and creased trousers, and the shoes literally down at heel. Taylor guessed that they were sixteen or seventeen, or thereabouts. Harrington called Taylor over and introduced him to the young men.
It turned out that Charles and William Parker were brothers. Charlie, the younger of the two, had been valet to a gentleman, and William had been a groom. Now both were unemployed and out of cash and were knocking around London in search of a place. They had met Edward Harrington a couple of weeks before and had been staying with him. Harrington had been sleeping with both of them, but Taylor's arrival was in many ways a blessing. The Parkers had been scrounging off Harrington and he had taken, and paid for, his pleasures. Now Harrington was ready to move on.
Alfred Taylor was all smiles. The rosy-cheeked Parkers were a pair of extremely well set-up boys, butch but not too butch, just the right age, and thankfully neither of them wore a moustache. They clearly enjoyed having sex with men. They were also flat broke. It was not going to be difficult at all to persuade them to meet and sleep with various gentlemen of his acquaintance in return for a little cash. Taylor stood everyone another round of drinks, and the conversation turned to sex: `I can't understand sensible men wasting their money on painted trash like that,' he said contemptuously, referring to the female prostitutes who frequented Piccadilly Circus. `Many do, though. But there are a few who know better.' `Now you,' he said with a knowing look at Charlie and William, `you could get money in a certain way easily enough, if you cared to.' Charlie made what he described as `a coarse reply' to the effect that he was agreeable `if any old gentleman with money took a fancy to me'. `I was agreeable,' Charlie later explained. `I was terribly hard up.' Taylor laughed and said that `Men far cleverer, richer and better than you prefer things of that kind.'
That night, Charlie and William went off with Taylor to Little College Street, where they would spend the best part of a month, taking turns to share Taylor's bed. Charlie claimed that during the first week or so, they rarely went out and that Taylor repeatedly committed sodomy with him, calling him by such endearments as `Darling' and `My little wife', while William alleged that `indecencies' took place with Taylor several times.
On 10 March, Alfred Taylor told the Parker brothers that they had all been invited out to dinner by Oscar. Ostensibly it was to celebrate Taylor's birthday two days earlier, but it was also an ideal opportunity for Oscar to meet Charlie and William. They went to Kettner's, not the Solferino, as Charlie later mistakenly claimed in court, and were shown into a private room with a piano and red-shaded candles on the table. Oscar was a few minutes late and arrived full of charming apologies. He sat next to Charlie and was clearly enamoured of him from the outset. According to William, Oscar `paid all his attention to my brother'. As the meal progressed and the champagne flowed, sex and food commingled. Oscar `often fed my brother off his own fork or out of his own spoon', said William, adding that Charlie even accepted a preserved cherry from Oscar's own mouth. `My brother took it into his, and this trick was repeated three or four times.' It was quite clear to everybody that Oscar wanted Charlie to take more than just a preserved cherry into his mouth.
During the course of dinner, Charlie told Oscar that he had ambitions, like so many of the boys Oscar had met, to go on the stage and asked Oscar if there was any way he could help him. For his part, Oscar seemed genuinely interested in the Parkers. `He showed curiosity about my family and affairs,' said Charlie, `and I told him my father was a horse dealer.' At the end of dinner Oscar turned to Charlie and proclaimed: `This is the boy for me!' and asked him if he would come back to the Savoy. `Yes,' said Charlie. They left Kettner's and hailed a hansom cab. `Your brother is lucky!' Alfred Taylor remarked to William. `Oscar does not care what he pays if he fancies a chap.'
When they got to the Savoy they went straight to Oscar's room on the third floor, Room 362, which had a connecting door to Bosie's room, 361. Oscar ordered iced champagne which they drank before Oscar locked the door of the sitting room and took Charlie into the bedroom. They undressed completely and got into bed. `I was there about two hours,' Charlie testified:
I was asked by Wilde to imagine that I was a woman and that he was my lover. I had to keep up this illusion. I used to sit on his knees and he used to play with my privates as a man might amuse himself with a girl.
Oscar asked Charlie to `toss him off. He also sucked Charlie's cock and wanted Charlie to suck him off in turn, to be a `gourmet'. `He suggested two or three times that I would permit him to insert "it" in my mouth,' said Charlie. `But I never allowed that.' The next morning Oscar gave Charlie £2 and told him to come back to the Savoy in a week's time at 11 o'clock in the evening. This was probably the occasion when Oscar presented him with a silver cigarette case, which had cost £ I. `I don't suppose boys are any different to girls in taking presents from them that are fond of them,' Charlie later remarked philosophically in court.
Charlie was emphatic that he and Oscar had had anal sex that first night at the Savoy. At Oscar's second trial, his defence counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, interrogated Charlie. `You say positively that Mr. Wilde committed sodomy with you at the Savoy?' he asked. `Yes,' answered Charlie, without any equivocation. In his deposition to Lord Queensberry's solicitors, Charlie had gone no further than indicating that Oscar had only performed `certain operations with his mouth' - or oral sex. His revelations in court caused a considerable stir. By alleging that Oscar had sodomised him, Charlie was laying Oscar open to new and terrible charges. Sodomy carried a penalty of between ten years and life in prison.
There was strong circumstantial evidence that anal sex had taken place in Oscar's bed, if not with Charlie, then with other boys. Jane Cotta was a chambermaid at the Savoy who remembered Oscar arriving at the hotel on 2 March. She could fix the date, she said, because Oscar arrived on the same day as the third floor re-opened to guests after its spring cleaning. Just after eight o'clock in the morning, on or around 9 March, Oscar rang the bell in his room to summon the chambermaid. Jane Cotta knocked on the door of Room 362 and entered. Oscar was already up but not dressed. He wanted, he said, a fire lit in the room. Jane Cotta left to get wood and coal, but not before she noticed, to her surprise, that there was a boy asleep in the large double bed. Jane Cotta told Lord Queensberry's solicitors that the boy was `a common boy, roughlooking', aged, as far as she could tell, about fourteen. Later in court, she thought the boy might have been sixteen, eighteen or even nineteen and had `close-cropped hair and a sallow complexion'. A few minutes later she returned to light the fire. The boy was still asleep in bed.
Later that day, as Jane Cotta was making Oscar's bed, she noticed that the bed sheets `were stained in a peculiar way'. They were, she told Lord Queensberry's solicitors, in a most `disgusting' state. She was quite specific about the nature of the stains on the sheets: there was vaseline, there was semen, and there was `soil', by which she meant human excrement. Oscar's night-shirt, she said, was also stained in the same way.
Jane Cotta pointed out the stains to another chambermaid, Alice Saunders, and went to seek the advice of Mrs Perkins, the Savoy's housekeeper. `How disgusting!' was Mrs Perkins's first reaction. She advised Jane Cotta not to discuss the matter with any other members of staff. After all, she said, Mr Wilde was sure to have some explanation for the presence of the boy in his bed, and it could all be perfectly innocent. As for the sheets, Mrs Perkins gave directions on how they should be treated to remove the staining. The advice was timely. For this was not the only incidence of staining and soiling
on Oscar's sheets, which were, according to Jane Cotta, continually stained in the same way - and often to amuch worse degree.
At Oscar's trials, similar evidence was produced from a quite different source. Mrs Mary Applegate was the housekeeper at 28, Osnaburgh Street, a rooming house where Fred Atkins and `Uncle' Burton had lived for almost two years. Mrs Applegate claimed that Oscar had, to her knowledge, twice visited Fred Atkins there, staying about two hours on each occasion. `One of the housemaids came to me and complained of the state of the sheets on the bed in which Atkins slept after Mr. Wilde's first visit,' said Mrs Applegate. `The sheets were stained in a peculiar way.'
Mr Justice Charles, the judge who presided over Oscar's second trial, summarised the evidence of the stained sheets. `I do not wish to enlarge upon this most unpleasant part of this most unpleasant case,' he told the jury:
but it is necessary for me to remind you as discreetly as I can that, according to the evidence of Mary Applegate, the housekeeper at Osnaburgh Street, where Atkins used to lodge, the housemaid objected to making the bed on several occasions after Wilde and Atkins had been in the bedroom together. There were, she affirmed, indications on the sheets that conduct of the grossest kind had been indulged in. I think it my duty to remind you that there may be an innocent explanation of these stains, though the evidence of Jane Cotta certainly affords a kind of corroboration of these charges.
The `innocent explanation' put forward by Sir Edward Clarke, Oscar's defence counsel, was that Oscar had been suffering from diarrhoea, and it was this which caused the staining to the sheets, rather than what one contemporary account of the trials described as the consequences of `the sodomistic act' which `has much the same effect as an enema inserted up the rectum. There is an almost immediate discharge, though not, of course, to the extent produced by the enema operation.' When he was confronted about the evidence of the soiled bed-linen at the Savoy in court, Oscar stoutly maintained that the evidence of the housemaids was `untrue'. `You deny that the bed-linen was marked in that way described?' Sir Frank Lockwood demanded. `I do not examine bed-linen when I arise,' Oscar retorted grandly. `I am not a housemaid.'
Whether the boy that Jane Cotta saw in Oscar's bed was Charlie Parker is impossible to say. The dates more or less fit, but there was a succession of boys going in and out of Oscar's suite. The `Plea of Justification' filed by the Marquis of Queensberry before his trial for criminally libelling Oscar alleged that Oscar committed `sodomy and other acts of gross indecency and immorality' with boys on five dates during his stay at the Savoy. Only one boy is named: Charles Parker, who is alleged to have had sex with Oscar on the night of 14 March, as well as `on divers dates' during March 1893. Oscar's other bed partners at the Savoy, on 7, 9, 20 and 21 March, were `boys unknown', though Alfred Wood was almost certainly one of them. He testified that Oscar and Bosie summoned him to the Savoy by telegram.
Jane Cotta was not the only employee of the Savoy to find a boy in Oscar's bed. Antonio Migge, who described himself rather grandly as a `Professor of Massage', detailed what he saw when he walked into Oscar's room one morning to give him his customary massage. `It was in March, 1893,' he said, `from the 16th to the 20th of the month':
On going to the room - I entered after knocking - I saw someone in bed. At first I thought it was a young lady, as I saw only the head, but afterwards I saw it was a young man. It was someone about sixteen to eighteen years of age.
Oscar was dressing himself when Migge came in. He airily told Migge that he felt much better that morning, that he was very busy and would not, after all, have the massage.
Emile Becker, a waiter at the Savoy, claimed that he saw at least five different young men in Oscar's sitting room on different occasions. He served them whisky and sodas, and on one occasion, he brought up a supper of `chicken and salad for two' for Oscar and a boy, almost certainly Charlie, paying his second visit to the Savoy. The bill for this supper was sixteen shillings, prompting Mr Justice Wills to comment during Oscar's third trial, `I know nothing about the Savoy but I must say that in my view "Chicken and salad for two. 16s." is very high! I am afraid I shall never have supper there myself.'
The neurotic Edward Shelley was almost certainly another of the five boys seen by Emile Becker. Shelley visited Oscar twice at the Savoy. He had received a letter from Oscar inviting him to `come and smoke a cigarette' with him. Shelley turned up at the Savoy one morning at about 11am and found Bosie with Oscar. A week or so later, Shelley went again, and this time Oscar was alone. They had tea in Oscar's sitting room and a quarrel took place. In his testimony to the court, Shelley did not give any reasons for the quarrel, but it is not hard to guess that Oscar had attempted to kiss him or fondle him. Shelley said that he told Oscar `not to be a beast' and that Oscar, by way of expiation, replied `I am so fond of you, Edward.'
The Marquis of Queensberry also alleged that Oscar committed `indecencies' with one Herbert Tankard, a hotel pageboy whose pet name was `Chips'. Herbert Tankard was either thirteen or fourteen when Oscar and Bosie arrived at the Savoy. He told Queensberry's solicitors that he was often in Oscar and Bosie's rooms, delivering and receiving messages. He was clearly something of a favourite with Oscar, who used to greet him with the words `Hello! Here's my Herbert.' On at least one occasion, Oscar bent down to kiss his Herbert, which startled the boy enormously. Oscar and Bosie were popular among the Savoy pageboys mainly because of their large tips. They invariably tipped them half-a-crown, a huge tip to a pageboy. Both Herbert Tankard and Jane Cotta had heard about these tips and about the kisses that Oscar was in the habit of bestowing on the pageboys. Jane Cotta deposed that she overheard one of the pageboys telling another that Mr Wilde `is always kissing me' and adding `but he always tips me 2/6'.
During his stay at the Savoy, Oscar was throwing caution to the winds. He brought back at least five boys to his room and allowed at least two of them to be seen in his bed by hotel staff. His bed sheets were often stained with a mixture of vaseline, semen and excrement. The circumstantial evidence alone was compelling. But what was the truth of the matter? Had Oscar dragged boys back, had sex with them, sodomised them? Did he do this with sublime, blind indifference to who might see these boys in his room and to what Trelawny Backhouse called `ocular and horrible proofs of a most painstaking pedicatio' staining the sheets? Or was he, as his defence counsel claimed, innocent of all charges? The stains on the sheets, said Sir Edward Clarke, could be explained away by repeated attacks of diarrhoea. Besides which, he argued, if Oscar was really guilty of such terrible crimes, why had he been so unconcerned about entertaining boys at the Savoy, and why had he taken so little trouble to conceal the stained sheets in his room? True guilt presupposed cunning, deception and concealment.
There is a curious absence from the trial records and the witness depositions. Bosie is rarely mentioned, and then only in passing. And yet he spent almost as much time at the Savoy as Oscar. Where was Bosie, for example, on the night of Alfred Taylor's birthday dinner at Kettner's, the evening when Oscar first met the Parker brothers? Although Bosie's room adjoined Oscar's, none of the hotel staff who gave evidence at Oscar's trial mentioned seeing Bosie in his room or in Oscar's room. There were good reasons why Bosie's name did not figure prominently. Both Oscar and Bosie's father, the Marquis of Queensberry, were determined to keep Bosie's name out of the scandal as far as they possibly could, and both believed that they were acting out of love for Bosie.
Exactly what went on at the Savoy will never be known, but there is strong evidence that Bosie, as well as Oscar, indulged in `sodomy and other acts of gross indecency and immorality' with the five boys, including Charlie Parker, named in Queensberry's `Plea of Justification', and perhaps with several others not named. Like the `two neighbour jewels in Love's coronet' of Bosie's poem, Oscar and Bosie had adjoining rooms at the Savoy and were ideally placed to share what they poetically termed `Love's burden'. Hunting singly, or as a pair, they found and brought boys back to the Savoy where they both had
sex with them, either d trois, or sequentially, or both. In an early draft of the statement made to Queensberry's solicitors by Charlie Parker, he recounts how, six weeks or so after his first visit to the Savoy with Oscar, he was invited to call on Oscar at the Albemarle Hotel. Lord Alfred Douglas, Charlie said, was in Oscar's room, and on that occasion both men-had- behaved indecently with him.
Bosie would have wanted to sodomise the boys at the Savoy. He was invariably the penetrator in anal sex; he had a pathological horror of being penetrated. Oscar may have been flexible, perhaps taking both roles, that of penetrator and penetrated. Being sodomised may have been what he was referring to when he spoke to Frank Harris of the `sting of sexual pleasure'. Significantly, it was Oscar's night-shirt which, according to Jane Cotta, had been stained with a mixture of vaseline, semen and excrement, suggesting that the discharge had come from Oscar's rectum. For an older man to allow himself to be penetrated by a younger one, let alone to enjoy it, may have seemed perverse - if not unthinkable - to some of Oscar's contemporaries, but would hardly shock, or even surprise today. `What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought,' Oscar said, `perversity became to me in the sphere of passion.'
Oscar enjoyed irrumination, or cock-sucking, and there was no reason why he should not have equally enjoyed being sodomised. In the same way, there is no reason why some of the boys and young men he had sex with should not have preferred to penetrate, rather than be penetrated. Some of them, certainly, also enjoyed sex with women and may, or may not, have preferred to be the penetrator in anal sex. The weasly Fred Atkins seems to have hankered after women. Edward Shelley was deeply confused about his sexuality and eventually married. William Allen, one of a gang who blackmailed Oscar and with whom Oscar may have slept, was already married. Ironically, if Oscar had been sodomised by any of the boys he slept with, Sir Edward Clarke's defence that it was diarrhoea that caused the staining on the sheets may have contained a germ of truth.