The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  It appeared that Drumlanrig's interest in Trelawny Backhouse was distinctly sexual, as Backhouse made clear:

  He was extremely and ideally handsome, an Adonis or a Ganymede of charming manners and a pleasing habit (like Bozic) of blushing if anyone's `propos' became `risques'! Douglas begged me to dine with him in town after the Oxford term ... my intimacy with Douglas rapidly developed: we had tastes in common and allowed them to expand to the fullest amplitude.

  Those `tastes in common' were, of course, anal sex, and allowing them `to expand to the fullest amplitude' was Backhouse's rather witty admission that he and Drumlanrig had sex on at least one occasion.

  At first, the love affair between Rosebery and Drumlanrig attracted little or no attention. There was some surprise in political circles that Rosebery should have appointed a charming and engaging young guardsman without any apparent political acumen or talent as his private secretary, but this soon passed. And, as it happened, Drumlanrig was rather good as Rosebery's private secretary. He was universally liked and his engaging personal qualities smoothed his political passage. There was, however, one large fly in the ointment in the squat and ungainly form of Drumlanrig's father, the Marquis of Queensberry. Queensberry was surprised when Drumlanrig resigned his commission in the Coldstream Guards to take up a career in politics, and not a little annoyed that his son and heir had chosen to ally himself with the Liberal Party, which represented the antithesis of every political belief Queensberry held.

  In the spring of 1893, less than a year after his appointment as Rosebery's private secretary, Drumlanrig was offered a peerage so that he could sit in the House of Lords in a junior ministerial role, as Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen. It was Rosebery's gift to his lover and it was Drumlanrig's first step on the political ladder. But before he could accept the peerage, Drumlanrig felt that he had to consult his father, who had lost his right to sit in the House of Lords as a Scots Peer when he refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Queen Victoria. In his unpublished memorandum of the events surrounding Drumlanrig's peerage, Rosebery recorded the outcome of Drumlanrig's meeting with his father. Drumlanrig, he wrote, had gone to consult his father in Brighton where he was living in a hotel. Queenberry's reactions were, to say the least, mixed. He wrote directly to Rosebery saying that he had no intention of allowing his personal feelings to stand in the way of his son's political career, but that the offer of a peerage to his son brought back bitter memories of his own thwarted political career. Rosebery was unconvinced that Queensberry had given his full and free consent and so Drumlanrig was despatched to Brighton again to clarify his father's views. This second visit was successful. Drumlanrig told Rosebery that he had his father's full consent. The peerage was granted and Rosebery gave the matter no further thought.

  But shortly after Drumlanrig's elevation to the peerage as Baron Kelhead had been announced, Queensberry started writing abusive letters to Rosebery, to Queen Victoria and to the Prime Minister, Gladstone. On 5 June 1893, Sir Algernon West, Gladstone's private secretary, confided to his diary that Lady Queensberry had told him that:

  Lord Queensberry was for the moment furious, as he himself had not a seat in the Lords as a representative peer and had written a very offensive letter to Mr Gladstone. I promised Lady Queensberry that a soothing answer should be sent.

  But Queensberry could not be so easily soothed and continued to despatch offensive and abusive letters. Two weeks later, on 20 June, one of his letters to Gladstone was read out at a Cabinet meeting. Rosebery advised that the letter should be ignored. Queensberry's accusations were, he said, the ravings of a madman. Queensberry believed that Drumlanrig's peerage was a plot, deliberately designed to humiliate him by allowing his own son and heir a seat in the House of Lords. The prime author of the plot was Alfred Montgomery, his former father-in-law, who had, in Queensberry's eyes, been fomenting plots and intrigues against him for years, poisoning his children's minds against their father. After he received a letter in which Queensberry excoriated the role of `that arch pimp Alfred Montgomery' in securing Drumlanrig's peerage, Rosebery realised too late that he had become caught up in the terrible feud between Queensberry and his former wife and her family. Despite having given his full consent to Drumlanrig's peerage, Queensberry had brooded over it and had soon begun to regard it as a calculated insult - an insult to which Rosebery must have been a full party. For his part, Rosebery concluded that Queensberry was insane, that he was suffering from a -form of persecution mania.

  Rosebery's estimate of Queensberry's mental state was entirely just. The `Scarlet Marquis', as Oscar dubbed him, was becoming increasingly mentally unstable. Queensberry's diseased hatred of his wife and her family had been growing since his divorce from Sybil six years earlier. He was on distant terms with his children. He provided them with an allowance but rarely saw them. His life was very unsettled. He lived in a series of hotels and was more or less excluded from polite society because of his scandalous treatment of his wife. Typically, Queensberry claimed that it was he who had chosen to exclude himself from society. `I have quite given up going out in what is called English Society,' he told his friend Moreton Frewen in 1889. `They don't understand me and I don't care much about them.' Although Queensberry was still, by any standard, a wealthy man, mismanagement meant that the revenues from his estate had dwindled dramatically over the years and he had been forced to sell off parcels of land. He also lost money when the City of Glasgow Bank spectacularly crashed in 1878. Gambling, hunting, horse racing and boxing were his main occupations, and drinking and womanising his recreations. Oscar painted an unappetising portrait of Queensberry as `drunken, declasse and half-witted' with a stableman's gait and dress, bowed legs, twitching hands, a hanging lower lip and a bestial grin.

  Queensberry's life had gone badly wrong. The bright promise of a life as a great landowner, rich, respected and secure in the bosom of his loving family, had given way to a feckless, deeply unsatisfying existence. He was unwilling, unable to accept that he was the author of his own misfortunes and sought to lay the blame on others. There was his wife who had turned his children against him, set his sons against their father. Then there was his father-in-law, the loathsome Alfred Montgomery, literate, sophisticated, effete - and quite possibly effeminate, Queensberry thought - who had encouraged his daughter to defy her husband and was now acting in loco parentis with his eldest son. Queensberry desperately wanted to restore relations between himself and his children, but his methods were brutal, blunt and entirely wasted. By attacking Sybil and Alfred Montgomery, he merely pushed his children further away. And when they did see him, they were embarrassed by their uncouth, unconventional father whose long, glowering silences they found so disconcerting. And when Queensberry did speak, it was invariably to bluntly disagree, to argue, to lambaste and to humiliate.

  Queensberry's acute sensitivity on the subject of Drumlanrig's peerage was inflamed dramatically by the scandalous rumours which started to circulate in the summer of 1893. It was whispered that Drumlanrig was Lord Rosebery's catamite, and that he owed his peerage not so much to his political acumen, as to his abilities to accommodate Rosebery's `large, thickset organ' in his rectum. The author of this rumour was `Loulou' Harcourt, who was desperate to see his father succeed Gladstone. `Any possibility there may have been of a peaceful development of the argument over the succession,' wrote Rosebery's biographer, Robert Rhodes James, `was bedevilled by the intrigues of Harcourt's charming, popular, but unscrupulous son, Loulou':

  Having set his heart upon his father becoming Prime Minister, Loulou began the task of undermining Rosebery's position with a cold ruthlessness which was to poison the Liberal Party for the next decade.

  Loulou was well placed to know Rosebery's secrets. He himself was known to be a lover of men, and, according to Trelawny Backhouse, his love of men was `the paramount influence of his life'. Backhouse also claimed that at one time Loulou had unsuccessfully set his cap at Rosebery. It was Loulou's jealousy of Drumlanrig,
coupled with his political ambitions for his father, that caused him to deliberately set out to try and destroy Rosebery. Loulou spread his poison assiduously. `Many scandalous anonymous letters reached Douglas and, I believe, Lord Rosebery himself,' Trelawny Backhouse recalled, `including a cartoon inscribed "The New Tiberius" which was unblushingly obscene.' Backhouse says that it was Loulou himself who informed Queensberry that there was a sexual relationship between his son and Lord Rosebery.

  In the summer of 1893, the tone of Queensberry's letters changed dramatically. There was still the same ranting about `insults', coupled with references to Rosebery's Jewish connections. Rosebery was not Jewish, but his wife Hannah was, and this was enough to bring out Queensberry's virulent anti-Semitism: he frequently referred to `Jew pimps' and `this dirty Jewry business'. But now there were also references to Rosebery's `bad influence' on Drumlanrig. As yet, Queensberry had no absolute proof that his son was having a sexual relationship with the Foreign Secretary. But he became increasingly agitated and disgusted at the thought of his eldest son being sodomised by an older man. That Rosebery had somehow corrupted Drumlanrig into becoming his catamite went without saying. That the effeminate Alfred Montgomery had somehow connived at Rosebery's corruption of his son also went without saying. The idea that a son of his could ever consent to, let alone enjoy, such vile, disgusting and degrading sexual practices simply did not occur to him. Rosebery must have beguiled Drumlanrig with the gift of a peerage: he had bought his son's sexual complaisance. Queensberry felt that he had to do something. He had no choice. Although he was estranged from his son, he knew that it was his duty as a father to intervene to save him. It would be better for Drumlanrig to be dead than to be so sexually shamed, so sexually dishonoured. Queensberry's reaction may seem extreme, but it was unexceptional by the standards of the time. Sodomy was considered by many to be a worse crime than murder.

  In early August, Queensberry discovered that Rosebery was to visit Bad Homburg where Bosie and Oscar had spent some time the year before. He determined to go there and confront the corrupter of his son in person. According to Rosebery's memorandum of events, he started to receive letters from Queensberry boasting of his boxing prowess and containing not-so-veiled threats of violence. Just before leaving England for Germany, Rosebery was in receipt of a letter in which Queensberry announced that he intended to take the first opportunity of publicly assaulting him. Two days later, Queensberry sent a telegram to Rosebery: `Too hot to come today - would strongly recommend a skipping rope.' Queensberry was referring to Rosebery's slight podginess. Using a skipping rope would help Rosebery get in shape for his forthcoming pugilistic encounter.

  On 11 August, in Bad Homburg, Rosebery received another letter from Queensberry, this time from Nice, addressed to `Cher Fat Boy' and consisting of two barely decipherable pages, in which Rosebery was variously described as a `snob', a `prig', the `greatest liar in the world' and a `Jew pimp'. Significantly, Rosebery did not record that in the same letter Queensberry had also called him a `Jew nancy boy' and made several references to foreskins. Queensberry's letter was an incoherent rant about how Rosebery had made bad blood between himself and his son, about the `peerage business' and about his father-in-law `Alfredo Montgomerino' - whom Queensberry called `a pimp of the first water and quite fitted by nature to run in double harness with yourself'. The literal thrust of Queensberry's letter was that he was going to fight Rosebery:

  I have a punching ball here on which I am having inscribed in black letters `The Jew Pimp'. I shall daily punch it to keep my hand in, until we meet once more.

  Eight days later, on Saturday 19 August, Rosebery was taking his usual morning stroll when a friend rushed up to tell him that he had seen Lord Queensberry in the Kurpark gardens. Rosebery decided to consult Sir George Lewis, the society solicitor, who happened to be in Bad Homburg. It was Lewis who had so successfully resolved Bosie's blackmail in Oxford the previous spring, and to whom Oscar had turned when faced with Alfred Wood's blackmailing threat a few months earlier. The cautious Lewis begged Rosebery to go straight back to his rooms in order to avoid any possibility of a meeting with the lunatic Queensberry. In the meantime, Lewis said, he would go to the Chief of Police and see what could be done to restrain Queensberry. A council of war was held in Rosebery's rooms between Rosebery, his friend Ronald Munro Ferguson, Sir George Lewis, the Chief of Police and the Duke of Cambridge. The Duke was brother to the Prince of Wales, who was also in Bad Homburg. It was decided that a confrontation between Her Majesty's Foreign Secretary and the mad Marquis of Queensberry must be avoided at all costs. For the rest of the day Queensberry stalked Bad Homburg telling anyone who would listen of the dreadful thrashing he was going to give that bloody pimp and bloody bugger Rosebery.

  The Chief of Police called on Queensberry at 9am the next morning and asked for his word of honour that he would not assault or in any other way insult Lord Rosebery. Queensberry reluctantly agreed. To make assurance doubly sure, the Chief of Police had arranged for some discreet surveillance. Rosebery later recorded how Queensberry had changed his lodgings twice before noon and how he spent the afternoon bragging to all and sundry about an infallible system he had devised of winning at roulette in Monte Carlo. Late that evening Queensberry managed to have a few minutes' conversation with the Prince of Wales. He was not going to cause any trouble, he told the Prince, and was leaving for Monte Carlo in the morning. But everything he had said about Rosebery was true. Rosebery was a liar, a damned liar.

  Queensberry kept his word and left Bad Homburg the next morning. The Chief Commissioner of Police wrote to inform Rosebery that:

  The Marquis of Queensberry, in consequence of the entertainment I had with him, found it advisable to part this morning with the 7 o'clock train for Paris.

  Rosebery himself wrote dryly to the Queen that: `It is a material and unpleasant addition to the labours of Your Majesty's service to be pursued by a pugilist of unsound mind.'

  Bad Homburg had been a humiliation for Queensberry. He had gone there to thrash Rosebery to within an inch of his life. He had failed signally. The Prince of Wales, no less, had intervened to protect `that bloody pimp and bloody bugger', and Queensberry had quite literally been railroaded out of town. He slunk back to England, frustrated and furious, muttering threats and imprecations against Rosebery. Whichever way he looked at it, Bad Homburg had been a fiasco. He had been made a laughing stock. What he needed, he decided, was proof: proof that Rosebery was a sodomite and proof that he had bribed and corrupted his son into becoming his catamite. Proof would wipe the smug smile off Rosebery's face, and he, the devoted and dutiful father, would be vindicated. Proof. And how to get it? That was the problem which exercised Queensberry's mind as he journeyed back to England.

  Rosebery, behind his air of imperturbability, was more than a little shaken by the episode. His decision to record in detail the events leading up to the confrontation at Bad Homburg reflected his concern. There was one phrase in particular in Queensberry's ranting, incoherent letter which nagged at him. `God help the country say I,' Queensberry had written, `if ever such as yourself come to guide her destinies, if she is in trouble.' `To guide the country's destinies?' What exactly did Queensberry mean? It must be a reference to Rosebery eventually becoming Prime Minister. Was it an insult, one of many insults heaped upon him, or, more sinisterly, did it constitute a threat? Only Queensberry knew. It was unsettling and it was troubling. Rosebery must have felt that he had not heard the last of this disturbed and disturbing pugilist.

  A schoolboy with

  wonderful eyes

  `Little boys should be obscene and not heard.'

  Rumours of the narrowly avoided confrontation between Lord Rosebery and Lord Queensberry must have percolated back to Oscar and Bosie at Goring. They would have been mortified and amused in equal measure. But Bad Homburg was a long way away, and they had more pressing concerns. The Cottage at Goring-on-Thames was not proving to be quite the Arcadian idyll that Oscar and B
osie had anticipated. They were beginning to get on each other's nerves badly. Neither of them was constitutionally suited to unrelieved domesticity. Oscar had been bored, bored to death, by marriage to Constance. But by contrast, marriage to Bosie was far too tumultuous and unpredictable. Enforced domesticity bred contempt, frustration and irritation with each other. In the confines of the Cottage, Bosie's charming capriciousness had turned into sullen moodiness or sudden emotional squalls, and Oscar's goodhumoured tolerance had been strained almost to breaking point.

  By July, Oscar and Bosie were spending almost as much time apart as they were together. Both of them paid several visits to London. Apart from the dubious charms of the pitiably ugly, but nevertheless sexually available, Walter Grainger, and the perhaps untasted charms of George Hughes, the boat boy, there was no feasting with panthers to be had in Goring. London was where they had to be if they wanted to meet and have sex with the young men and the rough trade they so desired.

  Oscar and Bosie were together in London on 16 August for the last performance ofA Woman ofNo Importance. Robbie Ross was with them, as were Max Beerbohm and Aubrey Beardsley. As Beerbohm delicately put it, Oscar, Bosie and Robbie wore `rich clusters of vine leaves' in their hair. In other words, they were all extremely drunk and inclining towards the disorderly. Beerbohm was not amused. `Nor have I ever seen Oscar so fatuous,' he told Reggie Turner:

  He called Mrs Beere `Juno-like' and Kemble `Olympian quite' and waved his cigarette round and round his head. Of course I would rather see Oscar free than sober, but still, suddenly meeting him ... I felt quite repelled.

  Beerbohm's reference to Oscar being `free' was telling, suggesting that, in his opinion at least, Oscar was running dangerous risks.

  Behind such scenes of revelry, tensions were running high. The fuse was lit at the end of August when Bosie presented Oscar with his translation of Salome. Bosie had been working at it, more off than on, for three or four months. But Oscar was decidedly unimpressed by Bosie's work and, unusually for him, extremely tactless in how he expressed his opinions. There was a series of `scenes', Oscar recalled in De Profundis, `the occasion of them being my pointing out the schoolboy faults of your attempted translation of Salome'. The translation Bosie had produced, Oscar told him, `was as unworthy of you, as an ordinary Oxonian, as it was of the work it sought to render'. His comments were deliberately hurtful and cutting, designed to put Bosie in his place, to remind him that Oscar was the intellectual sorcerer, and Bosie very much his apprentice.