by Neil McKenna
The Importance of Being Earnest opened on 14 February 1895, and attracted glowing notices. To describe the play as `farce', said Oscar's contemporary, the critic William Archer, would be `far too gross and commonplace a word to apply to such an iridescent filament of fantasy'. It was, he said, `a rondo capriccioso, in which the artist's fingers run with crisp irresponsibility up and down the keyboard of life'. Earnest was a strange paradox. Written quickly with the aim of generating some much-needed cash, aided by Robbie's Boswell-like jottings of his master's epigrams from a long-forgotten summer, and abetted by Bosie's not inconsiderable wit, the play represented the apogee of Oscar's career as a dramatist. And yet curiously it contained the very seeds which led to Oscar's destruction. Uncontrolled appetites, double lives, unpopular fathers, impure truths, shameful debts, scrapes, scandals, Scotland Yard, Holloway Prison, and indiscreetly inscribed cigarette cases given to young men all ominously prefigured Oscar's own future: in Canon Chasuble's prescient words, the `bitter trials' to come.
Love's sacrifice
'A kiss may ruin a human life.'
At approximately 3.30 on the afternoon of Thursday 18 October, a shot rang out from the direction of a turnip field belonging to Halsey Cross Farm in the village of Over Stowey, near Bridgwater, in Somerset. The sound of gunfire was not, in itself, unusual. A party of five gentlemen and half-a-dozen gamekeepers and beaters had set out that morning from nearby Quantock Lodge for a day's shooting, as they had done every morning for nearly a fortnight, and spluttering volleys of shots had been booming and echoing across the countryside all day. The weather was fine and bright. Lunch had been `partaken of out of doors in picnic fashion', and the shooting had been excellent with `a goodly number of pheasants and partridges killed'. Afterwards, everyone was agreed that it had been a perfect day's sport - up until the moment when that single shot rang out in the field of turnips.
There was something about this shot that was different and alarming. It was a single report and not part of a more usual volley of shots. And there was something about the sound of the shot that was odd. It was, according to Mr William Elton, one of the gentlemen in the shooting party, `a very deadened report', as if it had been somehow muffled. Furthermore, the shot `seemed to be about 100 yards off, and it sounded as if it had come from behind the shooting party, from the turnip field they had just tramped through.
Whether by coincidence, or whether from an unconscious sense that something was wrong, Webber, the head gamekeeper, almost immediately asked `Where can his Lordship be?' The Lordship in question was Bosie's beloved older brother, Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig, who had spent the last fortnight as the guest of Mr Edward Stanley MP at his home, Quantock Lodge. `I hope he hasn't shot himself,' was William Elton's response - made, as he ruefully admitted later, `half in jest'. `Oh no,' Webber replied. `We won't think that.'
But Drumlanrig was nowhere to be seen. As far as anyone could remember, Drumlanrig had been with them only minutes before. He had, it appeared, told one of the beaters that he was going back to look for a partridge he had winged. Webber started blowing his whistle and shouting out loudly for him. Ominously, there was no answer. Gerald Ellis, another member of the shooting party, was beginning to get worried. `I will walk along beside the hedge,' he called out, `and see if I can find him.' In the company of another man, Ellis crossed into the turnip field, and it was not long before they found Drumlanrig:
lying in the hedge, apparently dead, from injuries sustained in the head, seemingly from the accidental discharge of his double-barrelled gun, the right-hand barrel being found empty.
They could see that Drumlanrig's `head was very much sprinkled with blood, as also was the collar. There was a wound in the forehead.' Nothing could be done and the police were sent for.
Five days later an inquest was held at Quantock Lodge. Various speculations about the cause of the tragedy were put forward to the Coroner by the members of the shooting party. Most were agreed in thinking that it had been a terrible accident. Drumlanrig's gun had gone off accidentally, they said, as he was crossing a stile and his attention was distracted by the appearance of the carriage holding a party of the ladies from Quantock Lodge. On the face of it, it was a very plausible explanation. Clambering over a stile while carrying a loaded gun was tricky at the best of times. If Drumlanrig had slipped or lost his footing, even for a split-second, the gun could have accidentally gone off. But there was one insurmountable problem with this theory: when the gun went off, Drumlanrig was nowhere near a stile, let alone climbing one.
The medical evidence, too, seemed to strongly militate against an accident. `On my arrival I found that life was extinct,' Mr Alfred Egerton Smith, the doctor who had attended the scene, told the Coroner:
On examining him I found that the charge had entered his mouth fracturing the lower jaw on the right side. Some of the shot passed out between the nose and eyes on the right hand side. The charge had entered and passed through the roof of the mouth on the left hand side. The base of the skull must have been completely shattered. The lower lip was slightly blue as if by powder. The roof of the mouth was so lacerated that it was impossible to say whether it was discoloured by powder or not. I did not notice that the moustache was singed.
The Coroner then asked Dr Smith the crucial question. `Do you consider from what you saw that the mouth of the deceased was open or shut?' `I should say it was open,' Dr Smith replied emphatically. Drumlanrig's mouth was open when the shot was fired, and it seems probable that the barrel of the shotgun was inserted into his mouth. This would account for the strangely `deadened' sound of the shot which those who heard it testified to. Drumlanrig's death no longer looked like an accident, but much more strongly like suicide. Yet despite this evidence, the inquest returned a verdict of `Accidental Death'. As the Member of Parliament for Bridgwater and a man of considerable influence and importance locally, Edward Stanley would have done his best to avoid any whiff of scandal. The suicide of one of his guests was a major scandal, and Stanley would have exerted the utmost pressure to ensure that a less socially embarrassing verdict of `Accidental Death' was returned.
But why on earth should a young man like Drumlanrig choose to end his life? It was incomprehensible. He was widely liked and already making a good career in politics as a junior minister in the House of Lords under the aegis of his friend and patron, Lord Rosebery. And with Rosebery now Prime Minister, there was every chance that promotion would follow. Everyone who was at Quantock Lodge agreed that Drumlanrig had seemed to be in the best of spirits during the previous fortnight. He had every reason to be. Exactly a month earlier, on 18 September, Drumlanrig had become engaged to be married to Alexandra Ellis, the third daughter of Major-General Arthur Ellis, equerry to the Prince of Wales.
Alix, as she preferred to be called, was the niece of Edward Stanley, and Drumlanrig had been invited to Quantock Lodge to get to know Alix's family better, including her brother, Gerald Ellis, who subsequently found Drumlanrig's body. When the news of Drumlanrig's engagement got out there had been some audible murmurs of surprise among those who were privy to Drumlanrig's sexual preferences. Harry Foley, a friend of both Drumlanrig and Rosebery, called Drumlanrig's engagement `terrible news', and Lewis `Loulou' Harcourt, the son of Lord Rosebery's great political rival, Sir William Harcourt, was incredulous at the news. `Drumlanrig is going to marry General Ellis's daughter,' he confided to his diary. `It makes the institution of marriage ridiculous.'
On the day of his engagement, Drumlanrig had written a letter announcing the fact to Lord Rosebery and telling him of his intention of going north to Dumfriesshire to see his father, the Marquis of Queensberry:
What the result of the interview will be I don't know, and I feel it is not exactly an auspicious moment! However, that cannot be helped and of course I know in any case that I shall have to look forward to considerable difficulties.
Drumlanrig does not elaborate on the nature of the `considerable difficulties' he would have to face, or ex
plain why it was an inauspicious moment to tell Queensberry about his impending marriage. Queensberry did not feel especially well-disposed towards marriage as an institution. His first wife had divorced him acrimoniously, and now his second wife was about to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of Queensberry-'s `frigidity and impotence'.
The biggest difficulty between father and son was Queensberry's determined and highly embarrassing campaign to bring an end to Drumlanrig's relationship with Lord Rosebery. After the fiasco in Bad Homburg the previous summer, when Queensberry had stalked the Kaiser Friedrich Promenade hoping to find Rosebery and thrash him, father and son had barely been speaking. Queensberry had left Bad Homburg, at the request of the Prince of Wales, determined to find proof of the sexual relationship between Rosebery and his son. He had obtained his proof in the course of the summer of 1894, at least according to Trelawny Backhouse, who records in his unpublished memoirs how, `by setting private detectives to work', Queensberry had obtained `very damaging evidence of a carnal bout after a supper party at Bourne End on the River Thames' between Drumlanrig and Lord Rosebery. `Apparently,' Backhouse continued:
the evidence upon which he relied was that of two maid servants at the inn and the concrete proofs afforded by the condition of the drapery of the bed on which the two lovers had passed the night.
The `concrete proofs' of sheets, stained in the same way as those on Oscar's bed at the Savoy with a mixture of semen, excrement and vaseline, were what Queensberry had been hoping and praying for since the previous summer. He was convinced that he now had the upper hand. According to Backhouse's version of events:
Queensberry wrote to the Prime Minister threatening exposure in a letter to the republican owner of Truth, Mr. Henry Labouchere, Lord Rosebery's inveterate enemy, unless he resigned office and severed relations with Drumlanrig.
For Lord Rosebery to resign as Prime Minister under threat of blackmail by Queensberry was unthinkable. If Trelawny Backhouse's account of the affair is correct, Drumlanrig must have been desperately manoeuvring to try and save Rosebery's career and find a way out of a seeming impossible situation. His proposal of marriage to Alix Ellis may have been his best hope of averting scandal. Once safely married to a woman of impeccable pedigree, and with a promise to sever his relations with Rosebery, Drumlanrig may have believed that he had done enough to quell his father's wrath and allow Rosebery to retain office.
This may have been the purpose of Drumlanrig's proposed visit to Queensberry in Dumfriesshire in late September. Whether the meeting ever took place, and, if it did, what was said between father and son, will never be known. After Drumlanrig's death, Queensberry told his hated and despised ex-father-in-law, Alfred Montgomery, that he `had not met or spoken frankly' with his eldest son `for more than a year and a half'. Perhaps Queensberry refused to see Drumlanrig, and they communicated instead by letter, or perhaps they did in fact meet - a meeting which Queensberry, in the tumult of guilt and self-recrimination after his son's death, chose not to reveal to Alfred Montgomery. Either way, if it had been Drumlanrig's purpose to seek some sort of accommodation with his father, he was to be disappointed. Queensberry's hatred of Rosebery, the `Jew nancy boy' and `bloody bugger', was implacable. It had been Queensberry's greatest fear that Rosebery would one day become Prime Minister, and now that Rosebery was indeed guiding his country's destiny, Queensberry could invoke - along with his rabid antiSemitism and his phobic hatred of sodomites - a spurious and twisted patriotism as grounds for demanding Rosebery's political suicide.
It must have become clear to Drumlanrig that his forthcoming marriage to Alix Ellis was not going to be enough to save his patron, his friend and his lover from scandal and oblivion. There was only one option left to him. To save Rosebery from political suicide, Drumlanrig decided that he must himself commit suicide and make it look like an accident. It was, as Trelawny Backhouse commented, `a noble sacrifice on the altar of his chief's fame'.
Drumlanrig's cousin, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, heard the news in Tunis. It was, Blunt wrote in his diary, `an appalling tragedy'. `Terence', Blunt's companion on the trip to Tunis:
who knows him better than I do, thinks that things may have gone wrong in regard to his intended marriage. He asked him last summer abt it, he seemed doubtful then whether it wd ever really take place. I have heard too that he had scruples about marriage, seeing what madness there is in his family.
Although Blunt clearly suspected that something had `gone wrong' in Drumlanrig's life, something that had to do with his marriage to Alix Ellis, he was still unwilling to accept that Drumlanrig had taken his own life. `It seems unlikely it could have been suicide,' he wrote. But other members of the Queensberry clan were convinced that Drumlanrig had taken his own life. Francis Douglas, later the 11th Marquis of Queensberry, and Bosie's nephew, told Oscar and Bosie's biographer, Harford Montgomery Hyde, that he was `positive that his uncle Drumlanrig had taken his own life in the shadow of a suppressed scandal', and, towards the end of his life, Bosie told Sheila Colman, the woman who eventually became his literary executrix, that Drumlanrig had indeed committed suicide and that `a scandal lay behind it'.
Speculation about Drumlanrig's death was rife. Oscar wrote in De Profundis that Drumlanrig's death was `stained with a darker suggestion'. Sir Edward Hamilton, a very senior civil servant and friend and confidant of Rosebery, recorded Drumlanrig's death the day after it happened. `There is no reason to suppose that it was anything but an act of carelessness; though people are already jumping to other conclusions,' Hamilton wrote in his diary. `Curiously enough, his grandfather met with a similar fate.'
Hamilton's observation was an understatement. It was not a similar fate, it was an identical fate. On 6 August 1858, Archibald Douglas, 7th Marquis of Queensberry, had left the family home at Kinmount to go shooting. At about 3.30 in the afternoon, the last in a series of shots was heard from the woods by men working in the grounds. At 4pm, Archibald's body was discovered `prostrate on the earth and covered with blood'. Archibald had been shot through the chest by his own gun. As with Drumlanrig, there were mutterings about suicide, but it was never to be proved. Had Drumlanrig meticulously and grotesquely re-enacted the death of his grandfather, convinced that there was a good chance that his death would be seen as an unfortunate shooting accident?
Lord Rosebery was grief-stricken. He more than anyone seemed unwilling to countenance the possibility that Drumlanrig's death was anything but accidental. But Sir George Murray, Rosebery's private secretary, was not so sure. Three days after Drumlanrig's death, Murray met with his cousin, H.J. Mordaunt, who had been a guest at Quantock Lodge and a member of the illfated shooting party. Murray quizzed his cousin about the day's events and wrote to Rosebery with a detailed account and an accompanying map which made it clear that Drumlanrig's death could have no other explanation than suicide. `Dear Lord Rosebery,' Murray wrote. `I have been able to arrive at some comprehension of what took place. But the newspaper accounts of the inquest are not intelligible without a commentary of some kind':
The guns had beaten through the turnip field A in the direction shown by the arrow; when they got to the end of it they turned off to their left in the direction of the second arrow, crossed over into field B and formed up in line along the fence preparatory to beating that field in the other direction.
D, instead of going with them, stopped at the hedge at the bottom of Field A to look for a running bird of his. While there, it is thought, he must have been attracted by a carriage in the road beyond; for he went through a gap in the hedge and proceeded some way (about 25 yards) into the grass field.
He was last seen alive at the point I have marked in red X, and he was found at the place marked 0, close up to the hedge, and about halfway between the gap he crossed by and another gap at the pond where the two fences join.
It is very difficult to account for his going up to the hedge at the point where he was found. The hedge was barely passable there; but there was nothing that co
uld be called a gap; and it was by no means the natural place to choose if he wanted to rejoin the guns as soon as possible.
To add to the mystery he was shot through the mouth upwards, a circumstance almost impossible to produce by accident.
On the other hand the hypothesis of suicide is almost equally improbable for want of motive. He seems to have been in his usual spirits all through the week; and no reason is known why he should have been otherwise. The whole thing is to my mind quite inexplicable; but Mordaunt told me that his own opinion, which was shared by the Doctor, and the two other guns (Elton and Fortescue) is that it was suicide.
Publicly, at the inquest into Drumlanrig's death at Quantock Lodge, these `other guns' had testified to the likelihood of an accident. Privately, they were convinced it was suicide.
Queensberry was beside himself with grief, anger and hatred. He wrote a typically foul and ranting letter to Alfred Montgomery in which he blamed `the Snob Queers like Rosebery' and the `whole lot' of the Montgomery family for Drumlanrig's death. `I smell a Tragedy behind all this and have already got Wind of a more startling one,' he wrote, without explaining what he meant. But, if Trelawny Backhouse, Bosie, More Adey and several others are to be believed, Queensberry had by this time already uncovered more damaging evidence of sodomy in the Liberal Party, which he would put to good use six months later. According to Backhouse, Bosie and others, the government's vigorous prosecution of Oscar in April and May 1895 was driven entirely by the fear that Queensberry would make public the sexual secrets he knew about Lord Rosebery and about other senior members of his government.