by Neil McKenna
The premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, when the great and the good and the fashionable of London society would be assembled together, would be the perfect occasion to air `this hideous scandal of Oscar Wilde', Queensberry thought. With luck, he might get himself arrested for breach of the peace, or even criminal libel. There would be plenty of witnesses. The plan was simple: he would go to the theatre and wait until the end of the performance when Oscar appeared on stage to take an author's call. During Oscar's speech, Queensberry intended to stand up like an Old Testament prophet and denounce Oscar to the glittering assembly as a disgusting and dangerous sodomite. For good measure, he would hurl a bouquet of rotting vegetables on to the stage as an expression of his contempt. A group of Queensberry's sporting friends took a box for the performance. They were there to give him support, to barrack Oscar, and to applaud when Queensberry's rotting bouquet landed on stage, preferably on Oscar himself.
St Valentine's Day 1895 saw the worst snowstorm in London that anyone could remember. It was a'dark, sinister winter's night', Ada Leverson recalled thirty years later. `A black, bitter, threatening wind blew the drifting snow', causing chaos among the crowds of hansom cabs and carriages which were bringing the glittering first night audience to the St James's Theatre. Despite the appalling weather, Little King Street was thronged with crowds who had come to gawp at the gorgeously dressed ladies and gentlemen. Many were what Ada Leverson called `Wilde fanatics' - young men mostly, with a sprinkling of women - who stood in the bitter wind waiting to catch a glimpse of Oscar as his carriage drew up outside the theatre. He was dressed that night, Ada Leverson recalled, `with elaborate dandyism and a sort of florid sobriety' in a black coat with a velvet collar and a white waistcoat, from which, in an echo of the Prince Regent, a bunch of seals on a black moire ribbon dangled.
Inside, the theatre was `the very breath of success', Ada wrote. The atmosphere was perfumed, metaphorically and literally. Oscar had decreed that `the lily of the valley was to be the flower of the evening as a souvenir of an absent friend'. Nearly all the women wore sprays of lily of the valley, and large numbers of elegant young men sported buttonholes of the flower. It was a charming tribute to Bosie. Amid the heady sea of lilies of the valley, `a single green carnation bloomed savagely' in Oscar's buttonhole. It was a defiant gesture. Oscar was in the highest spirits. He was `beaming with euphoria', Ada said, firing off an endless series of epigrams and witty one-liners. Aubrey Beardsley, who was there with his sister Mabel, was the target of Oscar's wit. `What a contrast the two are,' he told Ada Leverson, `Mabel like a daisy, Aubrey like the most monstrous of orchids.' `Don't sit on the same chair as Aubrey,' he told Ada. It's not compromising.'
Amidst the noise, the congestion and the crowds, the discreet cordon of police around the entrances to the theatre was barely noticeable. The police were there at the request of Oscar and George Alexander, who had acted quickly to foil Queensberry's plot. The theatre's business manager had written to Queensberry and told him that his ticket had been issued in error and enclosing a refund. To make assurance doubly sure, Scotland Yard had been alerted. `I had all Scotland Yard - twenty police - to guard the theatre,' Oscar told Bosie. Despite these precautions, Oscar was nervous. He was diffident about taking an author's call. `I don't think I shall take a call tonight,' he told a member of the cast. `You see, I took one only last month at the Haymarket, and one feels so much like a German band.' Wit was the best antidote to fear.
As it happened, the plans to exclude Queensberry were successful, and Oscar made light of the matter in reply to a frantic telegram from Bosie in Biskra. `Yes: the Scarlet Marquis made a plot to address the audience on the first night of my play!' he wrote. `Algy Bourke revealed it and he was not allowed to enter.' Queensberry had turned up outside the theatre, clutching his bouquet of rotting turnips, and tried and failed to gain entry. A prize-fighter accompanied him. `He prowled about for three hours,' Oscar wrote, and `then left chattering like a monstrous ape.' The frustrated Queensberry had left his `grotesque bouquet' with a message for Oscar at the box office. `This of course makes his conduct idiotic,' Oscar wrote, and `robs it of dignity'.
Despite this air of amused detachment at Queensberry's antics, Oscar was worried - worried enough to return to his solicitors to discuss the possibility of prosecuting Queensberry and getting some sort of restraining order against him. In order to make a case to the courts, Charles Humphreys needed evidence in the form of affidavits of Queensberry's behaviour at the St James's Theatre that night. But the evidence was deliberately withheld. `Upon investigating the case,' Humphreys wrote to Oscar:
we have met with every obstruction from Mr George Alexander the Manager and his staff at the Theatre who declined to give us any statements or to render any assistance to you in your desire to prosecute Lord Queensberry and without whose evidence and assistance we cannot advise you to venture upon a prosecution. You personally would of course be unable to give evidence of that which occurred behind your back as to which you have no personal knowledge beyond the information of others who apprised you of the insulting threats and conduct of his Lordship.
George Alexander was not about to become embroiled, however obliquely, in a legal battle between Oscar and Queensberry, especially as he was well aware that it was Oscar's love affair with Bosie that was the root cause of the quarrel. There was, however, a small crumb of comfort from the solicitors. `Such a persistent persecutor as Lord Queensberry will probably give you another opportunity sooner or later of seeking the protection of the Law in which event we shall be happy to render you every assistance in our power of bringing him to Justice and thus secure your future Peace at his hands.' The solicitors were quite right, and the chance would come sooner, much sooner, than anyone expected.
Percy Douglas tried to pour oil on troubled waters. He visited his father at Carter's Hotel two or three days after the incident at the St James's Theatre, and put it to him that his increasingly noisy persecution of Oscar and Bosie was itself creating a scandal and exposing the family to ridicule. Predictably, Percy's attempts at diplomacy were doomed to failure and only enraged his father more. Queensberry heartily disliked both Percy and his wife, Minnie. He wrote to Minnie after Percy's visit:
I may say that as Percy came here and quarrelled with me and had the audacity and impertinence to bring accusations against me of being the cause of this hideous scandal about his brother so that I am obliged to bring out more evidence about Alfred's character, and to speak about something that I knew about. I have kept secret until now, entirely to myself but I will do it no longer after this wretched accusation.
Queensberry went on to relate the details of Bosie's blackmail at Oxford in 1892, for which Drumlanrig had sought Oscar's assistance. The affair had been settled for £ 100, with the help of Oscar's solicitor and friend, George Lewis. According to Queensberry, it was George Lewis, in a professional and personal betrayal of Oscar, who had told him the whole sordid story. Percy refused to believe that either Oscar or Bosie could have been involved in anything quite so sordid. The story had to be a figment of Queensberry's diseased imagination. Try as hard as he might, Queensberry could not convince Percy that he was telling the truth. `You must be all mad,' Queensberry ranted:
If you choose to make inquiries, you will find the whole town has been reeking with this hideous scandal of Oscar Wilde for the last three years, and it is only in the last year that I have taken any action in the matter. If I were to shoot this hideous monster in the street, I should be perfectly justified, for he has almost ruined my so-called son.
Meanwhile, Bosie had come rushing back to London from Algiers as soon as he heard about his father's attempt to ruin the first night of Earnest. `I am greatly touched by your rushing over Europe,' Oscar wrote. `For my own part I had determined that you should know nothing.' Oscar's reluctance to inform Bosie of the events in London resulted partly from a natural desire not to worry him, but mostly from the fact that he knew that Bosie would fly off
the handle and would almost certainly make matters very much worse by writing one of his impetuous and insulting letters to his father. All in all, it would be better for Oscar to try and deal with the situation as calmly as he could.
Bosie arrived back in London on or around 20 February, turning up at the Avondale Hotel in combative mood, just as Oscar had feared he would. He wanted to know every last detail of what had been going on. Oscar had wanted to get some sort of restraining order, but Bosie saw his father's behaviour as a golden opportunity to put him behind bars. `You thought simply of how to get your father into prison,' Oscar told Bosie later:
To see him `in the dock', as you used to say: that was your one idea. The phrase became one of the many scies of your daily conversation. One heard it at every meal.
As ever, sex was never very far from Bosie's mind, and it was not long before he picked up a boy and brought him back to the hotel, expecting to stay there with him for a few days. `A.D. brought to my hotel a companion of his own,' Oscar recalled from prison two years afterwards:
one whose age, appearance, public and private profession, rendered him the most unsuitable companion possible for me in the terribly serious position in which I was placed. On my remonstrating with him, and asking him to let his companion return to his home, he made a violent scene, and preferring the society of his companion to mine retired at once to another hotel, where I subsequently had to pay the bill for them both, I need hardly say.
Oscar's comments were written in a letter from Reading Gaol to More Adey and were constrained by the fact that all prisoners' letters were read. But reading between the lines, it was clear that Bosie's `companion' was very young, very rough and almost certainly a `renter'. For Oscar to be seen to be associating in any way with such a boy could be highly compromising. Belatedly he was exercising a degree of caution. But from his new hotel, Bosie began to `bombard' Oscar with a series of more than usually `revolting letters', none of which have survived but which probably accused Oscar of moral cowardice in worrying about what people might think.
At about five o'clock in the afternoon on Thursday 28 February, two or three days after Bosie's `violent scene', Oscar drove to his club, the Albemarle. It was the first time he had been there since his return from Algiers. As he walked in, he was greeted by the hall porter, Sydney Wright, who knew both Oscar and Constance by sight. Oscar greeted Wright and asked him to give him a blank cheque. `Lord Queensberry desired me, sir, to hand this card to you, when you came into the club,' Wright replied, perhaps a little hesitantly, handing Oscar a small, unsealed envelope.
Six days earlier, Queensberry had marched into the Albemarle and asked Sydney Wright where Oscar might be found. When Wright told him that Oscar was not there and had not been there for some time, Queensberry produced a printed calling card and furiously scrawled five words on it in ink. `Give this card to Oscar Wilde,' he growled and stalked out. Queensberry's handwriting was so appalling that Wright had difficulty in deciphering the scrawl. After puzzling over it, he thought the words Queensberry had written were: `For Oscar Wilde ponce and somdomite.' In his rage, Queensberry had misspelt sodomite. Wright was unsure what to do after Queensberry had left. Clearly, His Lordship's message to Mr Wilde was a terrible insult. He turned it over and wrote on the back the time and date. He placed the card in an envelope and kept it on his desk until such time as Mr Wilde showed up at the club. There seemed little more he could do.
Because of Queensberry's handwriting, it took Oscar a few seconds to absorb the full import of the message. His heart must have missed a beat. This was the final insult, the public slap across the face. Oscar believed that he had no alternative now but to act. By writing the card and allowing Sydney Wright - and anyone else who happened to examine the contents of the unsealed envelope - to read what he had written, Queensberry had libelled Oscar by accusing him of a vice many considered worse than murder. According to Mr Justice Wills, who presided over Oscar's last trial, `The action of Lord Queensberry was one which no gentleman would have taken and left Wilde no alternative but to prosecute or to be branded publicly as a man who could not deny a foul charge.'
Oscar drove back to his hotel only to find yet another `loathsome letter' from Bosie waiting for him. Oscar immediately dashed off a note in pencil to Robbie Ross. `Dearest Bobbie,' he wrote:
Since I saw you something has happened. Bosie's father has left a card at my club with hideous words on it. I don't see anything now but a criminal prosecution. My whole life seems ruined by this man. The tower of ivory is assailed by the foul thing. On the sand is my life spilt. I don't know what to do. If you could come here at 11.30 please do so tonight. I mar your life by trespassing on your love and kindness. I have asked Bosie to come tomorrow.
Oscar sent the note by hand to Robbie, who noted that he received it at exactly 6.40pm, less than two hours after Oscar had first read Queensberry's hideous words. Significantly, it was Robbie, rather than Bosie, that Oscar wanted to see. He needed wise counsel and thought that Robbie would be more impartial than Bosie, who was wildly irrational on the subject of his father.
Oscar had another letter to write that evening. Constance must be told. He pencilled a note to her and had it sent by messenger to Tite Street. `Dear Constance,' he wrote. `I am coming to see you at nine o'clock. Please be in - it is important.' There is no record of what passed between Oscar and Constance at this meeting, but Oscar must have told her about Queensberry's card with hideous words and that a criminal prosecution now seemed inevitable. He would have warned her that the trial was likely to be sensational and that she must prepare herself and their children for an orgy of publicity in the newspapers.
Constance may have been devastated by the news, but she can hardly have been surprised. She and her husband had been leading separate lives for almost two years, and for most of that time Oscar had lived away in hotels and suites of rented rooms. They did spend time together as a family in the school holidays, and Oscar had not entirely absented himself from Tite Street, making visits and spending occasional nights there. But, for most of the time, Constance was kept in the dark about Oscar's movements and often did not have an address where she could write to him. She had not been aware that Oscar had gone to Algiers, and, towards the end of January, she had been obliged to write to Robbie to ask him to ask Oscar to send her some money as she was £5 overdrawn at the bank. Their marriage was a work of fiction, a modus vivendi, designed to maintain a facade of respectability and normality.
Constance must have had her suspicions about the nature of Oscar's close friendships with young men. But there is very strong evidence to suggest that they were more than mere suspicions. It seems that she was fully aware of at least one - and perhaps several - of his relationships. In 1897, long after the trials were over, when Oscar was in prison, Constance seriously considered divorcing him on the grounds of sodomy and gross indecency with boys and young men. But Oscar was convinced that he could successfully defend himself against any petition for divorce because of what he called Constance's `condonation'. `My only chance of resisting a divorce was the fact of condonation by my wife,' he told Robbie. By italicising the word, it is clear that Oscar was using condonation in its legal and technical sense, rather than in its more general sense.
In late-nineteenth century divorce law, `condonation' was a strictly technical term and meant `forgiveness with a condition'. According to Napoleon Argles, author of How to Obtain a Divorce, published in 1895, the law on condonation was clear and unambiguous: `If the petitioner has condoned, that is, has conditionally forgiven the adultery complained of, the petition shall be dismissed.' And, according to Napoleon Argles, to constitute condonation, there must be:
1. Full knowledge of all prior offences.
2. Forgiveness conditional upon avoidance for the future of a matrimonial offence.
3. Voluntary conjugal cohabitation following upon such forgiveness.
Oscar evidently believed that he could use Constance's condonation to defend
himself against any divorce petition she might bring based on his sexual infidelities with young men. But he quickly realised that her condonation did not meet all the strict requirements of the law. `I now learn that no condonation is of any value where more than one offence may be charged,' he told Robbie. `My wife has simply to say that she condoned X, but knew nothing of Y, and would not hear of condoning Z.' The full extent of Oscar's revelations to Constance about his love affairs with young men, and the plenitude of her condonation, her forgiveness of his Uranian sins, will never be known. But it does appear that Oscar had confessed to, and received absolution for, at least one affair with a young man.
Now Constance was being forced to ask herself some uncomfortable questions, to delve into subjects which hitherto had been best left alone. Why was Lord Queensberry doing this? Was it because Oscar and Bosie were lovers? And what evidence did he have for his allegations? After his promises to reform, to resist, had Oscar crawled back to his sodomitical vices? When Constance put direct questions to him, Oscar may have admitted to some sort of idealised love affair with Bosie. But he would have kept silent about his other lovers, about the short and intense affairs, the chance encounters and the feastings with renters who had figured so prominently in his sexual life. These revelations were yet to come.
Oscar's visit to Tite Street was not prolonged. Afterwards he paid a brief call on Charles Ricketts round the corner at the Vale. Ricketts sensed that something was wrong. Oscar's conversation seemed forced and stilted. But one comment of Oscar's struck him forcibly: `I live in a world of puppets, who do not understand, and yet would play with the strings,' Oscar said musingly. His observation betrayed a strange fatalism, a sense of predestination. He was perhaps recalling the words of the palmist Cheiro, who had told him two years earlier that his `most unusual destiny of brilliancy and uninterrupted success' would be `completely broken and ruined'. Oscar left the Vale and met Charles Shannon hastening home along the King's Road in the thick fog. They stopped outside a shop where sausage rolls and pork pies were piled up in the window and garishly lit by gaslight. Oscar looked `tired and preoccupied', Shannon thought. `What curious things people will eat!' Oscar said suddenly. `I suppose they must be hungry.' With that, Oscar hailed a passing cab and returned to Piccadilly to meet Robbie.