by Neil McKenna
After his return to London, Oscar went to discuss the case with his barrister, Sir Edward Clarke QC MP. Sir Edward Clarke was one of the most highly regarded barristers of his time. A former Solicitor General, he was famous for fearlessly cross-examining the Prince of Wales in the celebrated Baccarat gaming case. When Humphreys first took Oscar to meet him, Clarke had said, `I can only accept this brief, Mr Wilde, if you can assure me on your honour as an English gentleman that there is not and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you.' Oscar gave his solemn assurance that Queensberry's charges were `absolutely false and groundless'. It was a bald lie, but then again, Oscar was not an English gentleman. He was an Irish gentleman which, as he had once famously said, `is quite another thing'.
Money, or rather the lack of it, was becoming an increasing problem. Humphreys and Clarke were demanding something on account towards their fees. `Can you do me a very great favour?' Oscar wrote in desperation to Ada Leverson's husband, Ernest:
Can you advance me £500 for my legal expenses, in this tedious and dreadful trial? Lord Douglas of Hawick, the eldest son has promised to pay half my costs, and Lady Queensberry has promised to pay 'any amount required', but Lord Douglas is in Devonshire and Lady Queensberry in Florence, and the money is required by my lawyer at once.
Leverson stumped up the cash and a grateful Oscar wrote a graceful letter of thanks.
On Monday 25 March, with barely a week to go before the trial proper of Queensberry was due to begin at the Old Bailey, Oscar and Bosie paid a most satisfactory visit to Mrs Robinson, the Sibyl of Mortimer Street. `We have been to the Sibyl Robinson,' Oscar joyously telegraphed to Ada Leverson. `She prophesied complete triumph and was most wonderful.' Fate, it seemed, was on their side and Oscar's confidence that he would win once again surged.
As Oscar was visiting the Sibyl of Mortimer Street, a Grand jury was being sworn in at the Old Bailey to consider whether the evidence was sufficient to warrant proceeding with the prosecution. If the Grand jury were convinced that there was a case to answer, they would return a `True bill' and the case would proceed to court. The Grand jury looked at the evidence for Oscar's prosecution of Queensberry: the statements of Oscar, Queensberry and Sydney Wright, the card with hideous words itself, and the series of letters Queensberry had written to Bosie and to Alfred Montgomery, including the letter of 6 July with its references to Rosebery. The foreman of the Grand jury was Paul Villars, a French journalist resident in London, who wrote for Le Figaro and the Journal des debats. Although the deliberations of a Grand jury were supposed to be secret, when Villars saw the name of the British Prime Minister twinned with that of Oscar Wilde, he knew he had an explosive story on his hands. Inevitably, the story began to seep out, and it was widely reported throughout Europe and the United States that Lord Rosebery was in some way mixed up in the Oscar Wilde affair. There were endless rumours about the Prime Minister's health and about his imminent resignation. In the nine days between the convening of the Grand jury and the start of Queensberry's trial for libel, rumours of Rosebery's involvement were everywhere and had reached fever pitch. In the event, these rumours would do Oscar nothing but harm.
On the same day that they visited the Sibyl of Mortimer Street, Oscar and Bosie went to the Cafe Royal, where Oscar had arranged to meet Frank Harris at 3pm. Sir Edward Clarke had advised Oscar that he would need to defend Mr W.H. and Dorian Gray against charges that they in some way expressed and advocated unnatural vice. They were the weakest point of a strong case, and Oscar would need to mount a robust defence, preferably producing expert witnesses who could testify to this. Oscar wanted to ask Harris whether he would agree to stand up in court in his position as editor of the Saturday Review and say he did not consider Dorian Gray to be in any way immoral. Harris had been lunching with George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar's forthcoming appearance in court had inevitably taken centre stage in their conversation. Both were in sombre mood when Oscar arrived with Bosie. A day or so earlier, Harris had taken it upon himself to discover what he could about the case and what evidence, if any, Queensberry had collected to justify his libel. Harris was wellconnected and had spoken to several `people of importance', including a senior figure in the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. His investigations yielded appalling results. Most people were convinced that Oscar was not merely posing as a sodomite, but that he was actually guilty of sodomy. There was, so Harris discovered, a substantial body of evidence already stacked against him.
Oscar sat down in high good humour and gracefully explained his mission. He did not get the answer he had been expecting. `For God's sake, man, put everything on that plane out of your head,' Harris expostulated. `I know what evidence they have got':
You don't realise what is going to happen to you. It is not going to be a matter of clever talk about your books. They are going to bring up a string of witnesses that will put art and literature out of the question.
Harris urged Oscar to go abroad immediately with Constance and leave the whole legal boxing ring, with its gloves and ropes, its sponges and pails, to Queensberry. Harris appealed to Shaw, who said he agreed that the case was certain to go against Oscar. Oscar was visibly shaken. It was as if Harris and Shaw had thrown a bucket of cold water over him. Throughout the conversation Bosie had sat in what Shaw described as `a haughty indignant silence'. Now he stood up, his face white and distorted with rage. `Such advice shows you are no friend of Oscar's,' he hissed. To Shaw and Harris's astonishment, Oscar got up to leave. `It is not friendly of you, Frank,' he said. `It really is not friendly.'
Thirty years later, Bosie recalled that afternoon in the Cafe Royal in a letter to Frank Harris. Bosie freely admitted to Harris that he had, with a great deal of persuasion and cajoling, screwed Oscar to the `sticking place': he had got him to the psychological point where he was convinced that a prosecution of Queensberry was both inevitable and necessary. Bosie was frightened that Harris and Shaw would `argue Wilde out of the state of mind I had got him into'. He was, he said, `terribly afraid that Oscar would weaken and throw up the sponge'.
As it turned out, Frank Harris's predictions were uncannily correct, and his and Bernard Shaw's advice to Oscar to throw up the case and go abroad at once was entirely sound and rational. What they did not know and could not understand was the curious configuration of the love between Oscar and Bosie, a love born in danger and a love which thrived on adversity. Now, as their love faced its greatest danger, its greatest threat from Queensberry, it blossomed anew.
Persuading Oscar to prosecute his father may have been a question of psychological manipulation for Bosie, but for Oscar it had become both an expression of his love for Bosie and an article of his Uranian faith. The epic love affair between Oscar and Bosie had been on the wane for some months before the trials began. Oscar had several times sought to end their relationship, and Bosie later recalled that he was `beginning to get a little tired' of Oscar:
We had had several acrimonious quarrels. In the ordinary course of events my infatuation for him would have worn out, and obviously his for me was a very much less enduring and tremendous affair than he himself imagined it to be.
Paradoxically, `the emotion of the great crisis fanned the waning fires of our devotion to each other,' Bosie wrote.
And just as Oscar's love for Bosie was an epic love, so his battle with the man who sought to destroy that love had assumed epic proportions. In the quasiliturgical language of the `Rules of Purpose' of the Order of Chaeronea, Oscar and Bosie were `vexed and persecuted lovers'. The Order demanded `justice for all manner of people who are wronged and oppressed by individuals or multitudes or the laws'. Oscar and Bosie were Uranians wronged and oppressed by both an individual and by the laws of their land. It was his duty, Oscar considered, to stand up for his love for Bosie, to stand up for the love that dare not speak its name. It would be a battle between love and hate, between the nobility of Uranian love and the seething foulness of those who sought to deny,
to destroy that love. It was a battle that Oscar was convinced he could and must win.
Three days before the trial, on 30 March, Queensberry filed his `Plea of Justification'. It made grim reading. Predictably, Dorian Gray was singled out as a book `designed', `intended' and `understood' to describe `the relations intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural tastes habits and practices'. More surprising was the inclusion of the Chameleon, Jack Bloxam's `Bazaar of Dangerous and Smiling Chances', to which Oscar had contributed his `Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young'. The Chameleon was described as containing `divers obscene matters and things relating to the practices and passions of persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits and tastes'. Queensberry's Plea alleged that Oscar `joined in procuring the publication' of the Chameleon, an allegation which happened to be true.
But the real shock of Queensberry's Plea lay in its allegations that Oscar `did solicit and incite' a baker's dozen of named individuals and `boys unknown' to commit `sodomy and other acts of gross indecency and immorality'. There were dates, places and nine names: Edward Shelley, Jenny Mavor, Fred Atkins, Maurice Schwabe, Alfred Wood, Charles Parker, Ernest Scarfe, Walter Grainger and Alfonso Conway. As if this was not enough, Oscar was also alleged to have taken `indecent liberties' with Herbert Tankard, the pageboy from the Savoy.
Oscar and Bosie read Queensberry's Plea with a mounting sense of horror. The literary side of the case was neither here nor there. It was the list of names of boys Oscar had had sex with which frightened him. He had underestimated Queensberry, underestimated his cunning, his resolve and his resourcefulness in hunting down boys to use as evidence against him. With a sinking feeling, it must have dawned on Oscar that losing the libel case was now the least of his problems. If Queensberry could persuade any one of the boys to give evidence, Oscar knew that he would face a criminal prosecution. Alarmingly, Queensberry's Plea alleged not only gross indecency and immorality, but also that Oscar had `solicited and incited' boys to commit sodomy in every one of the thirteen counts. In other words, Oscar had attempted sodomy with every one of the named and unnamed boys. Whether or not he succeeded was deliberately left unclear, a ploy designed, said Oscar's barrister, Sir Edward Clarke, to ensure that the boys did not incriminate themselves as partners in Oscar's crimes. Attempted sodomy and actual sodomy: the difference was academic. The mere fact that he was alleged to have solicited and incited sodomy with thirteen boys was damning enough. With sodomy carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, Oscar knew that, if charged with and convicted of these allegations, then he would almost certainly die in prison.
Oscar and Bosie went through Queensberry's Plea with Charles Humphreys and Sir Edward Clarke line by line, allegation by allegation. They could do nothing but sit in Clarke's chambers telling serious lies with serious faces and hope that they would be believed. Queensberry's allegations were delusions, figments of the Scarlet Marquis's imagination. But there was, they conceded, a kernel of truth in them. Oscar had met the boys named, had befriended them, entertained them and helped them on occasion with money. Oscar also decided to come clean about the attempted blackmail, first by Alfred Wood, and then by William Allen and Robert Cliburn, over his `madness of kisses' letter to Bosie.
However bizarre it may have seemed that a renowned playwright had met and befriended boys and young men less than half his age and from wholly different backgrounds to his own, Humphreys and Clarke failed to smell a rat and were somehow or other convinced that Oscar was telling the truth. Here was the faintest glimmer of light. If Oscar could convince Clarke and Humphreys, then he could perhaps convince Ned Carson, the judge and the jury.
These fleeting moments of optimism alternated with more prolonged periods of pessimism. In the days before his trial, Oscar visited Cheiro the palm-reader. He wanted to know if the breach in his line of destiny that Cheiro had seen at Blanche Roosevelt's party two years earlier was still there. `I told him it was,' Cheiro recalled, adding on a more hopeful note that Oscar's powerful trajectory of success could surely not now be broken. Oscar was unconvinced. `He was very, very quiet, but in a far-off way,' wrote Cheiro. `My good friend,' Oscar told him, `you know well Fate does not keep road-menders on her highways.'
Oscar told Max Beerbohm's friend Reggie Turner that Queensberry's Plea had been `a knock-down blow'. He knew that any discussion of Queensberry's allegations in open court would be catastrophic. And yet despite the knowledge that he faced certain ruin, disgrace and, most likely, imprisonment, Oscar went to meet his destiny in the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. He went `bravely, wondrously bravely,' Reggie wrote, `but with death in his heart'.
Fighting with panthers
`The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!'
`All trials,' Oscar declared, `are trials for one's life.' Though technically the prosecutor, Oscar must have known only too well that he was in reality the defendant in the case. It was his life and his loves that would be on trial. And it was his life, `that tiger life', the life he had lived so fully and so thrillingly, that was to be exchanged for a life in prison. He had feasted with panthers, and now, he told Ada Leverson, he was going to `fight with panthers'. The outcome of the contest was a foregone conclusion, and Oscar bravely set off from Tite Street on the morning of Wednesday 3 April with `death in his heart', knowing that in a day or two he would almost certainly be behind bars, awaiting trial for gross indecency and perhaps for sodomy. He would be convicted and would spend years, probably the rest of his life, as a convict.
The strain of the last weeks was beginning to take its toll. Oscar looked tired. Like Lord Rosebery, he had not been sleeping at all well. In the last fortnight he had bought no less than a dozen sleeping draughts from Alsop and Quiller, the chemists. But on what he saw as his day of judgement, the day that Nemesis would finally catch up with him, Oscar was outwardly calm and self-assured. He had made a most elaborate toilette that morning and his hair was perfectly waved. He was dressed immaculately in a long dark Chesterfield coat and an impossibly tall silk top hat. But today there was no buttonhole of lilies of the valley, no savagely blooming green carnation in his coat. A carriage and pair with a coachman and two footmen in livery had been hired from William Bramley's stables in Sloane Square to convey Oscar and the equally elaborately dressed Bosie to the Old Bailey. Oscar stopped the carriage outside a shop in St James's Street. He wanted, he explained, to buy `a gayer tie'.
The small courtroom was badly ventilated and was already full to capacity when Queensberry arrived alone. He spoke to no one as he pushed through the crowded courtroom and stood hesitantly in front of the dock, unsure of exactly where he should go. He wore a hunting stock instead of a tie and looked more like a bookmaker's tout than a peer of the realm, with his drooping lower lip, red mutton-chop whiskers and short legs. Just before half-past ten, Oscar and Bosie arrived and squeezed their way to the front of the court. Someone joked about the `The Importance of Being Early', and there was a ripple of laughter through the courtroom.
By a quirk of the system for selecting jurors, nine of the twelve jurymen were from the neighbouring parishes of Clapton and Stoke Newington in north-east London, once villages, but by 1895 dominated by newly built streets of terraced houses for the newly constituted lower middle classes. There was a butcher, a bootmaker, a bank messenger and a stockbroker - in those days a more lowly profession - and eight jurors who styled themselves `gentleman' but who were in truth shopkeepers, tradesmen or clerks. It was, reported the Star, `a commonplace-looking jury', a stolid, solid jury of lower middle-class men brimful of Victorian values of morality, continence and respectability. They must have regarded Oscar as a bizarre creature far removed from their own world.
Sir Edward Clarke, looking, recalled Frank Harris, exactly like `a nonconformist parson of the old days', began the proceedings with a suave and soothing opening speech in which he outlin
ed the events leading up to the case. The impression he sought to convey was that Oscar had been forced - more in sorrow than in anger - into seeking legal remedy when all other avenues to halt Queensberry's persecution had failed. Oscar was, he said, a distinguished author with a brilliant career who, in 1891, was introduced to Lord Alfred Douglas by a mutual friend. They became friends, and their families had become friends. Oscar had `again and again' been the guest of Lady Queensberry, and Bosie had been `the accepted and welcome guest' of Oscar and Constance in Tite Street and elsewhere. Oscar had even tried on at least two occasions to heal the `strained feelings' between Bosie and his father, with little or no success. There was loud laughter in court when Clarke came to describe Queensberry's abortive attempt to disrupt the first night of Earnest with `a large bouquet of vegetables', and even louder laughter when Clarke, by a slip of the tongue, substituted the name of Lord Rosebery for that of Lord Queensberry.
Clarke skilfully glossed over the allegations of gross indecency and attempted sodomy with a sly dig at the probity of any witnesses who might be produced. He would not trouble the jury, he said, with a blow-by-blow refutation of the sexual allegations:
It is for those who have taken the very grave responsibility of putting into the plea those allegations to satisfy you if they can, by credible witnesses whose evidence you will consider worthy of consideration and entitled to belief that these charges are true.