The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Kill the bugger!

  `If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.'

  As he drove away with Bosie and Robbie from the Old Bailey in his hired carriage and pair, Oscar was in a state of shock and near collapse. He realised that he had been routed by Queensberry and that his life lay in ruins. What made it worse was that he knew he was the architect of his own misfortune. He had embarked blindly and foolishly on the prosecution of Queensberry, and now his blindness and foolishness had come back to haunt him. As in a Greek tragedy, Oscar's arrogance and wanton contempt for the rules of life, his hubris, had been his undoing. `I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws,' he had once declared. Now he had made the bitter and humiliating discovery that this was not so, that he was, like everyone else, made for laws, and not exceptions. He had tempted providence and paid the price:

  Once I had put into motion the forces of Society, Society turned on me and said `Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws? You shall have those laws exercised to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to.'

  Oscar, Bosie and Robbie drove first to the nearby Holborn Viaduct Hotel, where a private room had been engaged for lunch. They were followed by Queensberry's private detectives, Littlechild and Kearley. From there Oscar hastily dictated a letter to the editor of the Evening News, which Robbie took down on two of the hotel's envelopes:

  It would have been impossible for me to have proved my case without putting Lord Alfred Douglas in the witness box against his father. Lord Alfred Douglas was extremely anxious to go into the box, but I would not let him do so. Rather than put him into so painful a position, I determined to retire from the case, and to bear on my own shoulders whatever ignominy and shame might result from my prosecuting Lord Queensberry.

  It was, of course, an outright lie. There had never been any question of Bosie taking the stand. It was true Bosie had been extremely anxious to testify to the fact that his father `was an inhuman brute' who had `bullied and persecuted' his wife and `had for twenty years neglected and ill-treated his children'. But Bosie simply failed to grasp that Queensberry's inadequacies as a husband and a parent were not pertinent to the libel case, and his testimony about his father's cruelties would most certainly have been ruled inadmissible by the judge. Bosie always maintained that, had he been allowed to take the stand, Oscar might well have won his case. `At the very worst,' he told Frank Harris many years later, `even if he had lost the case, there would have been no subsequent criminal prosecution of Wilde. All the sympathy and all the feeling would have been on our side.' Bosie blamed Sir Edward Clarke for first agreeing to call him as a witness and then reneging on his promise. It was a charge Clarke vigorously refuted.

  Oscar also dashed off a short note to Constance, which he sent to Tite Street by special messenger. `Dear Constance, Allow no one to enter my bedroom or sitting room - except servants - today,' he wrote. `See no one but your friends.' Oscar was worried that Littlechild and Kearley or even detectives from Scotland Yard would turn up at Tite Street and rifle through his compromising letters and private papers in their search for more evidence.

  Percy Douglas arrived and the four of them ate a wretched lunch contemplating the wreck and ruin of the trial. They went over and over the options. Would Oscar face a criminal prosecution, and if so, how soon would the warrant for his arrest be issued? And would Bosie - as Oscar's partner in sexual crime - be arrested too? Should Oscar flee abroad while he still could? Should Bosie flee? Oscar hesitated and wavered. He was in a state of shock and incapable of making a decision. But, in case he could be persuaded to fly to Paris, Robbie was despatched to Oscar's bank to cash a cheque for £200.

  Oscar, Bosie and Percy, meanwhile, drove to Ely Place, to the offices of Sir George Lewis, who might, they hoped, be able to advise them what to do. The interview was short and to the point. `What's the use of coming to me now?' Lewis snapped:

  I am powerless to do anything. If you had had the sense to bring Lord Queensberry's card to me in the first place I would have torn it up and thrown it in the fire, and told you not to make a fool of yourself.

  From Ely Place, they set off for the Cadogan Hotel in Sloane Street, where Bosie had been staying for the past couple of weeks. Now, in addition to the carriage containing Littlechild and Kearley, three or four other carriages containing a dozen or so reporters also followed them, making a strange procession.

  After cashing the cheque, Robbie went to Tite Street, where he broke the news as gently as he could to Constance, who burst into floods of tears. `Poor Oscar!' she sobbed, `Poor Oscar! I hope he is going abroad.' Robbie tried to comfort Constance as best he could but time was short. He needed to go to the Cadogan Hotel and continue to try, if possible, to persuade Oscar to flee while there was still time. He found Oscar collapsed into an armchair determinedly drinking hock and seltzer. He seemed abstracted and was oblivious to the pressing entreaties of his friends to leave at once and catch the boat train. `The train has gone,' Oscar said in a hollow voice. `It is too late.' He was waiting for the inevitable.

  For Queensberry it was a day of vindication and triumph. As he left the court he delivered a public message to Oscar. `If the country allows you to leave, all the better for the country!' he snarled. `But if you take my son with you, I will follow you wherever you go and shoot you like a dog!' But Queensberry actually wanted to see Oscar prosecuted and imprisoned. `I think he ought not to be allowed to leave the country,' he told reporters at a press conference he held at Carter's Hotel in Albemarle Street that afternoon. `I think he ought to be placed where he can ruin no more young men.' Queensberry knew he was the hero of the hour and was revelling in his newfound status as guardian of public morals. `I have done my duty, not only to my family and myself, but also to the community,' he told reporters. `It has cost me £ 1,200, and now if the law of England don't step in I must make my own law.' He had been overwhelmed, he said, `with congratulations from all quarters of the globe' and proudly held up a sheaf of telegrams, singling out one from the actor, Charles Danby, which read simply `Hearty Congratulations', and another, `Every man in the City is with you. Kill the bugger!'

  While Queensberry basked in moral righteousness, his solicitor, Charles Russell, acting on his client's instructions, had been extremely busy. As soon as the case ended, he wasted no time in sending a letter to Hamilton Cuffe, the Director of Public Prosecutions:

  Dear Sir, In order that there may be no miscarriage of justice, I think it is my duty at once to send you a copy of all our witnesses' statements, together with a copy of the shorthand notes of the trial. Yours faithfully, Charles Russell.

  Russell's letter was a warning shot to the powers that be. Oscar must not be allowed to slip away into the shadows of a continental exile in Paris or Florence, however congenial to him and however convenient to the authorities such a flight might be. He must be arrested and tried.

  Hamilton Cuffe moved with astonishing speed. Immediately he received Russell's letter, Cuffe summoned him to his office. What was said between the two men is not recorded, but Trelawny Backhouse and others believed that it was at this meeting that Russell delivered Queensberry's short and explicit ultimatum to the Liberal government: send Oscar Wilde to prison or face the exposure of several senior Liberal politicians - including the Prime Minister - as sodomites. Certainly, within an hour or two of meeting with Russell, Cuffe had hastily convened a conference at the House of Commons with Asquith, the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Reid, the Attorney General, and Sir Frank Lockwood, the Solicitor General. It is hard to think of any convincing reason - apart from the one Backhouse suggests - for this hastily summoned and extraordinary meeting of senior Liberal politicians, other than that there were pressing political considerations in some way connected to the prosecution of Oscar Wilde. Over the coming days and weeks, Bosie and several others became convinced that Queensberry was blackmailing the Liberal government into sending Oscar to prison.

  Asq
uith immediately issued instructions that Oscar was to be stopped wherever he might be found. So much for Oscar's proud boast that the Treasury would always give him twenty-four hours to leave the country before attempting to arrest him. Cuffe summoned Detective-Inspector Brockwell of Scotland Yard to his office in the Treasury building, and, at about half past three, Brockwell and Angus Lewis, a senior Treasury solicitor, proceeded to Bow Street Magistrates Court where they had a private interview with Sir John Bridge, the chief magistrate. Bridge returned with Brockwell and Lewis to Whitehall to pore over the evidence and decide on the charges that Oscar might face. At the end of the deliberations, Oscar was only charged at this stage with various counts of indecency. The damaging conspiracy charges would come later. Despite the allegations of sodomy in Queensberry's Plea of Justification, it was decided not to charge Oscar with this much more serious offence.

  At exactly five minutes to five, barely five hours after the collapse of the case against Queensberry, Sir John Bridge signed warrants for the arrest of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Taylor and handed them to Detective-Inspector Brockwell for immediate execution. At some time between five and six o'clock, Thomas Marlowe, a sympathetic reporter from the Star, turned up at the Cadogan Hotel and spoke to Robbie. Marlowe told him that the news had come through on the tape that a warrant had been issued for Oscar's arrest. When Robbie told Oscar about the warrant, Oscar went `very grey in the face'. Robbie begged him to save himself while he still could. But Oscar refused. He had made up his mind. `I shall stay and do my sentence whatever it is,' he said with quiet dignity.

  Bosie was not with Oscar when the news of the warrant broke. He had raced down to the House of Commons to see his cousin, the MP George Wyndham. The news was not good. Wyndham had spoken to Arthur Balfour, a leading Tory politician and future prime minister, who had been told by senior figures in the government's legal machine that Oscar's case was hopeless. He was `certain to be condemned', Wyndham told Bosie, and `sure to be imprisoned'. There was no case against Bosie - yet. But Balfour and others, he said, were `unanimous' in their opinion that Bosie `had better go abroad for a year or two'. `Bosie took it very well,' Wyndham told his father, the Hon. Percy Scawen Wyndham, two days later:

  He thought I was going to ask him to go at once, and began saying that nothing on earth would make him leave London until the trial was over. You may be sure that nothing will: he is quite insane on the subject.

  Bosie had still not returned from the House of Commons when, at about twenty past six, Detective-Inspector Richards and Detective-Sergeant Allen entered the Cadogan Hotel. `Is Oscar Wilde staying here?' they asked the hall porter. `Will you show us to his room?' The two detectives were shown up to room 53 where they knocked and entered and found Oscar sitting in an armchair `calmly smoking a cigarette and drinking a brandy and soda'. The floor was strewn with copies of the evening newspapers.

  `Mr Wilde, I believe?' said Inspector Richards.

  `Yes,' he answered. `Yes.'

  `We are police officers, and hold a warrant for your arrest,' said Richards. `I must ask you to accompany me to the police station.'

  `Shall I be able to obtain bail?' Oscar asked plaintively.

  `That is a matter for the magistrate.'

  `Well,' said Oscar with a deep sigh. `If I must go I will give you the least possible trouble.' He swayed a little as he got up. Fear, shock, hock and Selzer and brandy and soda had made him unsteady on his legs. Robbie helped him on with his overcoat, and Oscar picked up his hat, his gloves and his cane. Drawing himself up to his full height and lighting a cigarette, he said, `I am now, gentlemen, ready to accompany you.'

  Oscar was escorted outside and conveyed by hansom cab number 15,034 to Scotland Yard before being transferred to Bow Street Police Court where he was taken into the charge room and formally charged with various counts of indecency with men. Now charged, Oscar was searched. The £200 in cash was found, along with various writs for unpaid bills, and one or two letters. Oscar's cigarettes and matches were also taken away.

  Bosie returned from the House of Commons a matter of minutes after Oscar's arrest. He found a note from Oscar scrawled in haste. `My dear Bosie':

  I will be at Bow Street Police Station tonight - no bail possible I am told. Will you ask Percy, George Alexander, and Waller, at the Haymarket, to attend to give bail. Would you also wire Humphreys to appear at Bow Street for me. Wire to 41 Norfolk Square, W. Also, come to see me. Ever yours, Oscar

  As Bosie rushed off to Bow Street in pursuit of Oscar, Robbie returned to Tite Street to pack a change of clothes and some toiletries for Oscar. Constance was not there. She had left Tite Street that afternoon and gone to seek refuge at the house of her aunt, Mrs William Napier. With the help of one of the servants, Robbie forced his way into Oscar's locked bedroom and study and gathered up as many of his incriminating letters and papers as he could find. Though the situation seemed hopeless, at least the police would not be able to find more evidence and add further names to the long list of boys Oscar had had sex with.

  Bosie arrived at Bow Street at about eight o'clock in the evening `in a frightful state of despair and consternation'. He had been to see George Alexander, who was playing the lead in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Lewis Waller, who was playing the part of Sir Robert Chiltern in An Ideal Husband, about standing bail for Oscar. Both had refused. Now Bosie offered to stand surety for Oscar himself, but the police told him that there could be no question of bail. He wanted to see Oscar, but was peremptorily refused permission.

  Bosie's world was fast disintegrating around him. He was powerless to do anything to help Oscar. He went back to the Cadogan Hotel and wrote to everyone he could think of, anyone who might be able to help. `Can you do anything or suggest anything in this horrible tragedy?' Bosie wrote in pencil to George Ives late that evening:

  I am so miserable and wretched that I am unfit for anything. I cannot see Oscar or give him anything, not even some poison to kill himself with. I should be glad to hear that he is dead, and I wish he had died before this terrible thing happened.

  Bosie was almost hysterical with grief and anguish. Suicide, Oscar's and his own, seemed a tempting way out of the hideous nightmare they were in. Ives was sympathetic. `Poor boy,' he wrote in his diary. `When I think what he must suffer I am sick at heart.' Ives, too, hoped that Oscar might have committed suicide, and he even melodramatically contemplated suicide himself, going so far as to take out his revolver and rhapsodising how a bullet would save him from `the force of all the state'.

  That evening, as Bosie was desperately trying to see Oscar and get him bailed from Bow Street, Adrian and Laura Hope received an unexpected visit from Constance's aunt, who had come to solicit help from the Wildes' old friends and neighbours. `A most trying visit from Mrs William Napier,' Laura wrote in her diary, `in a most frantic state about her poor niece Constance Wilde as the whole verdict has gone against her monstrous husband - the whole episode most terrible.'

  As the long day drew to its end, only Queensberry was happy as he celebrated his famous victory with friends and cronies far into the small hours. Constance lay sleepless in her aunt's house, trying to make some sense of the sudden devastation of her life and hopes, and of her children's lives and hopes. Not much more than a mile away, Bosie was alone in his suite at the Cadogan Hotel, his face pale with exhaustion and stained with tears, pacing round and round as he tried desperately to think of a way to save his beloved Oscar. In his narrow, dirty cell in the bowels of the Bow Street Police Court, Oscar lay sleepless on the long narrow bench. He was cold and uncomfortable, despite the blanket handed to him by a friendly policeman. The effects of the afternoon's alcohol had worn off, and he was deprived of his constant supply of cigarettes. He was hungry and alone, caught up in the inexorable process of law, a process he himself had initiated. He could but wonder at the extraordinary fate which had taken him in so short a space from the heady pinnacles of success and fame to the depths of shame and infamy.

 
; Oscar at bay

  `Is it not high time that a little charity, Christian or antiChristian, were imported into this land of Christian shibboleths and formulas? Most sane men listen on in silence while Press and public condemn to eternal punishment and obloquy a supposed criminal who is notyet tried orprovedguilty.'- Robert Buchanan to the Star, 16 April 1895

  Oscar ate nothing the next morning, but drank copious quantities of tea ordered in from the Tavistock Hotel in nearby Covent Garden. After a quick wash with cold water, he replaced his soiled collar from the previous day and waited to make the first of his three appearances before Sir John Bridge at Bow Street Police Court in committal proceedings. It was the first time that Oscar would encounter in court some of the key prosecution witnesses against him. Just after the first of these, Charlie Parker, had gone into the witness box, it was announced that Alfred Taylor had been arrested in his rooms at Denbigh Place, Pimlico and was to join Oscar in the dock. Oscar greeted Taylor with a slight bow. Taylor smiled and bowed back.

  Charlie Parker, his brother William and Alfred Wood all took the stand and briefly gave their evidence. Charlie went over the events of the night in March 1893 when he and his brother had been introduced to Oscar over a sumptuous dinner at Kettner's, after which he had gone back to the Savoy and spent an hour and a half in bed with Oscar. Alfred Wood told of his dinner with Oscar in a private room in the Florence restaurant, after which he had gone back with Oscar to Tite Street and had sex with him. `I was the worse for drink,' Wood said, in explanation. Oscar listened impassively. They were an unappetising sight. Max Beerbohm called them `a knot of renters', and Reynolds's News called them `male strumpets'. `A something' was how Robert Sherard collectively and contemptuously described them later, `a multiple something that was giggling and chatting and smoking cigarettes. It was The Evidence.'