The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  The last of the key witnesses to be called was `Jenny' Mayor. Mayor described his first meeting with Oscar: how he and Taylor had met Oscar and Bosie for dinner, how he had received a present of a silver cigarette case from Oscar a week later, and how he had arranged to meet Oscar at the Albemarle Hotel, where he subsequently spent the night. When Mayor was asked what had taken place that night between Oscar and himself, Mavor boldly replied, `Nothing'. There was an audible murmur of surprise at his answer.

  Bosie was in court and smiled. He had spotted jenny Mavor in one of the corridors in Bow Street before the proceedings began.

  `Surely you are not going to give evidence against Oscar?' Bosie demanded.

  `Well, what can I do?' answered Mavor, looking round in a frightened manner. `I daren't refuse to give evidence now. They got a statement out of me.'

  `For God's sake,' said Bosie, `remember you are a gentleman and a public school boy. Don't put yourself on a level with scum like Wood and Parker. When counsel asks you the questions, deny the whole thing, and say you made the statement because you were frightened by the police. They can't do anything to you.'

  `All right,' said Mavor, grabbing Bosie's hand. `I'll do what you say.'

  Jenny Mayor's denial that anything immoral had occurred between himself and Oscar was a small but nevertheless important victory. Unlike the unreliable and decidedly criminal `male strumpets' who constituted the bulk of the evidence against Oscar, Jenny Mavor was more or less respectable; he worked for his living and was well-educated. His denials might well carry more weight with a jury than the assertions of self-confessed blackmailers and male prostitutes. At the conclusion of the day's proceedings, the magistrate Sir John Bridge flatly turned down a request for bail. `I think there is no worse crime than that with which the prisoners are charged,' he said. `I shall therefore refuse bail.'

  In the days that followed Oscar's arrest, the air was alive with rumours that more arrests were imminent. `Sworn informations have been lodged against several persons mentioned in the trial,' reported the New York Herald, `some of whose names were not made public, and the civil officers are only awaiting the authority of the Treasury Department to make the arrests.' The Star predicted a `sensational development', saying that `Warrants are understood to have been granted for the arrest of four other persons whose names have been canvassed in connection with the case.'

  Who could these `four other persons' be? Bosie was certainly one of them. It was clear from Oscar's cross-examination that Bosie was not just Oscar's lover, but also his willing and energetic accomplice in sexual crime. It was equally clear that Bosie had had dealings with male prostitutes and blackmailers. Not only that. His poems were explicitly sodomitical in sentiment. It seemed only a matter of time before the authorities would arrest him and he would stand in the dock alongside Oscar and Alfred Taylor. Maurice Schwabe was another. He had cropped up several times in the libel trial, his name never being uttered, but instead written down on a scrap of paper. Lord Rosebery's name had also been `canvassed in connection with the case'. Was this what the Star meant by a `sensational development'? Was it possible that the Prime Minister himself would be arrested and charged? Rumours of Rosebery's imminent resignation kept cropping up in the newspapers, usually immediately adjacent on the page to reports of Oscar's arrest. Was this by accident or design - an example of the time-honoured newspaper trick of saying the unsayable?

  Meanwhile, Rosebery's health continued to go from bad to worse. `Rosebery seems to me to make no way: there being hardly any improvement in his sleeping powers,' Sir Edward Hamilton confided to his diary three days after Oscar's arrest. Over the next few days, Hamilton became even more alarmed. `The last three nights have been very bad again,' he wrote on Friday 12 April. Rosebery was `certainly more depressed about himself' and was talking about suicide again.

  Oscar's arrest had started a sudden and intense outpouring of hatred against Oscar and his kind. It was, Frank Harris said, `an orgy of Philistine rancour such as even London had never known before'. The newspapers were almost universally hostile to him. `Mr Oscar Wilde is damned and done for,' exulted the Echo. `We begin to breathe a purer air,' proclaimed the Pall Mall Gazette. The Daily Telegraph devoted a lengthy editorial to the subject of the devilish Oscar and all his works:

  We have had enough, and more than enough, of Mr. OSCAR WILDE, who has been the means of inflicting on public patience during the recent episode as much moral damage of the most offensive and repulsive kind as any single individual could well cause.

  The National Observer, edited by Oscar's former friend W.E. Henley, pulled no punches, describing Oscar as `the obscene impostor'. The paper was in no doubt that Oscar and everything that he represented must be done away with:

  There must be another trial at the Old Bailey, or a coroner's inquest - the latter for choice; and the Decadents, or their hideous conceptions of the meaning of Art, of their worse than Eleusinian mysteries, there must be an absolute end.

  The hostility in the newspapers was matched and reflected by the public at large. `Public feeling is fiercely hostile to him, among all classes,' George Wyndham told his father. Street ballads and cheap pamphlets attacking Oscar were starting to appear. According to Andre Raffalovich, there were rumours of a league being formed `whose goal was to pursue all the suspect individuals, without regard for their wealth, position or merit'. Many of Oscar's friends and acquaintances were quick to turn against him. `I look forward eagerly to the first act of Oscar's new Tragedy,' Aubrey Beardsley wrote with schoolboy glee to Ada Leverson. `But surely the title Douglas has been used before?' Oscar's letters were burnt, his books thrown away. To his surprise and dismay, Bosie experienced this hostility at first hand the day after Oscar's arrest, when he called on Adrian and Laura Hope to solicit their help. `Adrian had a most painful interview with Lord Alfred Douglas,' Laura Hope wrote in her diary, `who came to implore him to go bail for that fiend O.W. which was of course impossible.' In the eyes of both polite and impolite society, Oscar had become a `fiend'.

  There were plenty who exulted in Oscar's arrest and hoped that there would be many more arrests, a wholesale mucking out of the sodomitical Augean Stables. Blanche Crackanthorpe, the wife of the solicitor Montague Crackanthorpe, wrote to her friend, the actress Elizabeth Robins:

  There was an idea on Sunday that many other arrests would follow - I only hope they may - nothing would do so much to purge schools and universities - and sorely they need it - as sentences which should strike terror and dismay into the hearts of the offenders. `Light, light, more light.'

  In the first days after Oscar's arrest, many Uranians began to feel afraid. The climate of hostility towards men who loved men was so intense, so tangible, that they feared they would be the victims of a judicial pogrom. Many decided to go abroad. There was, said Frank Harris, a sudden `strange exodus' of Uranians swept across the channel by the `wind of terror' in London. John Gray discreetly slipped out of the country and went to Berlin, where Andre Raffalovich later joined him. Robbie at first refused to leave Oscar. But his mother was emphatic, and, by dint of contributing £500 to the cost of Oscar's defence and promising to look after Lady Wilde, she persuaded a reluctant Robbie to go to France. Taking Reggie Turner with him, Robbie decamped to the Hotel Terminus in Calais from where they could watch the unfolding drama.

  Even though it seemed almost certain that he would be arrested, Bosie was adamant that he would not leave Oscar. `I have determined to remain here and do what I possibly can,' he told Robert Sherard:

  though I am warned on all hands that my own risk is not inconsiderable, and my family implore me to go away. I do not say this to try and gain credit for myself, for I should be a base coward if I did anything else, considering all I owe to him, and that I am in many ways the innocent cause of this horrible calamity.

  Though many among Oscar's large and glittering acquaintance seemed to have simply melted away, there were still a few stalwart friends left. Robert Sherard in Paris r
allied to his standard. Ada and Ernest Leverson were steadfast in their loyalty. Max Beerbohm told Reggie Turner that Trelawny Backhouse `is raising money for the conduct of the case', and that Will Rothenstein `is most sympathetic and goes about the minor clubs insulting everyone who does not clamour for Hoscar's instant release'. And in a gesture of great generosity, Sir Edward Clarke had volunteered to defend Oscar for no fee.

  Bosie was tireless in his efforts to galvanise support for Oscar. He wrote letter after letter to the newspapers protesting at the relentlessly hostile press coverage of the case. `Mr Oscar Wilde,' Bosie wrote:

  has been tried by the newspapers before he has been tried by a jury, that his case has been almost hopelessly prejudiced in the eyes of the public from whom the jury who must try the case will be drawn, and that he is practically being delivered over bound to the fury of a cowardly and brutal mob.

  Bosie constituted himself head of an informal committee working to free Oscar and to change public and political attitudes towards sex between men by writing letters and pamphlets. Max Beerbohm sent a jaundiced and amusing sketch to Reggie Turner of a pamphlet-writing evening at Ernest and Ada Leverson's home. `The scene that evening at the Leversons' was quite absurd,' Beerbohm wrote:

  An awful New Woman in a divided skirt (introduced by Bosie) writing a pamphlet at Mrs Leverson's writing-table with the aid of several whiskeyand-sodas; her brother - a gaunt man with prominent cheek-bones from Toynbee Hall who kept reiterating that `these things must be approached through first principles and through first principles alone:' two other New Women who subsequently explained to Mr Leverson that they were there to keep a strict watch upon New Woman number one, who is not responsible for her actions: Mrs Leverson making flippant remarks about messengerboys in a faint undertone to Bosie, who was ashen-pale and thought the pamphlet (which was the most awful drivel) admirable: and Mr Leverson explaining to me that he allowed his house to be used for these purposes not because he approved of `anything unnatural' but by reason of his admiration for Oscar's plays and personality. I myself exquisitely dressed and sympathising with no one.

  In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar had drawn a witty thumbnail sketch of Holloway Prison. `The surroundings are middle-class,' he wrote, `but the gaol itself is fashionable and well-aired; and there are ample opportunities of taking exercise at certain stated hours of the day.' The truth, at least for prisoners on remand, was not so very far removed from the theatrical fiction. Oscar spent his four weeks on remand in Holloway in comparative comfort, though it was nothing compared to the luxury of his previous lifestyle. He occupied a `special cell' at the far end of the east wing of the prison, a larger and more comfortable cell than normal, approximately eleven feet square, which could be hired for a fee by prisoners on remand. Given Oscar's predilection for grandes dames and duchesses, it was perhaps appropriate that reputedly this cell's last occupant was a duchess remanded to Holloway for contempt of court. Special cells were unfurnished, and Oscar was able to hire some reasonably comfortable furniture, including an armchair, from a local firm. As a prisoner on remand he was allowed to wear his own clothes and have his meals sent in from a local restaurant. He could also have the daily papers.

  But, according to a journalist who wrote a well-informed article about Oscar's daily routine in Holloway, Oscar often had `moments of very low spiritedness, and becomes almost despondent'. Bosie managed to visit Oscar almost every day in Holloway. But, he told Robert Sherard, Oscar was always penned in `a horrible kind of barred cage, separated from him by a space of one yard, and in almost complete darkness with twenty other people talking at the same time'. Oscar would visibly `brighten up' after Bosie's visits but would become `very low-spirited and morose' after a consultation with his solicitor. Oscar's greatest misery was in not being allowed to smoke, and he found it hard to sleep. `He is out of bed most of the night and, in unstockinged feet, paces the room in apparently not too good a mood.'

  It was Bosie, and Bosie alone, who sustained Oscar through the misery and loneliness of the first dreadful days on remand in Holloway. `Nothing but Alfred Douglas's daily visits quicken me into life,' Oscar told Robert Sherard. `A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands always at my side,' Oscar said of Bosie in a letter to the Leversons. `His presence overshadows me. He moves in the gloom like a white flower.' Though he was `dazed with horror', Oscar told an unnamed correspondent that nevertheless `sometimes there is sunlight in my cell, and every day someone whose name is Love comes to see me, and weeps so much through prison-bars that it is I who have to comfort him.'

  Oscar left Holloway only to attend the committal proceedings at Bow Street. The second of these took place on Maundy Thursday, 11 April. The police van `was received by the motley crowd of roughs, hanging about the entrance to the court, with a hoarse shout which might have been a cheer or a jeer'. When Oscar stepped into the dock, it was evident that his week in prison was beginning to take its toll. He looked paler and thinner, weary and old. `Yes, Oscar at bay was on the whole a pleasing sight,' W.E. Henley wrote with schadenfreude to a fellow journalist of this appearance in court:

  Holloway and Bow Street have taken his hair out of curl in more senses than one. And I am pretty sure that he is having a damn bad time.

  More witnesses against Oscar were produced: an assortment of landladies, housekeepers and servants, alongside Fred Atkins and Edward Shelley. Now that jenny Mavor had denied any improprieties between himself and Oscar, the respectable, intellectual-looking Shelley represented by far the greatest danger to Oscar. Oscar listened to Shelley's evidence `with an inscrutable countenance, his gloves hanging from his fingers while his hands supported and almost covered his face', while his eyes remained fixed blankly on the wall behind Sir-John- Bridge.

  Bosie told Robert Sherard that, during one of the committal proceedings, he managed to spend some time alone with Oscar in a private room. Bosie did not reveal what they discussed, but, significantly, it was after this meeting between them that Bosie first began to claim that there was a political conspiracy ranged against Oscar. Was it Oscar who first sowed the seeds of the idea of a conspiracy against him? And, if so, what had he heard? And from whom? The next day, Bosie told Sherard unequivocally that there was `a diabolical conspiracy' against Oscar `which seems almost unlimited in its size and strength'. As if to give credence to Bosie's claim, Hamilton Cuffe, the Director of Public Prosecutions, was in court to watch the proceedings. And there were some strange and disturbing rumours concerning the key witnesses against Oscar. Some of them, it was alleged, had been bought new suits of clothes and, in a highly unusual step, were being lodged with police detectives in secret locations. Not only that, there was talk of them having been paid to testify, not just by Queensberry, but also by the Crown. It was rumoured that each of the witnesses received £5 a week for the duration of the trials. And then there was the fact that Alfred Taylor had been promised immunity from prosecution, if he agreed to turn Queen's Evidence and testify against Oscar. Clearly, the government was going to extraordinary lengths to secure a conviction. `The government appears determined to obtain a condemnation by all possible means, honest or not, which are in its powers,' Sir Edward Clarke privately told Bosie.

  Eight days later, on 19 April, when he made his third and final appearance at Bow Street, it was obvious to everybody that Oscar's health and spirits had deteriorated to `a startling degree':

  His face was haggard and grey, his cheeks seemed fallen in, his hair unkempt, and his general mien was one of great depression and sudden age. Even his clothes - the grey coat with the velvet collar and cuffs, the silk hat, the gloves - seemed to have deteriorated.

  Constance had already left London to go and stay with Lady MountTemple at Babbacombe Cliff. Ever since Oscar's arrest, she had been in a state of shock and grief. Her younger son, Vyvyan, recalled his mother `in tears, poring over masses of press-cuttings'. On the day of Oscar's third appearance at Bow Street, Constance wrote to the Sibyl of Mortimer Street fo
r consolation:

  My dear Mrs Robinson, What is to become of my husband who has so betrayed and deceived me and ruined the lives of my darling boys? Can you tell me anything? You told me that after this terrible shock my life was to become easier, but will there be any happiness in it, or is that dead for me? And I have had so little. My life has all been cut to pieces as my hand is by its lines. As soon as this trial is over I have to get my judicial separation, or if possible my divorce in order to get the guardianship of the boys. What a tragedy for him who is so gifted.

  Even in the depths of her own misery, Constance could still feel the enormity of Oscar's tragedy.

  On the same day, Charles Gill, the senior Treasury counsel who was in charge of the prosecution of Oscar in the courts, wrote a remarkable letter to Hamilton Cuffe, advising against prosecuting Bosie alongside Oscar. Though Gill was convinced that `there is little room for doubt that immoral relations existed' between Bosie and Oscar, nevertheless:

  Having regard to the fact that Douglas was an undergraduate at Oxford when Wilde made his acquaintance - the difference in their ages - and the strong influence that Wilde has obviously exercised over Douglas since that time - I think that Douglas if guilty - may fairly be regarded as one of Wilde's victims.

  Not only was Bosie just another of Oscar's young victims, but it would, Gill wrote, be extremely hard to prove in court that Bosie had had sex with Alfred Wood and Charles Parker. But Gill was lying. Wood and Parker had both made statements alleging sex with Bosie. The evidence against Bosie was from the same source, and of the same weight, as the evidence against Oscar. It was clear that the government was willing - indeed eager - to convict Oscar on the evidence of male prostitutes and blackmailers, and yet extremely reluctant to prosecute Bosie on the same testimony.

  In turn, Cuffe sent an even more remarkable memorandum to Asquith, the Home Secretary, explaining why Bosie would not be prosecuted: