Grain, in his address (on behalf of Taylor), reiterated the idea that the uncorroborated evidence of known blackmailers such as the Parkers could not be accepted. Gill, however, in the final speech of the day, asked, ‘Why should any of the witnesses have sought to give false evidence? What end could they serve? What good could they get by it?’ Corroboration was never likely to be possible concerning incidents that were almost invariably private. But the many gifts that Wilde had given these ‘lads’ – invariably made after he had been alone with them ‘at some rooms or other’ – told their own tale. ‘In these circumstances even a cigarette case is corroboration.’ Though Clarke might ‘protest against any evil construction’ being put on Wilde’s gifts and dinners for these ‘vulgar, ill-bred’ youths, ‘in the name of common-sense what other construction is possible?’
However impressed Wilde had been with Clarke’s advocacy, he held little hope for the outcome of the trial. That evening he wrote, from his cell at Holloway, a long letter to Bosie, beginning, ‘My dearest boy. This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonor be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently.’49
The proceedings next morning (Wednesday 1 May) began with the judge’s summing up. Over the course of three hours, in an exceptionally crowded court, he went over the evidence, listened to in ‘breathless silence’.50 It was a measured performance, leaning, perhaps, wherever doubt existed, towards the defendants. He approved the removal of the conspiracy charges from the indictment; he found that there was nothing to answer in relation to the counts involving Sidney Mavor, since Mavor had insisted that no improprieties took place; and they too were struck out. On the literary part of the case, he thought it ‘absurd’ to hold Wilde responsible for things that he had not written in The Chameleon. He remarked of Wilde’s actual contribution, ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, that ‘some are amusing, some cynical, and some of them – if I may be allowed to criticize them myself – silly; but wicked, no.’ He questioned whether it was right to regard Wilde’s extravagantly phrased letters to Lord Alfred Douglas as ‘horrible and indecent’, not least because Wilde himself appeared to be proud of them. He mentioned Shelley’s ‘very excited state’ in the witness box, and the inconsistencies in his behaviour. He drew attention to Atkins’s extraordinary piece of perjury – ‘a falsehood so gross that you would be justified, if you think fit, in declining to act on any of his evidence’. He admitted that, to him, it seemed ‘strange’ that, if what the Savoy servants alleged with regard to seeing a boy in Wilde’s bed were true, ‘there were so little attempt at concealment’. He mentioned, too, that Wilde had ‘the right to ask you to remember that he is a man of highly intellectual gifts, a person whom people would suppose incapable of such acts as are alleged’ – and Taylor, too, ‘though nothing has been said about his abilities’, was ‘well brought up’.
The jury went out shortly after half past one. It was generally expected that their deliberations would be brief, and that the guilt of the prisoners would be confirmed. But those in the court who had witnessed Justice Charles’s summing-up were less certain. And their doubts seemed confirmed as the time lengthened, the hours passed. At three o’clock lunch was called for. Rumours began to circulate that there might be disagreement. It was not until quarter past five that the jury filed back into court.51
Wilde and Taylor were brought back into the dock; Beerbohm reported that ‘Hoscar stood very upright’, looking ‘most leonine and sphinx like’. Taylor seemed insignificant beside him.52 The suspicions in the courtroom were confirmed: the jury had been unable to reach an agreement, except on ‘the minor question’ relating to Atkins, where they found the defendants ‘not guilty’. Formal ‘not guilty’ verdicts were also returned on the conspiracy charges, and the charges relating to Mavor. Wilde received the news ‘without any show of feeling’.53
Gill at once announced that the case would ‘certainly be tried again’ and probably ‘at the next sessions’ (in three weeks’ time). An application for bail was again refused, and Wilde was returned to the tedium of Holloway.54
* Of the performances on 5 April it was noted (by the Glasgow Herald) that at neither theatre ‘was there any hostile demonstration’, although at the St James’s the audience ‘was much smaller than usual’. And ‘in one or two places slightly discordant remarks were made’ – chiefly from the gallery – ‘especially when reference was made to the town of Worthing’ – which was now associated with Wilde’s seduction of Alphonse Conway.
† Ettie Grenfell would recall how her husband, Willie, had taken Wilde’s side during the early stages of the libel trial, protesting that the claims made against him were ‘impossible’. But, as the case proceeded, his innocence was shocked. He said, even before Wilde’s arrest, ‘We can never have him to Taplow again.’
‡ Lane, already greatly distressed by the fact that his publishing house had been mentioned in the Queensberry trial, as the place where Wilde had met Edward Shelley, was even more perturbed by press reports that Wilde had left the Cadogan Hotel after his arrest with The Yellow Book under his arm. The volume was in fact Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite, bound – like all French novels – in yellow wrappers.
§ An Ideal Husband, having transferred from the Haymarket to the Criterion (on 13 April), where Wilde’s name was actually restored on the programme, did not close until 27 April; although on the night following the verdict in the Queensberry trial, ‘the house dropped to £11’. The Importance of Being Earnest continued to play at the St James’s until 8 May, a run of eighty-three performances.
¶ Ross, prior to his departure for France, had retrieved from Tite Street – at Wilde’s request – several unpublished manuscripts, including The Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane. These he entrusted to Ada Leverson.
** The evidence of the Savoy masseur and chambermaid – about having seen a ‘boy’ in Wilde’s bed, though forceful, was incorrect. They had confused Wilde’s room with the adjoining one belonging to Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde, anxious to defend Bosie, had not mentioned this fact. Douglas, away in France, did – it seems – wire to Wilde’s lawyers, eager to point out the error. He was informed that his intervention was ‘most improper’ and that any further attempts at interference ‘can only have the effect of rendering Sir Edward [Clarke]’s task still harder than it is already’.
†† Wilde might have done better to suggest that he associated with these youths for their benefit, rather than his own. A benign interest in corrupted working-class youth was one of the accepted forms of late Victorian philanthropy. Gladstone gave tea parties for ‘reformed’ prostitutes. And such interest could be used to justify more dubious behaviour. In 1895 Wilde’s friends Professor Ray Lankester and George Alexander were both cleared of charges of consorting with (female) streetwalkers by claiming that they were seeking to assist them.
5
The Torrent of Prejudice
‘Do keep up your spirits, my dearest darling.’
alfred douglas to oscar wilde
Despite Gill’s assertion, there was some disquiet about the prospect of a retrial, with the ‘raking up anew’ of all the ‘loathsome details’. Some hoped that a second trial – if it had to happen – ‘could be heard in private’. But the pressures for action were great. When the Irish nationalist MP T. M. Healy begged Lockwood not to put Wilde ‘on his country’ again – to spare his ‘venerated’ mother ‘further agony’, the solicitor general replied, ‘Ah, I would not but for the abominable rumours against [Rosebery].’* Carson, it seems, made a similar appeal, and received a similar answer. Rosebery himself (so George Ives heard) considered doing something to aid Wilde, but was told by his home secretary, Asquith, ‘If you do, you will lose the election.’1
The case had become a ligh
tning rod for conspiracy theories. There was ‘a wide-felt impression’ that the judge had been ‘got at, in order to shield others of a higher status in life’. Some suspected that ‘the Government were trying to hush up the case’ for the same reason. The newspapers were bombarded with letters clamouring for further prosecutions, and suggesting that ‘the police in their action against immoral practices are paralysed by orders from above to see that nothing is done’. It was claimed that there were ‘hundreds of members of parliament, judges, artists, actors and others guilty of such offences’. Douglas, on the other hand, believed that the government was relentlessly driving the case forward under pressure from Queensberry and ‘a body of private persons’ who threatened to produce evidence against ‘important and exalted persons’ unless Wilde’s conviction was secured.2
There was much reporting – and much disagreement – about the division within the jury. Some put it down to a single ‘cantankerous jury-man’; L’Echo de Paris suggested it was ten to two in favour of conviction; Beerbohm understood ‘nine out of the twelve jurors was for [Oscar]’. One newspaper printed a supposed breakdown of the voting on the various charges, showing splits ranging from 10/2 (in favour of convicting Wilde for having had sex with Edward Shelley) to 2/10 (in favour of convicting Taylor of having had sex with the Parker brothers). But, overall, a ‘strong suspicion’ remained that the ‘hopeless disagreement… was not entirely free from the taint of corruption’. Queensberry was only too ready to believe that ‘individuals’ had been bribed. He even suspected his son Percy – ‘the great Lord Hawick and Shitters’ – of putting up the money. In such a climate, continued prosecution became inevitable.3
Bail was eventually granted on 3 May, but the amount was set at £5,000. Several further days were needed to arrange the money. £2,500 was allowed on Wilde’s own cognizance; Percy Douglas put up £1,250 to oblige his brother and to vex their father. The final £1,250 – after some frantic searching – was provided by Rev. Stuart Headlam, an independently wealthy and independently minded Anglican clergyman of socialist sympathies. Although he barely knew Wilde, he was a friend of Ross’s great friend, flatmate and occasional literary collaborator, More Adey. To those who expressed surprise – or horror – at his action, Headlam explained that he had come forward on ‘public grounds’, believing that the press coverage had been calculated to prejudice the case. He was not, he pointed out, a ‘surety’ for Wilde’s ‘character’; only for his appearance in court – and, on this score, he felt confident of the writer’s ‘honour and manliness’.4 After the formal bail hearing at Bow Street on 7 May, Wilde was finally released. He had been in Holloway for over a month.
Freedom, however, brought its own problems. Accompanied by Percy and Headlam, Wilde went to the Midland Hotel, St Pancras. He was consulting there with some of his legal team when the Marquess of Queensberry arrived, accompanied by his friend Sir Claude de Crespigny. Queensberry was convinced that Bosie was back in London, and he was determined to prevent his joining Wilde. Confronted by the marquess, Wilde hastily decamped across the road to the Great Northern Hotel, by King’s Cross. But Queensberry followed him there. And, it seems, this performance was repeated at several other hotels across London during the course of the evening. ‘There was no occasion for [Wilde] to bolt as he did, if the wretched [Bosie] was not with him,’ Queensberry wrote to Percy’s solicitor. ‘The display of the white feather was delicious all round.’5
Eventually, towards midnight, Wilde – harassed and desperate – sought refuge at his mother’s house in Oakley Street. Willie lived there too, together with his new wife, Lily. Oscar – according to his brother – collapsed over the threshold, ‘like a wounded stag’. ‘Willie, give me shelter,’ he pleaded; ‘or I shall die in the streets.’ Oscar was put up on a camp bed in the bare spare room. He at once succumbed to nervous – and physical – ‘prostration’. There is no record of his reception by his mother. Oscar’s travails had left her ‘very poorly and utterly miserable’.† According to some accounts she had taken to her bed, and was dosing herself with gin.6
Alcohol was certainly a ready resource at Oakley Street. Willie was a dedicated inebriate. And when Sherard came over from France to see what could be done, he found a flushed and worn Oscar lying on his narrow bed, smelling strongly of drink. But oblivion was hard to come by. ‘Oh, why have you brought me no poison from Paris?’ Wilde demanded in a broken voice.
There was widespread expectation, even hope, that Wilde might kill himself. George Ives believed that it would have been for the best. Robert Cunningham Graham claimed that during an encounter in Hyde Park, Wilde – after telling ‘his tale of woe’ – had asked, ‘What am I to do?’ Without thinking, Cunningham Graham raised his arm and, pointing to his temple with his index finger, ‘made a noise similising a revolver shot, by flicking the middle finger over the thumb’. He felt terrible when – at once – he realized what he done. Wilde apparently broke down, sobbing, ‘I know it’s the only way out, but I haven’t the courage.’ The notion that Wilde was funking the option was reiterated by Henley in a stupendously tasteless letter to Charles Whibley: ‘They say, he has lost all nerve, all pose, all everything; and is just now so much the Ordinary Drunkard that he hasn’t even the energy to kill himself.’7
The atmosphere at Oakely Street was depressing. The forced rapprochement with Willie brought little consolation. ‘Willie makes such a merit of giving me shelter,’ Oscar complained. ‘He means well, I suppose, but it is all dreadful.’ Among his many insensitivities was the comment, ‘Thank God my vices were decent.’ Sherard noted, however, that Wilde did not attach ‘any idea of criminality’ to his own behaviour. It was the men who did not like ‘bestowing sexual caresses’ on boys whom he now considered ‘abnormal’. He earnestly asked the writer Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who had called at Oakley Street, whether ‘truly and honestly he could declare that he had never liked young men, never wished to fondle and caress them’ and he ‘seemed almost to doubt Tex’s sincerity when he emphatically repudiated the very conception of such a thing’.8
A trickle of callers came to offer their support. Wilde was roused from his depression by a pleasant hour of talk with the poet Ernest Dowson. A tall veiled lady (possibly Ellen Terry) came to the door one evening and delivered a horseshoe with a bunch of violets, ‘For Luck’. The Leversons had him to dine.9
Sherard had arrived, determined to persuade Wilde to flee abroad. It was an idea that many supported. Frank Harris took Wilde out to lunch and urged the same course. He even claimed to have a steam yacht waiting in the Thames, ready to bear them across the Channel. Douglas, meanwhile, was expecting him daily in France. Wilde, however, had determined to stay. As Willie constantly reiterated to visitors, ‘Oscar is an Irish gentleman, and will face the music.’ Beside his commitment to his bailsmen, he had given his word to his mother. ‘If you stay,’ she had declared, ‘even if you go to prison, you will always be my son. It will make no difference to my affection. But if you go, I will never speak to you again.’10
Although Harris set down Wilde’s refusal to flee as ‘weakness’ – or ‘extraordinary softness of nature’ – combined with ‘a certain magnanimity’ (in not letting down his bailsmen), in his own mind Wilde framed it as bold defiance. He would rather be a martyr than a fugitive. He would suffer for his great love for Bosie. ‘A false name,’ he wrote to Douglas, ‘a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me, to whom you have been revealed on that high hill where beautiful things are transfigured.’11 In his resolve there was, too, besides love, a sense of the dramatic. Harris certainly considered that Wilde’s fascination (and identification) with Jesus played its part: ‘He felt vaguely that the life-journey of genius would be incomplete and farcical without the final tragedy: whoever lives for the highest must be crucified.’12
From the discomforts and irritations of Oakley Street Wilde was rescued by the Leversons, who invited him to come and stay with them at Courtfield Gardens. Before he arrived they can
vassed their servants, giving them the opportunity to leave if they wished. All elected to stay, and assist ‘poor Mr Wilde’. He was installed in the two adjoining rooms of the nursery usually occupied by the Leversons’ young daughter, Violet. It was a refuge of comfort and calm. He would come down each evening at six, exquisitely dressed, and spend an evening of talk with ‘the Sphinx’ and other friends. Though he might arrive muted and depressed, the atmosphere of wit and loving friendship – as well as the good cigarettes – soon roused him. He discoursed on the joys of absinthe and the effects of opium. He told tales and talked of books. It was to Ada that he remarked, concerning The Old Curiosity Shop, that ‘one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’ The trial was never alluded to.
During the day, though, Wilde would remain on the nursery floor, and it was there – ‘in the presence of a rocking horse, golliwogs, and a blue and white nursery dado with rabbits and other animals on it’ – that he consulted with his lawyers over the forthcoming trial. By special arrangement his case, and that of Taylor, was to be called on the opening days of the sessions. And, in an extraordinary move, the prosecution would be led by the solicitor general, Frank Lockwood, supported by Charles Gill and Horace Avory. The determination of the Crown to secure a conviction was clear.
Wilde also received a visit from Constance. She had come up from Babbacombe ‘with an urgent message from her lawyer [presumably George Lewis] imploring him to go away’. Even this was to no avail. She left in tears. Her distress prompted Ada to send up a note to the nursery begging Wilde to do as his wife had asked. She received no answer. But that evening, when Wilde came down, he returned the note with the comment, ‘That is not like you, Sphinx.’13
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