Clarke’s only rebuttal was the contents of Queensberry’s insulting letters, which included a malicious passage that hinted at Bosie’s illegitimacy. Introducing the letters was a mistake, for they revealed the irrational mind of the marquess and inadvertently put into the record—and into the newspapers—the names of Rosebery and Gladstone and made Wilde a scapegoat for homosexual rumors about Rosebery. Any hope that the establishment would intervene to aid Wilde’s acquittal was lost.
By introducing the letters, Clarke gave Carson the right to cross-examine Wilde again. Clarke had a premonition that his client had been less than truthful when Wilde, realizing his vulnerability, asked if Carson could question him about an incident when he and a boy were turned out of the Albemarle Hotel in the middle of the night. At this point Clarke rested his case for the Crown. For the defense, Carson stressed that Queensberry only wanted to free his son from Wilde’s immoral influence. Then, in a surprise move, Carson announced that he was going to bring forward the young men named in the plea of justification, who would testify to indecent acts with Wilde.
Clarke advised Wilde to withdraw and consent to the charge and told him he hoped he would leave the country before he was arrested. Wilde would not abscond like a common criminal, but on the morning of April 5 he was not in court for the finale. As Carson read out the already familiar names of those who would be called to testify, Clarke tugged on the barrister’s black cloak. A bewigged head looked down. The case was over. Carson insisted on the whole plea, and Wilde accepted that Queensberry was entitled to call him a posing sodomite in the public interest. At the judge’s instruction, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Queensberry made sure that the rent boys’ statements not used in the libel trial reached prosecutors. “If the country allows you to leave,” he wrote Wilde, “all the better for the country! But, if you take my son with you, I will follow you wherever you go and shoot you!”
Wilde left the Old Bailey for the Cadogan Hotel in Chelsea accompanied by Ross and Bosie, who had been in court every day. He knew that he would be arrested, but then again he might not. He sat slouched in his chair, mesmerized, sipping hock and seltzer, a half-packed suitcase on the bed. Ross saw Constance, who had been unaware of her husband’s double life until the libel trial, and told her the situation. “I hope Oscar is going away abroad,” she said.
But Wilde had an intractable nature. While others argued over his future, he ordered more to drink, repeating that he would stay and serve whatever sentence he was given. The arrest warrant, requested from the Bow Street magistrate at 3:30 P.M., was not issued until 5:00, when it was too late for the last boat train to France. The delay was either deliberate, to allow Wilde to leave quietly, or the result of bureaucratic paper handling. Shortly after 6:00 the men from Scotland Yard knocked on the door of Room 53. Wilde put on his overcoat, picked up his gloves along with a yellow-bound French paperback novel, and left Sloane Square to be booked. Newspaper headlines reported that he was arrested with a “Yellow Book under his arm,” wrongly assumed to be The Yellow Book. Wilde made it notorious without ever having published a word in it.
Was another trial necessary? An argument has been made that
Queensberry convinced the government to prosecute Wilde by threatening to implicate Lord Rosebery. Even without that incentive, the prosecutors were within the law to continue the case based on the evidence not presented. Wilde always said that one should be careful in one’s choice of enemies. Through years of posturing, he had more than his share of jealous rivals. Surprisingly, the one to seek revenge was a minor actor named Charles Brookfield, who held a grudge over a flippant remark Wilde had made about his keeping his gloves on at a tea party and wearing the wrong kind of suit off the stage. In 1892 Brookfield had collaborated with J. M. Glover on the musical parody of Lady Windermere’s Fan called The Poet and the Puppets, which Wilde tolerated in his good-natured way, always pleased with attention even if hostile.
Two years later Brookfield took the role of Lord Goring’s servant in An Ideal Husband, explaining that he did not want to learn many of Wilde’s lines. During rehearsals Wilde insisted that the cast work on Christmas Day. Brookfield protested. “Don’t you keep Christmas, Oscar?” he asked. “No, Brookfield,” replied Wilde, “the only festival of the Church I keep is Septuagesima. Do you keep Septuagesima, Brookfield?” “Not since I was a boy.” “Ah, be a boy again,” said Wilde.
When the libel trial was announced, Brookfield volunteered to collect evidence against Wilde and celebrated Queensberry’s not guilty verdict at a party following his performance in Wilde’s play. (A final irony, Brookfield was made examiner of plays in 1912.)
Wilde entered the prisoner’s dock on April 26 charged with the commission of acts of gross indecency in private with members of his own sex. Under the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, conviction carried the maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment. Creating the first non-religious category for such sexual offenses, this amendment shifted the focus of the law from sodomy—a crime based on a specific act—to a crime against gender. Technically, Wilde was never on trial for sodomizing boys; he was tried for violations against the male sex. His trial tested not only the standards of indecent acts between men but the extent to which private sexual behavior could become publicly regulated. He walked into the Old Bailey a sodomite under the old law and emerged a newly defined homosexual.
Denied bail, he spent two weeks in Holloway Prison, shuttling back and forth to Bow Street court for hearings, until his criminal trial opened. In Earnest’s Gribsby scene, Jack complains about being imprisoned in Holloway because it is in the suburbs. Gribsby assures him that, although middle class, it is “fashionable and well-aired.” The papers described it during Wilde’s stay as “dirty, dingy, damp and unwholesome … hardly fit for a cat to live in.”
Bosie visited Wilde daily until the day before the trial, when Clarke advised him to leave for France and avoid the risk of being cross-examined in court. It was rumored that Bosie would be arrested, but authorities claimed there was no evidence against him. His father had made sure of that. Wilde missed the visits. “A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands always at my side,” he wrote to Ada Leverson. “His presence overshadows me.”
For the second trial, Carson was replaced by Charles Gill, also a Trinity man and no friend of Wilde. Clarke volunteered for the defense and waived any fees. Alfred Taylor, whose reputation for procuring had figured prominently in the first trial, was offered immunity for testifying against Wilde but refused; he was, as Wilde had told the court, a Marlborough boy and a man of taste. To Wilde’s detriment, they were to be tried together on the same charges as well as a charge of conspiring with each other to commit indecent acts, which implied sodomy.
To paraphrase Macaulay, it is always a ridiculous spectacle to observe the British in a fit of morality. No one reached out to help Wilde. The evil joy that feeds on scandal and a man’s downfall increased in intensity. No one behaved well—not the press or the middle class at whom Wilde scoffed or the aristocrats whom he satirized. “Everyone,” recalled Frank Harris, “tried to outdo his neighbour in expressions of loathing and abhorrence.” Yeats rightly pointed out that the rage against Wilde was the rage of the British against art and the artist, a hatred generally dormant until the artist trespasses into foreign territory.
Wilde was sleeping on a prison cot at the same time that his income was at its peak. He had two plays running in the West End. He was being talked about as the century’s most brilliant writer of comedy. After his arrest on April 5, The Importance of Being Earnest continued production, although the author’s name was removed from advertisements on the hoardings and from the programs. To prolong the run and help Wilde pay his debts, George Alexander kept the play onstage until May 8, its eighty-third performance, before replacing it with The Triumph of the Philistines, an unfortunate title, considering the circumstances.* Earnest’s New York production opened on April 22 and closed in little more than a week, the
victim of scandal, poor reviews, and empty seats. An Ideal Husband transferred from the Haymarket on the day of Wilde’s arrest to the Criterion, where it lasted two weeks. Wilde’s books were removed from most publishers’ lists and bookshop shelves.
Constance removed Cyril and Vyvyan from school to shield them from publicity. Later a French governess took them to Switzerland while Constance remained in London to be by her husband’s side. She paid what outstanding bills she could afford, sending a guinea to the Sibyl of Mortimer Street, who had predicted good fortune only months ago. “What is to become of my husband who has so betrayed and deceived me and ruined the lives of my darling boys?” she asked the fortune-teller. “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.” The sibyl was silent. But Lady Windermere understood: “Misfortunes one can endure—they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults—ah!—there is the sting of life.”
More humiliation followed. On April 24, bailiffs arrived at Tite Street to auction the contents of “the House Beautiful.” The sale was held in the drawing room, under the Balzacian eye of Harper Pennington’s full-length portrait of Wilde, bought for fourteen pounds by Ada Leverson. Everything, including the children’s toys and Thomas Carlyle’s writing desk, on which little literary work was done, was knocked down. A circus atmosphere prevailed. The curious elbowed each other up and down the stairs, peering at the bedroom, pulling open drawers. Personal letters were exposed, and some original manuscripts vanished. French readers greedily digested a copy of Le Latin mystique. No attempt was made to bid up the prices; it was as if Wilde’s personal effects—from his beloved blue china to paintings by Shannon and Ricketts—had no value because of the indictment against the owner.
Wilde arrived at the Old Bailey wearing a dark chesterfield coat, silk hat, dark tie, and no buttonhole. He was thinner after his stay in Holloway Prison. The Illustrated Police News reported that the defendant’s “face looked almost bloodless, and his eyes heavy and weary.” He entered the dock, a high box with glass panels on each side and a narrow oak plank that served as a seat. Next to him sat Alfred Taylor. The same names heard in the Queensberry trial were introduced, except that now there was a face and voice behind the accusations.
The first witness was Charles Parker, who gave his age as twenty-one and his occupation as gentleman’s valet. Admitting that he sold sexual favors, he described how he met Wilde at Solferino’s restaurant and went with him to the Savoy, where with his consent Wilde “committed the act of sodomy upon me.” Afterward he received two pounds. His brother William, a groom, added more details about the dinner meeting, testifying how Wilde fed his brother preserved cherries from his own mouth. Landladies who had rented to Taylor and Charles Parker were questioned. The blackmailer Alfred Wood was the only witness to mention Douglas’s name. Gill moved quickly to discredit this connection, getting Wood to admit that Douglas introduced him to Wilde not in person but by telegram.
Fred Atkins, a twenty-year-old former billiard marker and bookmaker’s clerk, testified that Wilde took him to Paris for a weekend at the Grand Hôtel on the boulevard des Capucines. One night he attended the Moulin Rouge on his own and returned to the hotel to find Wilde in bed with Maurice Schwabe, nephew of the wife of the solicitor general, Sir Frank Lockwood, whose name had been carefully kept out of the libel trial by Carson. Clarke’s cross-examination concentrated on Atkins’s reputation as a blackmailer and the other boys’ background as prostitutes.
The exception was Edward Shelley, the clerk from the Bodley Head, who told the court how Wilde’s advances made him feel “degraded,” how he “objected vigorously” to them, and had left his position because colleagues called him “Mrs. Wilde” and “Miss Oscar.” There was sufficient evidence to prove that Shelley was unstable.
On the fourth day the defense’s case opened, and Clarke called Wilde to the witness stand. Familiar ground was covered as to Wilde’s literary work. He was asked to swear that the evidence he gave at the Queensberry trial was true and that there was no truth in any of the allegations in the present case. Gill returned to The Chameleon, in particular the two ambiguous poems written by Douglas. Wilde’s finest moment came when he was asked to explain “the love that dare not speak its name,” the last line of “Two Loves.” Wilde wanted to defend the artist’s right to freedom, which included sexual freedom, but to protect himself he had to pretend that he was not sensual, which contradicted his aesthetic ideals of enjoying pleasure. He gave a tribute to Greek love, to the misunderstood relationship that “repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.” Applause from the public gallery was accompanied by hisses.
From his perch in the gallery, Max Beerbohm called the speech “simply wonderful.” Wilde, he said, was “perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice. He has never had so great a triumph, I am sure, as when the gallery burst into applause.” Of his contemporaries, George Ives was the most responsible for elevating Wilde to homosexual martyr, recording in his diary that Wilde was one of those who “though they may have erred, at least created no actual victims or sorrow.” The plight of Constance and the boys mattered to few.
As the trial progressed, there was damaging evidence from several of the young men implicated in the crimes and from chambermaids at the Savoy who thought they found fecal stains on bedsheets alleged to be from Wilde’s room (Wilde later told Frank Harris the sheets were Bosie’s). In his turn, Clarke challenged the credibility of the witnesses. The conspiracy charge was dropped, a paradoxical move in retrospect, since it denied the existence of a community of men who took sexual pleasure in other men, despite the fact that the trials described that community in detail. It was now a question of whether Wilde was guilty of indecent acts. After three hours of deliberation, one juror continued to hold out for acquittal. No verdict meant another trial. Bail was denied until the Reverend Stewart Headlam and Percy Douglas provided £1,250 each as surety.
On May 7, Wilde was freed for three weeks. He and Percy drove to an out-of-the-way hotel near St. Pancras, where he was asked to leave almost immediately after registering. Queensberry and his gang made sure that no hotel would admit him. Home was the last resort. Now seventy-four and as imperious as ever, Lady Wilde still lived at Oakley Street with Willie and his second wife, Lily. The two brothers had not spoken for nearly two years. Willie said his brother “came tapping with his beak against the window-pane, and fell down on my threshold like a wounded stag.” There was talk about whether Wilde should leave the country. His mother royally told him, “If you stay, 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.” Yeats later said that Wilde “made the right decision” and “owes to that decision half of his renown.”
Willie exulted in his brother’s vulnerability. Wilde spent the night on a camp bed in a corner near the fireplace like a stray dog. Willie drank too much and muttered, “At least my vices were decent.” Robert Sherard visited and found Wilde agitated and flushed with fever. One of the few times he left the house was to dine with the Leversons. Wilde called Ada Leverson “the Sphinx,” one of his more endearing pet names. Well-married to the son of a diamond merchant, she was a woman of spirit and brilliance, a humorist—for Punch—at a time when women were not encouraged to publish wit. It appealed to Wilde that she resembled Sarah Bernhardt, particularly in the way she wore her frizzy hair piled on top of her head. The Leversons took one look at Wilde and invited him to stay with them. They informed their servants they could leave with a month’s wages if they did not want to stay in the house with a notorious man—but none left.
Wilde took over their so
n’s nursery and insisted that the toys remain. His old hairdresser from happier days called daily to shave and wave his hair. He ate his meals in the nursery and joined the Leversons later formally dressed and wearing a buttonhole, amusing them with his remark about Dickens that “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” He talked about everything, including the effects of absinthe, except his problems. He recalled that once in Paris he drank absinthe for three nights straight, priding himself on his sobriety until the waiter came to water the sawdust. Then he saw tulips, lilies, and roses sprout and grow to make a garden in the café.
Constance visited him in the nursery, where he greeted visitors; for two hours she pleaded with him to leave the country. Few of Wilde’s friends considered how awful it was for her to learn the truth about her husband’s fondness for young men, then to see her friends turn away. She faced many decisions about her life and that of her children. Still, there she was holding Wilde’s hand amidst the rocking horse and building blocks, offering the only advice a wife could give: save yourself.
When Wilde’s trial opened on May 20, Clarke successfully argued that since conspiracy charges had been dropped in the previous trial, the two defendants be tried separately, but he failed to have Taylor, whom he knew would be convicted, tried last. After a day and a half of testimony, the jury deliberated for forty-five minutes and found Taylor guilty.
Wilde entered the dock to stand trial for the second time on May 22. Replacing Gill was Sir Frank Lockwood, the solicitor general, an indication that the Crown was seeking to convict. The same witnesses were heard and the same letters dissected. On the third day, when Clarke called Wilde to the witness box, he looked tired; there were dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes were disheveled. He had the look and hollow sound of a defeated man. But when Clarke asked him whether there was any truth in the accusations against him, he answered in a determined voice, “None whatsoever.” Clarke’s defense strategy was to make his client an obvious scapegoat of British hypocrisy. “This trial,” he told the court, “seems to be operating as an act of indemnity for all the blackmailers in London.” To no avail, he argued that the accusers should be the accused. The jury deliberated for two hours before rendering a guilty verdict.
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