Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

by Franny Moyle

  Your mother expected that you would write & condole with her on the loss of her income. You have not followed her unexpressed but oh! how expressive! wishes – in this respect. Was this right? Oh No … it was wrong. Was I say for there is no need now to write. The arrow smote deep but it has been stayed by the hand of whom do you think? – the aged Octogenarian who in spite of the storm of opposition raised by the assembly of Aunts & sisters in law has ventured to express his approbation of your humble servant’s merits by bestowing on her £150 a year, £100 to be given to her guardian for her maintenance, £50 to be devoted to the purchase of her Dress, the payment of any studies or Concerts she may choose to attend & in fact for her ‘menus plaisirs’ in general.22

  Rather amusingly, and entirely understandably, Constance suggested buying the meanest possible wedding present for her mother, within the terms of the brief that Ada had clearly set them. ‘A propos of the honourable lady about to be married,’ Constance informed her brother, ‘it is necessary that we give her a present, & that present must be … costly … she has fixed her affections on a plain gold bracelet … I find the smallest is £7.7.6.’23

  Ada Lloyd eventually walked down the aisle with George Swinburne-King on 19 October 1878 at St James’s Church in Sussex Gardens. The newly-weds headed off for their honeymoon, and Constance was dispatched to one of her aunts in Norwood, south London.

  Constance’s grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had three daughters in addition to his sons Horace and Frederick. The family was close-knit and would remain so throughout Constance’s life. Frederick died early; Emily never married and lived with her father in Lancaster Gate; Carrie had married a physician, Dr Kirkes; and Louisa Mary, known as ‘Aunt Mary’, married William Napier, second son of the Trafalgar veteran and former Lord of the Bedchamber to King William IV, Baron Napier.

  It was in Aunt Mary Napier’s cottage in the leafy, smoke-free environs of Norwood that Constance now found herself at the end of October 1878. If she hoped that her mother’s attitude towards her would be changed by marriage, she was to be disappointed. ‘I have not had a line from my parents have you?’ Constance inquired of Otho. ‘Affectionate people!! Before I left Ella had had two letters from Mama, one from Mr King & Tizey … grandpapa one from Mama, and Aunt Emily one from Mama on Monday. Why is it I am always snubbed? However Aunt Mary is more than kind to me & Mr Hope too who admires you immensely.’24

  The reference to Mr Hope is to Adrian Hope, a young nephew of William Napier, who would almost certainly have been invited over by Aunt Mary to meet Constance, perhaps with matchmaking in mind. At twenty, Constance was eminently marriageable. Her mother’s recent marriage and subsequent lack of interest in her only contributed to her status as family burden, the responsibility for whom would now be shared out between her grandfather and his daughters. In the 1870s Constance was living in an era when middle- and upper-class women still did not work and were not expected to look after themselves. Despite any ambitions they might harbour, there was still no career path or opportunity for a stratum of society that had traditionally been supported by family or husbands. The era of the career woman remained far off, and those women who had found a living by writing or painting were still few and far between.

  Adrian Hope must have been an attractive prospect as a potential husband, but there was clearly no spark. The irony is that later in life Adrian and Constance would indeed become intimately entwined, but in circumstances that neither of them could have foreseen in these early days.

  It was not as if Constance was averse to marriage at this time; she simply lacked confidence when it came to young men. She had a tendency to lapse into what appeared to many to be a sulky silence when in company. This tendency, almost certainly an attitude she adopted when struck dumb by the extreme shyness that remained a lasting legacy of her abuse, was something that haunted her for the rest of her life. ‘Sulky’ was an adjective often applied to her by detractors. The photograph in The Young Woman in 1895 serves as a reminder that, years after she had conquered her nerves, she could still unthinkingly appear gloomy and melancholic.

  ‘Oh me! When shall I marry me?’ Constance moaned to Otho around this time. ‘You say I shall have a chance of marrying. I see none. I have no beauty, no conversation, no small talk even to make me admired or liked … I shall be an old maid, I am doomed to it & you will see your Sister walking about with 6 cats and half a dozen dogs.’25

  While Constance was staying with Aunt Mary, the debate raged over where the newly wed Swinburne-Kings would live and whether Constance would live with them. Constance suggested a move that would take them into South Kensington, into the artistic hub that surrounded the South Kensington Museum – now the Victoria and Albert Museum. Constance’s friend Lucy Russell lived in nearby Queen’s Gate, and Constance mooted a similar address. Ada’s response was typically nasty: ‘I suggested to Mama to take a house in Queens Gate but she nearly fainted at the idea, for it suddenly occurred to her that Miss R lives there & she said she would not be near any of my friends for £1000!’26

  Although Otho had been unable to protect his sister from Ada’s abuse up to this point, the marriage presented a new opportunity. He visited John Horatio and insisted that Constance must be removed from her mother. Ada put up no resistance. And so Mr Swinburne-King and his daughter moved into Devonshire Terrace, and Constance moved out. Her new home was to be that of her grandfather, 100 Lancaster Gate, with John Horatio and Auntie Emily in loco parentis.

  Now it would be these two charged with the future of their shy, studious ward. That within the next few years she would metamorphose into one of the most talked-about women in London was hardly an outcome they could have foreseen.

  2

  Terribly bad taste

  IN THE SECOND half of the nineteenth century Hyde Park had become a pleasure ground surrounded by the palaces of the rich. It was in one such palace that, by the age of twenty, Constance Lloyd found herself resident.

  Grandpa Horatio’s house at Lancaster Gate was enormous and imposing. Built as part of an ambitious scheme in the mid-1850s around the newly built Christ Church, it was one of a row of huge houses, set back from the road and overlooking Hyde Park, that had been described as the most handsome terrace in the whole of London.1 John Horatio was a man who had made his mark, and his address was testimony.

  From her new home Constance would have seen the full anatomy of London life. Early in the morning, from half-past seven, the so-called ‘Liver Brigade’ would be out riding. Taking their constitutional gallop, shaking the liver ahead of the day’s toil, London’s top judges, barristers, surgeons and millionaires would be seen clad in silk hats and black hunting coats, breeches and shining patent boots. When they had headed off for the City and Inns of Court, nursemaids in their smart grey flannel uniforms would emerge with perambulators, and governesses would march smart children up and down.

  Sometimes Constance would get a sight of a protest, since the park remained the arena for political manifestation since the great Chartist and reformist protests of the 1840s, 50s and 60s. And then in July she would have witnessed the municipal gardeners lay out thousands of potted palms and semi-tropical plants that would transform the park for its ten-week ‘summer season’ into something altogether more exotic.

  But prestigious and well located though it was, Constance did not much enjoy ioo Lancaster Gate. Over-sized for its occupancy of three, it was an austere and un-homely place for a modern young woman to live and, as she later told Oscar, she never felt more than a guest there. Although Constance adored her grandfather, her aunt Emily was old-fashioned and disapproved of many of her ambitions. Nevertheless, beneath Constance’s quiet exterior lay a determined soul. Perhaps not quite the ‘smouldering volcano’ that her mother had alleged, but certainly someone with her own strong mind, who was not prepared to toe the line just for the sake of convention. And so Constance pursued her interests as best she could.

  She began to display an increasing passi
on for art and culture, most specifically the visual and decorative arts. Constance makes much mention of the controversial Grosvenor Gallery in her letters in the early 1880s. This was a temple to contemporary art in New Bond Street, designed as an Italian palazzo. The art lovers who worshipped there would pass through its imposing Palladian entrance salvaged from the demolished church of Santa Lucia in Venice, before entering a huge room adorned with a blue coved ceiling on which James McNeill Whistler had painted the phases of the moon and a sprinkling of golden stars. Below a green velvet dado, red silk walls punctuated by Ionic pilasters rescued from the old Italian opera house in Paris displayed the best avant-garde art money could buy.

  But the Grosvenor was more than just a gallery: it was also the social nexus for the alternative, Aesthetic, liberal-minded set and was particularly women-friendly. Since its inception it had garnered a reputation for supporting, among others, ‘feminist’ artists, many of whom would go on to become firm friends of Constance and Oscar. Painters such as Emily Ford, Louise Jopling, Evelyn de Morgan and Henrietta Rae had their work shown here. They, like Constance, would have enjoyed the gallery restaurant, which specifically catered for ladies lunching unchaperoned, as well as its library and club, which had a dedicated ladies’ drawing room.

  Oscar, who even at university in Oxford was aligning himself with the Aesthetic group of poets and painters, had of course made a point of getting invited to the opening of the Grosvenor in 1877, and years later he summed up its enduring cachet in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘You must certainly send it [the painting of Gray] next year to the Grosvenor,’ Wilde’s Lord Henry Wooton urges the painter Basil Hallward.

  The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have either been so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.2

  Constance dashed to the Grosvenor on occasion to meet friends, although there is a sense that she did so with some secrecy. In one letter to Otho she confided that ‘as Grand Papa was in the City and Auntie at Windsor, I rushed off there in a hansom and … lunched there’.3

  At the Grosvenor, Constance met like-minded friends and solicited introductions to some of the contemporary artists she so admired. One man whose friendship she cultivated in 1881 was the sculptor Richard Belt. Constance’s fascination with Belt, a controversial figure, suggests a susceptibility to men whose character and profession placed them with at least a foot in the demi-monde.

  In 1879 Belt had won a prestigious competition to create a monument to Lord Byron, and in 1880 Constance would have seen his huge bronze seated figure of the poet unveiled close to Hyde Park Corner. Just after it was unveiled, an article in Vanity Fair suggested that, far from being by Belt, the statue had in fact been farmed out by him to foreign assistants, as had all the output of his studio since 1876. The source of this libel was another sculptor, Charles Lawes, whom Belt had once assisted and whom he promptly sued. This national scandal was in full swing when Constance and Belt began seeing one another. She visited his studio, had dinner with him and began to make her own investigations into this man, whom she clearly found fascinating and with whom she obviously shared some social connections.

  ‘Miss Emily A is going to take me to see the Pennants in Westminster next Wednesday in order to ask them about Mr Belt,’ she wrote to Otho.

  [T]he H’s had not heard of the libel and are most deeply interested in it and of course having heard of his talents when quite a boy, don’t believe a word of it … I’ve told Auntie that I am going but she does not remember the connection. Mr Belt, I daresay you will remember, was in Mr T’s school, and it was he who first discovered his talents.4

  Belt won his libel case, and Lawes was faced with £5,000 worth of damages. Just five years later, however, in another scandal involving the sale of fake diamonds to aristocrats that could easily have formed part of the plot of one of Oscar’s plays, Belt was convicted of fraud and sent to gaol.5

  It was not just art and its colourful characters that Constance also found herself drawn to. The Aesthetic movement had generated a new level of appreciation for the decorative arts, and craft skills such as embroidery, enjoying heightened status and recognition, became recognized outlets for female talent in the 70s. In 1872 the Royal School of Art Needlework had been established to provide suitable work for gentlewomen. The leading Aesthetic artists of the day supplied designs for the attendees of the school to work. Above and beyond this institution, the arts-led interior design practice of Morris & Co. – where William Morris’s own wife, Jane, and daughter May took an active role in supervising and commissioning the needlework – had given embroidery a new aspect. No longer a pastime where ladies produced their samplers in the drawing room, art needlework was now fashionable and for public consumption, considered a vital contribution to modern interiors.

  Constance, embodying this moment, explored her own needlework skills. Her staunchly Christian aunt Carrie marshalled Constance’s help in decorating the new high school for girls in Baker Street. This school was the philanthropic project of Mr and Mrs Francis Holland. A notable clergyman, Holland raised money and bought the site at 6 Baker Street and erected a modest building that could be converted into warehouses should the school fail. The great and the good from the local Christian community dived in to decorate the plain whitewashed walls in the weeks before the school opened in October 1878.

  Constance prepared a series of embroideries to run the length of the school’s ‘Ambulatory’. She spent days working the words ‘Hearken unto me, O ye children, for blessed are all they that keep my ways. Hear instruction to be wise’ on blue sham leather, carefully stitching each letter in a gothic script some five inches high in black, red and gold. Constance’s love of art needlework never left her. Years later she presented Otho with a fire screen that she had ‘embroidered on blue Morris linen in pink and green silks’ and mounted in a Liberty ash frame that was stained green.6

  For her efforts for the new girls’ high school Aunt Carrie took Constance to meet the great Francis Holland himself, but Constance performed poorly, ‘simply shaking with fright’ throughout the interview, despite the fact that Holland was charming and full of fun. ‘I do think I am the greatest donkey that ever lived I am so afraid of people,’ she noted afterwards.7

  Eventually, however, distance from her mother and the benign effect of her grandfather’s kindness allowed Constance to blossom. Slowly her sense of humour, her intelligence and her love of life began to surface, and her shyness began to recede. The girl who had found herself unable to speak in front of Francis Holland began to transform into a sharp, opinionated woman with a quirky sense of fun.

  ‘In a discussion she was surprisingly quick at detecting the flaw and weak point in any reasoning,’ Otho recollected. ‘She could carry her own in an argument well, and always had the courage of her opinions,’ along with a ‘quiet humour and a sense of the ridiculous’.8

  Constance’s natural interest in the arts reflected that of her grandfather, who had a keen interest in painting and something of a collection. Once Constance was out of her mother’s reach, John Horatio’s influence’s in this sphere began to be felt. A year after her mother wed, she found herself on a tour of Wales with her grandfather, Aunt Emily and Otho, staying for a few days in the Royal Oak Hotel, Betws-y-Coed.9

  The small village of Betws had become an artists’ colony in the mid-nineteenth century, with several eminent painters resident in the area and others flocking to capture the surrounding Conwy Valley. And when it wasn’t painters, it was art enthusiasts, the fashion-conscious and intellectuals who were also holidaying there, hoping to soak up the painterly spirit that prevailed and perhaps secure a work of art too. Constance would have thumbed through the visitors’ book at the Royal Oak and seen the sketches left there by the many artists who had stayed there before her, some of whom w
ere the country’s leading landscape painters.

  Constance was fired up by the artists she encountered. She delighted in meeting the well-known landscape painter Frederick William Hulme, who was a regular visitor to the village, and while in Betws her grandfather bought a picture of Pont-y-Pair from another painter, named Stevens.

  Constance flourished in this artistic atmosphere, and although her stay at the Royal Oak was relatively short, her newly emerging conversational skills managed to make an impression on another cultural tourist, Henry Fedden, a Bristol sugar merchant. He and Constance got along swimmingly.

  I was so sorry to leave Betws, I had just begin to feel at home there, and I had made a friend whom I need not say I have been teased to any extent about, because he was, well, a he! Mr Fedden. He was married tho’ and lives at Bishop Stoke about 4 miles from Clifton … He has asked them to let me come and stay with him & his wife, which of course I should like to do immensely.10

  Constance’s desire to visit the Feddens in Bristol was granted a few weeks later. In October she found herself installed in their comfortable home in Stoke Bishop, just outside the city, and thus began what would prove a very formative visit for her. The Feddens had a strong appetite for culture. They took Constance to concerts and soirées; they visited a loan exhibition; in the evenings Constance played the piano and Henry Fedden sang, and afterwards they would listen to his wife reading.

  During her stay Constance was taken aboard the training ship Formidable, anchored in the Bristol Channel. This marvellous old fighting ship was Henry Fedden’s philanthropic project. He, along with other Bristol businessmen, had leased it from the Admiralty and had turned it into a training vessel, not for privileged children but for street urchins. The Formidable could take up to 350 ‘lost boys’ and train them up into seamen, who could then find useful employment on one of the many commercial vessels that passed through the city’s port.