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

by Franny Moyle

  And so as the hot summer of 1893 got under way, Constance had lost any sway she had formerly held over her husband. Oscar was out of her control and totally captivated by Bosie. While Oscar had resisted Constance’s former suggestions that they should buy a property out of town, at Bosie’s suggestion he now took a year’s lease on the property in Goring and began a pattern of spending that, with the rental, cost the Wildes some £3,000. As a result, not only was Constance snubbed, but the likelihood of the proposed autumn in Florence was also greatly diminished.

  Although she and Cyril joined Bosie and Oscar in Goring in June, Constance and her son were an odd adjunct to the heady goings-on. Antics at the house were causing something of a stir in the village. One day the local vicar called to discover Oscar and Bosie wearing nothing but towels, larking on the lawn and turning a hosepipe on one another in the stifling heat. The new governess, Gertrude Simmons, whom Constance had employed to replace the French governess the boys had had at Babbacombe, also felt uncomfortable. One evening, during a firework display at a local regatta, she spotted Oscar with his arm around the boy employed to look after the boats.

  ‘I very much wish that Oscar had not taken the Cottage on the Thames for a year – things are dreadfully involved for me just now,’ Constance moaned to Georgina.26 It was the first of many complaints she would now begin to share with several of her female friends. If Constance had been in denial about her husband up to this point, it seems that the truth was now dawning on her. In August she visited Mrs Lathbury in Witley again and clearly confided some of her fears and troubles.

  ‘Mrs Lathbury has given me what I believe to be very good advice, and the advice that she always gives me, I shall try & follow it for 6 months and let you know the result,’ Constance rather gnomically relayed to Georgina after the visit.27

  Despite the year’s lease that he had taken, by September Oscar had done with Goring. He “was exhausted by his three-month stint with Bosie and needed to escape. He fled to Dinard in Brittany, where he spent the end of August and the first week of September. ‘I required rest and freedom from the terrible strain of your companionship,’ Oscar would later write to Bosie.28

  Some accounts place Constance and the boys with Oscar in France. But in fact her letters suggest that she stayed in England, moving between London and Goring. After returning from Witley, she entertained guests at Goring in Oscar’s absence, including her friend the painter Henriette Corkran. On 1 September she dashed to pick up Vyvyan in London and returned to Goring with him. Whereas Cyril and Governess Simmons had been resident in Goring for most of the holiday, Vyvyan had been with the Palmers again for the summer.

  Constance’s continuing habit of moving Vyvyan from pillar to post in this period begins to feel like the actions of a woman who was not only neurotic about her younger son’s health but had in fact lost the capacity to cope with the responsibility of a second child. Vyvyan was ‘sweet and affectionate but so extraordinarily wilful and wayward that he gets more and more difficult to manage’, Constance claimed.29

  Vyvyan could not stay by the Thames in the current climate, Constance wrote to Georgina. After just a few days with his brother there began a new search for another household that could take on the youngest member of the Wilde family. Initially Constance wrote to the Burne-Joneses in Rottingdean to see if they would have him. When the reply came that there was no room immediately in their household, he was dispatched to Brighton to stay with Constance’s mother.

  When Oscar returned from France, he settled up his bills in Goring and returned to London life. On 9 September or shortly thereafter Constance and Cyril also returned to London to greet Oscar, and, after a fortnight in Brighton, Vyvyan moved to nearby Rottingdean where, finally, room had become available for him in the Burne-Jones household.

  Constance left town to settle Vyvyan in with the Burne-Joneses and stayed a few days there herself. Her marital problems were now being widely discussed and it’s clear that the Burne-Joneses had their own advice to offer too. ‘I have taken Vyvyan to Rottingdean and Mrs Burne-Jones is going to look after him. As for Mr Burne-Jones I am quite in love with him! He sent his love to you and said that I was to tell you how I had last seen him – and this was wheeling his two grandchildren in their perambulators to save the nurse trouble,’ Constance related to Georgina. ‘[H]e asked me if I had any religion to help me, and I said that no-one could get on without it. This family life is so beautiful, Mr & Mrs Burne-Jones, Margaret & the husband and babes!! There I am going off again into dreams of what might be, wrong and foolish of me.’30

  By 28 September, Constance was on her way back to London but was dismayed that Oscar failed to meet her at the station, a courtesy that he had always extended to her in the past. In later years Bosie Douglas would ardently deny that his relationship with Oscar caused the deterioration of the Wilde marriage. He conceded that relations between the couple had become ‘distinctly strained’, noting that Oscar was now ‘impatient’ with Constance ‘and sometimes snubbed her, and he resented, and showed that he resented, the attitude of slight disapproval which she often adopted towards him’. With the most appalling lack of self-scrutiny, however, Bosie would claim that ‘to try and make out that this had anything whatever to do with me is simply dishonest and untruthful.’31

  There is no doubt that Oscar and Constance’s marriage hit its lowest point to date during that summer of 1893. And regardless of his inability to take responsibility for it, there is also no doubt that Bosie was largely the cause. And yet the sad truth is that Constance also helped exacerbate matters by allowing the chasm growing between her and her husband to widen. Her almost relentless absence from Tite Street at a time when everyone else around her could see Oscar courting very real danger is hard to explain, except perhaps in terms of her fleeing from a situation that she did not wish properly to confront. Constance was going out of her way now to avoid her husband. From Rottingdean she had attempted to negotiate a brief stay with Georgina in Babbacombe at the end of the month. If Georgina could not take her, she would have to return home to Tite Street, ‘but for reasons that I will explain when I see you I would rather not go there!’32

  Constance wrote a short children’s story at around this time, and perhaps in it there is some clue to the approach she took to her husband. Entitled ‘The Little Swallow’, Constance’s story was published in late 1892. It may have well been inspired by the pigeons that she often fed during her sojourns at Babbacombe, since it begins with an image of children ‘looking at the birds eating the crumbs that nurse has thrown out in the snow to them’.

  As the children watch the birds eating crumbs, their mother tells them another story about a ‘little bird’, this time ‘a tiny swallow’. The swallow is discovered on the ground by a young girl called Beatrice. It is spring and the ‘little swallow had tried to fly too soon, and so it had fallen down, and could not get back to its nest’. Beatrice nurses the swallow; she ‘picked it up and kissed it’. The swallow grows big and strong and soon learns to fly around inside Beatrice’s house. But one day, when Beatrice is out, someone opens a window and the swallow flies away, ‘singing for joy at the fresh air and bright sunshine’, and the child is heartbroken. Beatrice thinks she will never see the bird again, but then to her delight one evening the swallow comes back and visits her as she sits in an open window. Ever since then ‘he has come twice every day to get his food quite regularly … and Beatrice is very happy again’.33 Perhaps Constance felt that, in exchange for his freedom, Oscar, like the swallow in her story, would always return to the domestic security his wife essentially provided him.

  At the end of September, Constance went into a religious retreat at the convent of St John the Baptist at Clewer, Windsor. She was en route to Eton, which she was considering as a school for Cyril. The convent was part of a wider High-Church religious community in the area. It was associated with the Society of St John the Evangelist, the first Anglican religious community for men to be established sinc
e the Reformation.

  But Constance had specific associations with Clewer. Father Maturin, Oscar’s relative, had also taken a retreat with the Society of St John the Evangelist in the 1870s. Two of his sisters, Fidelia and Johanna, were now members of the convent, and Constance almost certainly went to see them and to seek some answers to her troubles within the austere atmosphere in which they lived. ‘Last night I was put ignominiously to bed and dosed with bromide and this morning I feel pretty bad!’ she related to Georgina.34

  Shortly after this she went to stay with the Thursfields at their home in Great Berkhamsted, before going on to spend some time in Leighton Buzzard with the medium Sarah Wagstaff, a homoeopath and clairvoyant who had treated and assisted both John Ruskin and Georgina in medical and spiritual matters, and who would have almost certainly been recommended by the latter to Constance. Cyril accompanied her on her travels while Vyvyan was still with the Burne-Joneses. At Leighton Buzzard Constance once again sought advice on how best to cope with and manage her domestic situation. And finally it seems that she was told some home truths.

  ‘Just back from Leighton Buzzard and have been district visiting since and am so tired. Mrs “Wagstaff has been so kind and helpful about the children and other things. When I see you, I will tell you, but it is too “intime” to write,’ Constance informed Georgina on her return to London on 9 October.35 She picked up the thread again the next day, revealing that ‘What Mrs Wagstaff told me in trance has not comforted me, but it is best to know the truth and I know that I of my own power can do nothing. I must pray for my boys and when they are older teach them to pray & to struggle.’36

  Otho would always deny that his sister knew about Oscar’s homosexual adventures, right up until his trial. But in the aftermath of what was to come he was keen to protect Constance’s moral reputation. Constance’s determination to pray for her boys surely indicates that finally she admitted the likelihood that Oscar’s friendship with Bosie was more than just that, and that her sons might one day be susceptible to similar sexual predilection.

  Amid their rapidly deteriorating relationship Oscar and Constance still had moments of intimacy, but they were few and far between. Constance was becoming increasingly tempted by Catholicism, an inclination that had been nothing but intensified by her recent visit to Rome and her introduction to the Maturins. Oscar too from his earliest student days had always been attracted to Rome. In October 1893 the couple found themselves alone at Tite Street and began to discuss the matter.

  I have been having wonderful talks with Oscar lately and I am much happier about him. But he thinks that it would be ruin to the boys if I became a ‘Cat’. No Catholic boy is allowed to go to Eton or to take a scholarship at the University … imagine my surprise to find that Oscar goes to Benediction at the Oratory sometimes & other things that he does surprise me more still! He will not go himself with me there, but he would like me to go & burn candles at the Virgin’s altar and offer up prayers for him. Remember that I can never broach these subjects to him myself and it may be years before he speaks to me again like this, but I shall not forget that he has these moods, and last evening he said a great deal to me. I shall go to the Oratory tomorrow and I shall burn a candle for Oscar and one for Mother.37

  Perhaps Constance failed to pick up that Oscar’s request to offer prayers for him might have been, if not a direct plea for help, something close to an admission from him that he was now in deep trouble. Bosie had in fact left Oxford University in June, having refused to sit his exams. During the holiday in Goring, Oscar had tried to help his lover as best he could and had suggested Bosie translate Salome, which Oscar had written in French, into English, and share something of the credit when the work was published in its English edition. But a terrible crisis had occurred when, by the end of August, it was apparent to Oscar that Bosie’s translation was less than good. Throughout September the two had argued over the book’s proofs, with Bosie rejecting Oscar’s corrections and Oscar refusing to accept a second-rate version of his work.

  ‘After a series of scenes culminating in one more than usually revolting, when you came one Monday evening to my rooms accompanied by two male friends, I found myself actually flying abroad next morning to escape from you,’ Wilde would later recall, ‘giving my wife some absurd reason for my departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you might follow me by the next train.’38 The incident was particularly painful and embarrassing for Constance, since it coincided with a major family event. Her cousin Lilias was getting married to one Henry Bonar, who worked in the consular service in Japan. Oscar was naturally expected to attend the ceremony.

  ‘Yesterday I made the acquaintance of my new cousin Henry Bonar … he had a godmother Constance and after her is called Constant, so … we made friends over the beautiful name. I do love my name so much, and think it one of the most beautiful names in the world; don’t you? I think that one should have beautiful names given to one and that then one should try and live up to them.’39 So began Constance in that day’s letter to Georgina, before revealing rather desperately: ‘I am unhappy because Oscar is not at all well, and had to fly off yesterday morning to Calais to meet a friend there; he declined to go to Paris to the friend so they agreed to meet halfway. I have got a Liberty dress for the wedding and Oscar is not here to see it!’40

  Constance’s reference to Oscar’s health in the same breath as mentioning his unexpected departure for France is intriguing. Her letters of this period are full of references to him being ‘unwell’. It’s tempting to see Constance’s references to Oscar’s health as some form of unconscious euphemism for his homosexuality. Just as some medics considered it a curable illness, it’s just possible that Constance was discussing possible ‘cures’ for her husband’s condition with her close female friends, such as Mrs Lathbury.

  If Constance had resolved to accept her husband’s homosexuality, whether its source was an illness or no, she was not prepared to absolve him of poor conduct. Constance was furious when Oscar announced he would not attend Lilias’s wedding. When he returned to London the next day, he was still smarting from what had clearly been a fiery row between the two of them.

  ‘Oscar is back in town but not with me,’ Constance confided to Georgina. ‘I hope he comes back tonight – all my old misery over again and another fiasco.’41

  12

  Modern-day Martha

  LILIAS’S WEDDING PROVED a watershed moment. As Oscar was sitting on the train hurtling across France, he realized ‘what an impossible, terrible and utterly wrong state my life had got into, when I, a man of world-wide reputation, was actually forced to run away from England, in order to try and get rid of a friendship that was entirely destructive of everything fine in me either from the intellectual or ethical point of view’.1

  On returning home to face the music, he resolved to change. And change he did. In late October and November 1893 the signs Constance had desperately sought – that perhaps there was still hope for her marriage – began to emerge. For a start, Oscar refused to see Bosie. He even took steps to have Bosie sent abroad. He wrote to Bosie’s mother, Lady Queensberry, who, as Wilde himself conceded, had ‘on more than one occasion’ consulted him about her wayward son, and expressed his concerns.

  ‘Bosie seems to me to be in a very bad state of health,’ Oscar wrote. ‘He is sleepless, nervous, and rather hysterical … He does absolutely nothing, and is quite astray in life, and may … come to grief … Why not try and make some arrangements of some kind for him to go abroad for four or five months, to the Cromers2 in Egypt if that could be managed?’3 Bosie was duly sent to Cairo. And the minute he was gone it was as if a cloud had lifted in Tite Street.

  Constance, sensing the change, acted on some advice that Georgina Mount-Temple had offered her in a previous year. If she had had plans to spend the autumn out of town she cancelled them, and instead sorted out Tite Street. It had been empty for so long, it was time to turn the house into a home once more.
She began the search for staff, not least a cook. As always, her trials and tribulations were related in detail to Georgina: ‘I am Martha today troubled with many things. My new cook comes in tonight & my temporary one left me yesterday in a rage. So I have had to cook breakfast & dinner for the household – very amusing for a change but tiring too. To-night Oscar and I feast at the club.’4

  On another day it was not the cooking she was attending to, but the household laundry.

  I wish you could see me in my new capacity learning ‘gracious household ways’ doing my housekeeping properly! This morning I have arranged all my house linen in a new linen cupboard which I have had made, and I am very proud and pleased at my household stores. I have got a charming cook & housemaid, and once more I am happy in my house. To-night Oscar and I … dine at the Club and go to hear William Morris lecture on Printing.5

  Mr and Mrs Wilde began to resemble the society couple they had once been. They were dining together regularly and attending lectures together. They were noticeable as a couple at their club, and were once again visible in London’s theatres. They saw Love’s Labour’s Lost, Measure for Measure and School for Scandal, all within one week in November, and discussed the performances with one another as they had used to. ‘The Shakespeare play last night was very interesting but exceedingly badly acted,’ Constance twittered happily to Georgina. ‘Oscar says that he never for a moment missed the stage scenery, and believes that it is a quite unnecessary adjunct to a really good play. However we did not sit it thro’, because the poor acting made it so dull.’ School for Scandal, on the other hand, went down well with the Wildes, and Constance admitted ‘it was nice being there with Oscar.’6