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

by Franny Moyle

  On 9 March the same parties reassembled, but with one profound difference. Sir George Lewis was not present. In his stead a new solicitor, a Mr Russell, had taken over the defence of Queensberry and was now joined by Edward Carson QC. After the hearing, which went over similar ground to the first, the case was duly committed to trial in the Old Bailey.

  Oscar’s side may well have chosen to read Lewis’s sudden withdrawal from the case as a positive indication of the likely outcome. Oscar and Bosie seemed to be ploughing ahead with utter confidence in their ability to win, and were blinkered to the realities of their likely success in the case. Almost somnambulant, they moved onwards without realizing that the whole of London was predicting that, on the contrary, Oscar was about to be exposed. For Lewis’s resignation was less a sign of confidence in Queensberry than an indication that, with a sense of the evidence Queensberry was gathering, he was about to crucify his old friend and client. This was something he could not bring himself to do.

  Constance had made statement appearances at court in the past. But she was absent now from a case concerning her own husband. That Constance did not want to expose herself to public ridicule or abuse would have been perfectly understandable. But another contributing reason was almost certainly her ill health. In spite of her restful stay at ‘Babb’, in March Constance’s mobility problems had taken another turn for the worse. She had been temporarily forbidden to walk by her doctors and was consequently preparing to leave Tite Street for a short stay with her aunt Mary Napier in Lower Seymour Street, where she could be properly nursed. She was, she told Robbie Ross, preparing for an operation in the third week of March, though if Oscar wanted her in Tite Street before this date, she would postpone it until after the case.

  Bed-bound at her aunt’s house, Constance seems to have become reliant on Robbie’s preparedness to play messenger between his two friends Constance and Oscar Wilde. Constance must have been mortified then to discover that Bosie, on seeing his father committed to trial, had suggested that he and Oscar head for Monte Carlo, and that her husband, seemingly prepared to accede to any whim presented by his young friend, had agreed. Resigned, Constance sent some correspondence for Oscar to Robbie, along with a note pointing out that she had arranged for someone to care for Oscar’s mother, Lady Wilde while he was absent and she was incapacitated: ‘I don’t know Oscar’s address … as I am forbidden to walk I shall not be able to come over to Oakley Street, but I will leave directions about his mother having everything she needs.’43

  With a thirty-two-hour journey ahead of them, Oscar and Bosie must have left on or around 12 March to arrive in Monte Carlo, as noted in the Pall Mall Gazette, on the 14th. In spite of all the troubles at home, Bosie and Oscar launched themselves into one of the most fashionable, crowded, talked-about and written-about resorts in Europe, if not the world. They could not have appeared more publicity-seeking.

  They stayed in the Hôtel Prince de Galles for a week. Back in London, society was scandalized by the audacity of this holiday à deux. While the Pall Mall Gazette was careful to separate Oscar and Bosie’s simultaneous arrival at the Principality by a few lines in their foreign column, other papers were less afraid of innuendo. The Aberdeen Weekly Journal was quick to point out what readers of the Pall Mall Gazette might have missed: ‘The following two paragraphs appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette,’ it pointed out knowingly: ‘“The Marquess of Queensberry [meaning here Bosie] has arrived in Monte Carlo via Paris from London.” “Mr Oscar Wilde has arrived in Monte Carlo.”’

  Constance’s aunt, meanwhile, seems to have dissuaded her from having the surgery that was scheduled for March to correct her mobility problems,44 and apparently whatever home remedies and nursing she had provided her niece did some good, enough to get Constance up and about once more.

  There is an account of her at this period that indicates that she did attempt some normalcy in her life and even continued her ‘at homes’. One of her contemporaries encountered her at ‘a little party for table-turning’.

  On this particular occasion the charming but always a little clumsy Constance was carving a chicken, after communications with spirits had been completed. Suddenly the chicken slipped off its plate and ended up on the floor. Constance and her socialite friends laughed so much that they all ended up crying.

  ‘I am weak with laughing!’ she said, after this disaster, turning helplessly to me as she sank into a chair. She was dressed in some soft shade of grey with a picturesque large brimmed hat, from beneath which her laughing face looked out framed, in its soft brown hair and lit by big luminous eyes. She looked a mere girl, and was merrier than us all … A few days later, my friend came to me and said: ‘Constance Wilde told me she had taken such a fancy to you, and she did wish you would come to see her. Will you come on her next “At home” day?’ I went, but my friend and I were almost the only visitors. Mrs Wilde received us with the gentle courtesy which characterized her, but we noticed that that she seemed depressed and distracted, and as we walked away my friend remarked to me: ‘I cannot make out what has happened – usually the street is thronged with carriages and her rooms so full that one cannot even get near her – today there was no one there.’45

  This particular memoir puts this ‘at home’ merely two days before the libel trial, on Monday 1 April, or April Fool’s Day. It is entirely possible that memory has misted the exact timing of these events and that, although ringing very true in the description of Constance, they may have happened at an earlier date than suggested. But if accurate, it may suggest that there was a last-minute display of bravado by the Wildes as the full scale of Oscar’s folly in pursuing Queensberry finally dawned on Saturday 30 March.

  Oscar and Bosie returned from Monte Carlo on 25 March. Their initial action vis-à-vis the looming trial was to visit Mrs Robinson, a fashionable fortune-teller. It wasn’t the first time the duo had sought her prophecies; indeed, it seems that visiting her was a little ritual they enjoyed. The previous summer the Sybil of Mortimer Street, as Oscar called her, had suggested that he and Bosie would travel abroad together in January, a prophecy that no doubt encouraged Oscar to include Bosie in his holiday plans when Constance had first suggested he sample North Africa. Now she predicted ‘complete triumph’ in the trial. Effervescing with optimism, the couple chose to believe her.

  Despite her husband’s ridiculous and insensitive behaviour towards her in the period immediately before the trial, Constance did what she could for Oscar. She went to friends and relatives to raise as many funds as she could to help him: £50 was forthcoming from cousin Eliza and £100 from Aunt Mary Napier, to which she added a further £50 from her own funds.

  On 28 March the press reported that a trial date had finally been set and proceedings would begin at the Old Bailey on Wednesday 3 April. Queensberry was going to plead justification for the libel. Queensberry’s legal team had intimated to Oscar’s side the nature of the plea of justification, and promised that a full plea would be delivered by Saturday the 30th for the prosecution to study. In spite of these intimations, Oscar’s team wished ‘that this case should be speedily dealt with, and hence it was that the prosecution were not adopting the customary course of asking for a long adjournment in order to meet the plea of justification’.46

  This act of legal folly, which committed Oscar to trial without time to consider properly the defence Queensberry intended to level against him came to haunt him when, on 25 March, Queensberry’s team did indeed deliver their plea in full detail. In addition to accusations that Wilde’s literature referenced ‘the relations, intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural tastes habits and practices’ there was the far more devastating accusation that Oscar had solicited and incited young men to commit ‘sodomy and other acts of gross indecency and immorality’. There were fifteen different counts, in which Wilde was accused of soliciting more than twelve boys to commit sodomy, of whom ten were named. Edward Shelley’s name was there, as was Sidney Mavor’s. F
reddie Atkins, Maurice Schwabe and Alfred Wood were all noted. Then there was a man called Charles Parker, another called Ernest Scarfe and yet another, Herbert Tankard. Walter Grainger, the under-butler from Goring, was cited, as was Alfonso Conway, whom Oscar had met during his holiday in Worthing.

  While Oscar had been in Monte Carlo, Queensberry had been very busy. He had hired private detectives, who had turned over every stone in order to drag up the details of Oscar’s clandestine homosexual activities, and their findings had leaked into the wider gossip-ridden society. The full nature of Oscar’s friendship with young men, at which cartoonists and satirists had been hinting for so long, had been kept as an open secret for years within Oscar’s circle of liberal friends. They had guarded it so well that it had never passed into the hands of those who could use such information against Oscar. They had even guarded against Constance discovering the full truth about her husband. But in the past weeks one of the circle had broken ranks. A disgruntled actor, Charles Brookfield, who astonishingly was playing in An Ideal Husband, had revealed all he knew about Wilde to Queensberry’s investigative team. The news then spread like wildfire.

  And this is perhaps why, if the account is correct, Constance bravely held her ‘at home’ on April Fool’s Day. It is just possible that, knowing she was about to cancel it, Oscar had either written to her or visited her on that Saturday after he had seen the evidence against him and asked her to continue with her social engagements in a gesture of support and defiance. This is, of course, speculation. What is certain, however, is that he asked her to accompany him to dinner and then the theatre that evening. Oscar had finally realized that his wife was his greatest asset in this whole matter. Instead of visiting Monte Carlo, he should have spent more time with her, and certainly more time with her where the public could be reminded just how beautiful and loyal she was. Of course, Constance did exactly as she was asked. She put on one of her most beautiful outfits and made arrangements to go out. It was too little, far too late.

  And so on 1 April 1895 Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas arrived together at the St James’s Theatre to see The Importance of Being Earnest. Constance, wearing white fur, was on their arms. The message was clear. If Oscar Wilde’s wife had no issue with his relationship with Bosie Douglas, then neither should anyone else.

  George Alexander, the theatre’s manager, was starring as John Worthing, and the theatre was packed, as it had been ever since the show opened some six weeks previously. During the interval Oscar went back-stage to talk to Alexander but was horrified to find that, instead of supporting him, Alexander considered his appearance with Constance in the worst possible taste.

  Earlier that very day Wilde had lunched at the Café Royal with his friend the journalist and editor Frank Harris, and the latter had pleaded with him to flee to France with Constance. Previously Wilde had asked Harris to provide evidence in support of his literature at his trial, a request that Harris was in principle prepared to grant. But when Harris began to make his own inquiries among his society friends, reporters and police contacts about the way the trial was likely to go, he was mortified to find that the die seemed to have been already cast against Oscar. ‘Everyone assumed that Oscar Wilde was guilty of the worst that had ever been alleged against him; the very people who received him in their houses condemned him pitilessly … To my horror, in the public Prosecutor’s office, his guilt was said to be known and classified.’47

  Unpublished letters from Bosie’s cousin and Oscar’s old friend George Wyndham also indicate a widespread view that Oscar was going to lose the case.48 Oscar’s and Bosie’s apparent confidence was leaving them utterly blind to how they were perceived and to the mood of the people. Just because Oscar’s plays were a hit, this did not mean that he was. Many people were envious of him, and the public who knew him only by repute always loved to see a shining star fall.

  With Harris’s advice to drop the case and escape still ringing in his ears, Alexander’s words must have felt like a double blow. But yet again Oscar failed to take heed. After the interval, rather than taking Constance home, packing their bags and summoning the children from school, he returned to his seat in the theatre.

  According to Bosie’s memoirs, Constance suffered terribly under the strain of that night. She must have felt as if the entire auditorium was looking at her. And perhaps now she looked at the auditorium in a new light.

  Just a few weeks earlier the ‘Call Boy’ column of Judy: The Conservative Comic, a magazine that competed with Punch to amuse London’s chattering classes, had carried an acerbic satire on Wildeans in general as they were observed in the auditorium on the opening night of The Importance. Presented as the foil to those ‘New Women’ among whom Constance would have counted herself were these ‘New Men’. The article described them meeting after the show in the vestibule, where one

  was fastening a really charming silk wrapper round his delicate neck with a modest elegant diamond brooch, and to this same kindred spirit he suddenly gushed with pretty abandon ‘I’m awfully glad Oscar made it a serious comedy for trivial people. I would never have gone if he hadn’t, because my corset hurts me so ‘when I laugh. Besides, Trixie, dear boy, violent laughter reddens the face so and makes one look such a shocking fright’.

  This had been a seemingly harmless satire a few weeks ago, but now, with the public shame now being attached to Wilde and his circle, articles like these must have haunted Constance as she sat listening to her husband’s wit played out on stage. All her adult life Constance had gone her own way. Determined and forthright, stubborn even – some had called her foolish – she was now about to pay a high price for the streak of rebellion in her character that had led her into the arms of the man that she now must have known was about to ruin her life.

  It was the last time she ever went to the theatre with her husband. It may well have been the last time she saw him as a free man. And Bosie remembered that ‘When I said goodnight to her at the door of the theatre she had tears in her eyes.’49

  13

  The strife of tongues

  THE LIBEL TRIAL of the Marquess of Queensberry began on 3 April 1895 at the Old Bailey. Oscar put on a show, arriving at court in a brougham carriage with liveried servants in attendance. By the third day, after Queensberry’s defence team had raked through the names of all the young men Oscar had associated with as part of their plea of justification, Wilde withdrew his libel charges against the Marquess. The judge ruled that the Marquess had been justified in calling Wilde a sodomite in the public interest. Queensberry was applauded. Oscar had not only lost the case but was faced with £70 of costs. He would almost certainly also now be prosecuted for indecency. His reputation was shredded, his professional life was in dire straits and his personal life was the talk not just of the town but of the whole of the Western world.

  As the trial crumpled, Oscar returned to the hotel where he had been staying in Holborn to write a quick note to the press explaining his actions and then went on to Bosie’s hotel, the Cadogan. He wrote to Constance begging her to ‘allow no one to enter my bed-room or sitting room – except servants – today. See no one but your friends.’1 But it was Oscar’s friend Robbie Ross who went and broke the news to Constance in person. Oscar was beyond facing his wife. She was still staying in Lower Seymour Street with her aunt Mary Napier.

  Oscar was arrested that night at around 6.30 p.m., charged with various counts of indecency. He was thrown into the cells at Bow Street. Robbie gathered some possessions from the hotel, a change of clothes and such like, but the police did not allow him to leave them for Oscar. Oscar was now on remand, and he would live like all the other prisoners awaiting their hearing with the magistrates.

  That evening Constance’s family were distraught. Mary Napier, who had been nursing Constance in Lower Seymour Street, went around to Laura and Adrian Hope in Tite Street. She was, according to Laura’s diary, ‘in a most frantic state about her poor niece Constance Wilde’.2 Adrian Hope was well regarded wi
thin the Napier and Lloyd circles, and doubtless Aunt Mary was seeking both his advice and assistance. The very next day Bosie also called on the Hopes. He was not so interested in Constance. His mission was to raise bail money for Oscar. Interestingly, the Hopes were already showing their true colours with regard to Oscar. In Laura’s diary he is noted as a ‘ monstrous husband’ and a ‘fiend’.

  The Hopes’ response to Oscar was typical of the wider public damnation of Oscar. Bile poured forth as newspapers produced ream after ream of hostile prose. ‘We begin to breathe purer air,’ declared the Pall Mall Gazette, a magazine to which Oscar had once been such a welcome contributor. Penny dreadful pamphlets were issued. The Great West End Scandal related in voracious detail the ‘unnatural offences’ and ‘startling revelations’ that the Queensberry libel case had brought forth. And of course, many of those who had once welcomed Oscar into their homes were quick to burn the telltale letters, photographs and calling cards that were evidence of their former association.

  The day after Oscar’s arrest the Pall Mall Gazette reported that his name had been removed from the playbills and programmes of his plays at the Haymarket and St James’s theatres. It was noted elsewhere in the press that, although there had been no demonstrations outside the St James’s Theatre, where The Importance of Being Earnest was playing, the audience was notably smaller, and remarks were shouted from the gallery at the mention of ‘Worthing’, a place now linked in the public mind in with Oscar’s illicit sex sessions with Alfonso Conway.

  In contrast to this surge of public hatred towards Oscar, there was a huge groundswell of public support for Constance. She was instantly identified as a victim of the terrible tragedy. She became from this point onwards ‘poor Mrs Wilde’ in the public’s mind. Constance was inundated with letters, many from people she knew well, some of whom had met her merely in passing. Some people who didn’t know Constance at all felt moved to put pen to paper. They were united in their pity for her.