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

by Franny Moyle

  It seems that the request for Constance to ‘have her own money’ represents a desire on Constance’s behalf to have complete financial freedom from her husband, such as would be accorded her by the courts were she to divorce him. Constance was still seeking to avoid a formal divorce, the attendant proceedings, costs and publicity, but she wanted nevertheless the kind of monetary separation that a divorce would provide. And so, as part of this desire, the thorny issue of the life interest was raised again.

  Adela continued: ‘Can you get at the friends of O’s who are bidding for the life interest, and will you get their consent and empower me to say that they will not attempt to bid against her if she will appeal for Oscar’s release?’

  More Adey did not comply with Adela’s request. Instead he wrote a letter to Constance explaining the nature of the bid for the life interest. This letter was sent to Adela, who in turn sent it to the Ranee for Constance’s attention. In the letter Adey revealed that, for those on Oscar’s side of the fence, there were mounting suspicions that those advising Constance were hostile to Oscar. In effect, Adey was suggesting he did not entirely trust Constance’s word and wanted more assurances.

  ‘I am instructed by admirers of Mr Oscar Wilde to buy the Life interest under your marriage settlement for his benefit,’ he explained to Constance.

  My clients are persons who have never had the pleasure of his acquaintance nor of yours. They are actuated by admiration for his talents and profound pity for his lamentable circumstances … They understand that you wish to purchase the life interest yourself and they are anxious to meet your wishes to the best of their power. It was their original intention to hand over to you upon what ever terms you pleased, one half for settlement upon your sons. The other half they proposed to settle upon Mr Wilde … As an alternative they would still be willing to withdraw altogether if you would secure to Mr Wilde in some other way the enjoyment of an annuity in the event of your predeceasing him … Mr Oscar Wilde has had no voice with my clients and indeed as far as I know imagines that their efforts have ceased.17

  Constance replied, but her letter does not exist. Adela’s comments on it do, however, and from them one can piece together that Constance was not interested in bargaining with people she did not know. Her conditions were that those attempting to buy the life interest must back off. She would not enter into promises about other annuities or be bargained with.

  Constance had always been clear-headed when it came to business. As a young woman she had been through the details of financial settlements between her grandfather and mother; she had worked with lawyers to protect her brother’s assets from his creditors; and now she was going to fight as hard as she could for her own. What is more, she had done her duty by Oscar. She had bailed out his debts more than once, and helped his mother financially. Otho had even loaned Oscar £500, of which some outstanding amount was still due. Her sense of indignation was strong in the matter of the life interest. And she had nothing really to lose. For what Oscar’s side had not worked out was that, if she divorced Oscar, the life interest would be voided anyway. The stupidity of their position only served to inflame her further.

  At first More Adey actually doubted that such a hard-nosed letter could be genuine. Bizarrely, he asked Adela Schuster if she thought the letter was some kind of forgery. Adey perhaps knew only a version of Constance informed by her somewhat shy and quiet manner. He was not, perhaps, familiar with the fiery, determined and highly intelligent version of Constance that Otho, Oscar and her close female friends, such as Georgina Mount-Temple, would have recognized. Adela, however, considered the letter genuine. What is more, she was in perfect sympathy with Constance and told More Adey as much.

  ‘The opposition of O’s friends sets her against her husband and will probably interfere with her being kind to him when he comes out,’ Adela warned Adey in August 1896.

  In every way – financially and socially he is very dependent on her good will … Whatever O’s friends may do or say she will certainly attribute their action in this matter to him, the more so as she knows that they have seen him several times, & she will soon naturally believe that they would not act in defiance of his wishes. All this is irritating her against him. This in itself seems to me cause enough to drop all opposition to her, and then will you consider what is the advantage you gain for O – set against all this possible loss?18

  Adey failed properly to heed what in fact was a very sound assessment of the situation. He wrote to Oscar and muddied the water further. This time, although he suggested that Oscar should perhaps accede to some of Constance’s wishes, Adey warned Oscar against signing any legal documents that would in any way diminish his paternal rights over his children. He suggested that Constance’s advisers were in fact now declared enemies of Oscar.

  In the meantime, in July, Oscar petitioned the Home Secretary himself for an early release. He argued that his crimes were in fact ‘forms of sexual madness’ and that he had been suffering from ‘the most horrible form of erotomania which made him forget his wife and children’.19 He also complained that his health was deteriorating, he was becoming deaf and his eyesight was concerning him. His petition failed to deliver the early release he had sought, but the authorities did grant him permission for more writing and reading material in his cell.

  In September, Oscar wrote to Adey. He had now obviously considered Adey’s suggestions that Constance’s family and advisers were hostile to him and suggested that, when it came to the guardianship of his children, someone from Constance’s family should be resisted. He suggested Arthur Clifton, but Clifton himself declined this suggestion.

  It is unclear whether Oscar’s views regarding a suitable guardian were made known to Constance. If so, they would only have been another among several aggravations that had now placed her side and Oscar’s in conflict. It is little surprise that, by October, Constance had had enough. She instructed Hargrove to write to Oscar directly and make the simple point: do as she required or she would divorce him. The divorce courts would annul any claim he had on her life interest and under current circumstances would award her the guardianship of the children.

  Oscar’s mental state had deteriorated greatly during his time in gaol. After suffering terrible health problems that ranged from bouts of dysentery to the problems with his hearing and sight that he mentioned in his petition, his mind was also becoming fragile. Arthur Clifton, who visited him in October 1896, noted how shockingly thin his appearance was. He was broken-hearted and felt the victim of the most savage punishment.

  Malnourished, suffering from lack of sleep and hard labour, Oscar had become grateful for any tiny kindness and irked by any further distress visited on him. He had been greatly moved by Constance when she had visited him in gaol, and he was grateful for the time and effort friends such as Adey were spending on his behalf. But when cold, business-like letters from Constance’s solicitors arrived, compared with the persuasive letters that Adey wrote against Constance and her advisers, Oscar far too quickly began to resent what he saw as the high-handed, dictatorial manner in which a wife who had once been utterly dedicated to him now behaved.

  In December 1896, Hargrove received notice from the Official Receiver that indeed half the life settlement in the Wilde marriage was about to be sold to Oscar’s friends. Hargrove wrote to Oscar and repeated the position that, if this sale went through, Constance would withdraw her offer to pay Oscar £150 a year on release from prison.

  But now Oscar had become fully persuaded by Adey and others. Living under the misapprehension that his friends had raised a considerable sum of money for him that would take care of his expenses for a couple of years after his release from prison, he decided to thumb his nose at Constance’s offer of an annual income and instead pursue the life interest against her wishes. He wrote to More Adey to this effect.

  By the end of December, Oscar’s position was emboldened yet further. He decided now that he “wanted an income as well as the life interest, and
he wrote to his newly appointed solicitors, Stoker and Hansell, to make this point clear.

  ‘With regard to money affairs, the offer made to me by my wife of £150 a year is, of course, extremely small,’ he wrote.

  I certainly hoped that £200 would have been fixed on. I understand my wife alleges as one of the reasons for £150 being selected that she wishes to pay off a debt of £500 due from me to her brother Otho Lloyd at the rate of £50 a year. I think, with Mr Adey, that I should have the £200 if that debt should be paid off by me.20

  Oscar was talking as if he were in a position to bargain. And he continued in the same vein: ‘With regard to my life interest I sincerely hope that half at least will be purchased for me.’

  Constance was left with little choice. She and her lawyers began once again to explore the divorce proceedings that they had delayed for eighteen months. She also moved forward with sorting out the custody of the boys.

  On 12 February 1897 the courts awarded Constance custody of the children, and she became their legal guardian alongside a responsible person of her choosing: her relative and former Tite Street neighbour Adrian Hope. In terms of divorcing Oscar, matters proved more complex. Given the amount of time that had elapsed since Oscar’s trial, from a legal perspective Constance could no longer divorce him for the ‘crimes’ revealed in the cases of 1895. Her reluctance to divorce her husband after such revelations amounted to her condoning them, in legal terms at least. If she were to obtain a divorce, Constance would have to bring about a new court case and prove new grounds. So now the prospect of a judicial separation was revisited.

  By April 1897, Oscar was preparing himself for his release from gaol. He would have served two years by 20 May 1897. As he began to get his affairs together, the full folly of More Adey and Robbie Ross dawned on him. Finally it became clear to him what Constance had grasped from the outset: that judicial separation would mean he would have to relinquish any claim on the life interest anyway. He suddenly realized the stupidity of his friends in alienating Constance. This fact was brought home all the harder by news that, contrary to his belief that his friends had raised a substantial sum of money for him to live on, in fact only very limited funds were available to him. His friends had taken Constance for a fool but, as Oscar knew well, that was one thing Constance could never be accused of.

  Writing to Robbie Ross, Oscar now reminded him of the letter in which he instructed Robbie not to go against Constance’s wishes. It was, of course, far too late.

  ‘You were very wrong not to do so,’ he rebuked his friend.

  Again how silly the long serious letters advising me not to surrender my rights over my children … My rights! I had none. A claim that a formal appeal to the judge in Chambers can quash in ten minutes … How much better if you had done as I asked you, as at that time my wife was kind and ready to let me see my two children and be with them occasionally … My wife was very sweet to me, and now she, very naturally, goes right against me. Of her character also a wrong estimate was made. She warned me that if I let my friends bid against her she would proceed to a certain course, and she will do so.21

  By May 1897, Hargrove had drawn up a deed of separation that saw the life assurance returned in full to Constance and offered Oscar an income of just £150 a year. Oscar attempted to push back on a clause that suggested this income was dependent on him not mixing with disreputable people. But even in this he failed, and finally he was required not only to accept humbly what was offered but also to sign a deed of separation ‘of the most pitifully stringent kind and of the most humiliating conditions’.

  On 19 May 1897, Oscar Wilde left prison. He was so furious with More Adey over the management of his affairs with Constance that he had attempted to prevent his friend meeting him and accompanying him from the gaol, as had been planned. This inclination on Oscar’s part had perhaps been heightened by the fact that Constance, against all the odds, made an unexpected last-minute gesture of kindness. Made aware that talk about substantial funds raised for Oscar were in fact not going to be forthcoming, she herself made sure that his immediate expenses would be covered as he began his new life. Oscar revealed to his friend Reggie Turner that ‘The person who has sent me money to pay for my food and expenses on going out is my dear sweet wife.’22

  And so with his wife’s money in his pockets Oscar left Reading gaol on 18 May and travelled by cab to Twyford station with two prison guards. He took the train to London, where he spent a final night in Pentonville prison. On the morning of 19 May, Oscar met More Adey and the Revd Stewart Headlam (who had stood him bail two years earlier) and took a cab to the latter’s house. That afternoon he went to Newhaven with Adey and then took the night ferry to Dieppe.

  By the time he arrived in France, Oscar had assumed his new identity. He was to be known as Sebastian Melmoth, a name inspired by the novel written by his forebear Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer. He wrote instantly to Constance. She received the letter four days later and told Otho it was ‘full of penitence’. By return Constance sent Oscar photographs of Cyril and Vyvyan and a note suggesting that they should meet.

  15

  Life is a terrible thing

  ON 22 JUNE 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee. It was her sixtieth year on the throne, and both Oscar and Constance – true Victorians in spite of everything else they were – celebrated with her.

  Oscar threw a party for the local children in the northern French town of Berneval-sur-Mer, where he had been staying since his arrival in France a month earlier. He put on a turquoise shirt for the benefit of fifteen ‘gamins’, and from half-past four in the afternoon until seven o’clock that evening he treated his young guests to strawberries and cream, ‘apricots, chocolates, cakes and sirop de grenadine’. Oscar had commissioned a ‘huge iced cake with Jubilé de la Reine Victoria in pink sugar just rosetted with green, and a great wreath of red roses round it all’.1 All the children were given presents from an assortment of accordions, trumpets and horns, and during the party Oscar encouraged them to play the British national anthem.

  Meanwhile, in Italy, Constance was back in Nervi, staying this time at the Ranee’s Villa Raffo. The day before the jubilee she had written to Vyvyan. ‘Why do you specially keep St Louis’s day at your school, and which St Louis is it?’ Constance asked.

  Mind you answer this when you write next. I saw two processions on Corpus Christi day, one at 10 o’clock in the morning in Genoa, where I had gone to see the book that the Ranee is giving to our Queen. The other procession was here after vespers and we … threw flowers as the Host passed. I saw a beautiful service once on Corpus Christi day at the Oratory, the biggest of the many Catholic Churches in London where Cardinal Vaughan led the Te Deum that was sung in all the catholic churches yesterday all through England in honour of the Queen’s accession.2

  ‘I hope you remember you are an English boy,’ Constance continued, ‘and are proud of your queen as you should be, for she is a good woman. It is 60 years since she came to the throne, and to-morrow is to take place the great procession through London, where every-one who can will see the Queen!! I have ordered a book of the procession to be sent to you.’

  Since May 1896, when Constance had first visited Heidelberg with the boys, she had split her time between that city, Nervi, where she was close to the Ranee, and Otho’s chalet in Bevaix. It was a pattern of life that she would repeat for the year ahead too.

  After their first summer term at Neuenheim College, the boys had remained with Constance in the environs of Heidelberg for their summer holidays. They were staying in the Hotel Schloss, in the hills immediately above the city, so Constance felt she was at least saving the expense of travelling. The hotel was secluded, surrounded by woods and was accessed by a little funicular railway that ran from the main market-place in the city.

  Constance and the boys settled in well. She became friendly with the proprietors, Herr and Frau Kohler. While Frau Kohler and Constance sewed together, the boys would
talk stamps with Herr Kohler, who was fanatical about philately and would show Cyril and Vyvyan his extensive stamp collection, much to their delight.

  With the commencement of the autumn term the boys returned to the college, and Constance headed back to Bevaix to stay with her brother. Remote from the busy social world she had once inhabited and all its fads and fashions, she nevertheless tried to keep up with some of the latest crazes. Many British newspapers were running graphology services, inviting their readers to submit examples of their handwriting for analysis. Constance duly sent off examples of her hand to both the Evening News and Pearson’s Weekly and Home Notes.

  ‘Calligro’ from the former publication responded that the handwriting of a certain C. M. Holland ‘denotes neatness order and persevering nature. You have a good temper and a well balanced mind – and affection is marked. You are not demonstrative nor do you wear your heart on your sleeve … You are easily led but cannot be driven.’ Otho noted this summary of his sister was ‘excellent, excepting that Constance was impatient and irritable from ill health and distress’.3 However, he deemed the analysis that was sent from Pearson’s perfect.

  You have an artistic appreciation of form and beauty and are a good deal influenced by outward appearances; your tastes are cultivated and refined, you have some literary ability and a keen sense of humour and are an acute observer. Your moods are a little uncertain, one day you will be in high spirits, the next a prey to despondency. You are generous in some ways, affectionate, loyal and fairly unselfish.

  Although Cyril was settled and fitting in well to the rough and tumble of school life, Constance was receiving troubling reports from Vyvyan, who remained unhappy at his new school. ‘My darling Vyvyan,’ she wrote to him from Bevaix, ‘I enclose stamps for you from Otho … Are you learning to be less babyish? I do hope so Darling. You are quite old enough now, & of course what you really will have most difficulty in learning is consideration for other people’s feelings & that you are not the centre of everything!’4