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

by Franny Moyle

  Throughout the course of 1898 and 1899 Oscar worked slowly on a number of literary projects. The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband were both published during this time, and Oscar also entered an agreement with Frank Harris to collaborate on a play, Mr and Mrs Daventry, which eventually went into production at London’s Royalty Theatre in November 1900.

  But in the first year of the new century Oscar’s health went into rapid decline. Early in the year he complained persistently of food poisoning and blood poisoning, and although he rallied sufficiently to visit Italy with Harold Mellor in the spring, during which time he took a trip to Rome and received a blessing from the Pope, on his return to Paris he was once more terribly unwell.

  Although Oscar continued to see Bosie from time to time, the latter had made a return to London society – a privilege that would never again be extended to Oscar himself. Back home in England, Bosie may well have noted the sale of a group of artworks at Messrs Foster of Pall Mall. On 1 August 1900 eleven pictures came under the hammer, raising just over £60. These were Constance’s pictures, being sold on behalf of her estate by Mr Hargrove. Three etchings of Venice by Whistler, which in early descriptions of Tite Street hung in the drawing room there, must have been removed by Constance from her former home before the bailiffs moved in. Each one sold spoke of a period in Constance’s life. Hanging in the Villa Elvira, they must have served as a reminder of her past and the friends she continued to hold dear. In addition to Whistler’s Venetian scenes there was an etching of a geisha by Mortimer Menpes, a portrait of Sarasate by Whistler, two pencil drawings by Edward Burne-Jones, a proof engraving and a photogravure by Watts (one, if not both, almost certainly of his portrait of Georgina Mount-Temple) and a photograph of Tennyson and his friends, by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron.

  While these sad relics of a lost life went under the hammer in London, in Paris Oscar was spending more and more time confined to his small room in the Hôtel d’Alsace. He was having great trouble with his ear, almost certainly as the result of a fall he had had in prison that had done permanent damage to it. By October the ear was terribly painful, and in the end Oscar agreed to have an operation on it, which was undertaken in his hotel room. Robbie Ross and Reginald Turner cared for him during this period. But despite their best efforts, within three weeks Oscar had developed a post-operative abscess in the ear and meningitis had set in. Although Robbie left Oscar’s bedside on 12 November to visit his mother in the south of France, he returned at the end of the month, alerted by Reggie to the fact that Oscar’s condition had become terminal. On 29 November 1900 Robbie fetched a Catholic priest, and Oscar was taken into that faith. The very next day he died. Bosie, summoned by Robbie, failed to reach Oscar’s bedside in time. He did, however, take the place of chief mourner at the funeral, although it was Robbie Ross who was holding Oscar’s hand as he passed away. Oscar was buried in the cemetery in Bagneux in a temporary concession. In 1909 his remains were removed to a permanent resting place in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

  Oscar never got to see his sons after Constance’s death. The Lloyd and Napier family closed ranks around the boys. Although they had so often been separated by their parents, and had little in common in terms of interest and temperament, Cyril and Vyvyan found themselves united by the tragedy of their circumstances and specifically by Constance’s premature demise. From that moment on, according to Vyvyan, they ‘walked along shoulder to shoulder’. After their school terms finished in the summer of 1898, they returned home to England and were brought up by Aunt Mary Napier and her daughter Lizzie. Although Adrian Hope was their appointed guardian, he adopted this role with a degree of distance.

  Vyvyan, whose fascination with Catholicism continued, was sent to Stonyhurst College. Despite Constance’s positive letter from the Admiralty in 1895, Cyril was denied a place in the navy and was instead sent to Radley College with a view to going into the army.

  Having endured the death of their mother, the boys suffered a second trauma when news of Oscar’s death broke. The Napiers had done their best to make his sons forget Oscar. Vyvyan claimed he had been told his father was already dead, and so when the school rector delivered the news that in fact he was newly deceased, Vyvyan was utterly perplexed. Cyril, on the other hand, read about Oscar’s death in the newspaper. On hearing that Robbie Ross had sent flowers on the boys’ behalf to the funeral, Cyril sent a letter of thanks in which he noted the deep pain that Oscar had inflicted on his family, for which Cyril hoped his father was truly penitent.

  Oscar’s story informed Cyril’s life. Determined to win back some respectability, he cast himself as a masculine hero keen to win sports trophies for his school. After Radley he went to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and then into the army, initially serving in India. There is some suggestion by his brother that he worked as a spy in the years leading up to the First World War. Cyril’s German was perfect, a fact not lost on the authorities. In 1914 Cyril’s regiment arrived in France. On 9 May 1915 he was shot dead by a German sniper during the Neuve-Chapelle offensive, just before the battle of Festubert.

  Vyvyan also served in the army in the Fixst World War. As with his brother, the legacy of his years in exile had at least provided him with an unusual facility for languages. He served first as a second lieutenant in the Interpreters’ Corps and later in the Royal Field Artillery. He was awarded an OBE thereafter. Before the war he studied law at Cambridge University, but he went on to become a translator and author.

  When Adrian Hope succumbed to an early death in 1904, the main barrier to Oscar’s friends reacquainting themselves with his sons was lifted. Robbie Ross made a point of befriending the boys, and Vyvyan attended Oscar’s reburial in 1909. Despite becoming friendly with Robbie Ross and many others from Oscar’s circle, and despite writing about being the son of Oscar Wilde, Vyvyan Holland never changed his name back to that of his Irish forebears. He had experimented with using the name Wilde just once, for about a month before the First World War when on a trip to Venice, and was so bothered by Italian reporters that he decided to never repeat the exercise. He died in 1967 aged eighty, leaving a son, Merlin, who has become an acknowledged Wilde scholar.

  Willie Wilde pre-deceased his brother, dying in March 1899 from an alcohol-related illness. Lily Wilde, his second wife and widow, subsequently married the journalist and translator Alexander de Teixeira de Mattos. Her and Willie’s daughter, Dorothy, grew up to be a well-known socialite. She drove an ambulance in the First World War. Like her father, she had a susceptibility to alcohol, and died young in 1941.

  Lady Mount-Temple survived Constance and died in 1901. Her daughter Juliet Deschamps, who had initially been so damning of Oscar when he was gaoled, wrote to Oscar in warm terms in October 1898 to inform him of the death of her husband, Eugene. Oscar had seen Eugene during his exile. In her letter Juliet restated how much she had valued Constance’s friendship. She also went on to speculate that, now united with Constance in the afterlife, her husband might have brought her ‘tidings of you whom she so dearly loved and for whose good she prayed and suffered’.1

  Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, died in January 1900, at which point Bosie inherited a significant sum. After his return to London society in 1898 he married the heiress Olive Custance in March 1902, and they had a son, Raymond. In 1911 he converted to Catholicism. Bosie continued to get embroiled in libel cases, losing a case he himself brought against Arthur Ransome in 1913, and finding himself sued successfully for libel by Winston Churchill in 1923. This last led to a six-month gaol sentence.

  Robbie Ross became Oscar’s literary executor and worked tirelessly to acquire the copyright to his work. Within a few years of Oscar’s demise he had paid his debts and returned his estate to credit. Adrian Hope had deemed that Oscar’s sons should not benefit from his literary estate, but after Hope’s death Robbie was able to restore any financial benefit from his work to Cyril and Vyvyan. In 1905 Ross published an abridged version of O
scar’s long confessional letter to Bosie, De Profundis. It ran to five editions in the first year of publication. In the same year Richard Strauss produced an operatic version of Salome in Dresden. Subsequently Robbie oversaw the publication of Oscar’s collected works in 1908. In 1909 George Alexander revived The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James’s to great success, and nine years later, when he died, the copyright of both this play and Lady Windermere’s Fan was restored to Vyvyan in Alexander’s will.

  In 1900 Ross, along with More Adey, joined the management of the Carfax Gallery, which had been founded by Arthur Clifton. Living together for fifteen years, they both continued to move in circles of artists and poets for whom homosexuality was a predominant theme.

  Relations between Bosie and Robbie Ross deteriorated dramatically during this time as the former went on to embrace a more conventional lifestyle and in doing so turned against his former homosexual friends. Bosie attempted to have Robbie arrested for indecency, and in 1914 the latter was forced to sue Bosie for criminally libelling him as a practising homosexual.

  After Bosie, Ross fell foul of the right-wing, homophobic MP Noel Pemberton Billing, who believed that Robbie’s circle were at the heart of national treachery. Billing published an article in which he suggested that an actress, Maud Allen, then appearing in a private production of Salome organized by Ross, was a lesbian associate of conspirators. When Allen sued Billing for libel over the allegations, Bosie actually testified in Billing’s favour.

  The pressures that Bosie and Billing between them brought down on Ross proved too great, and he died unexpectedly in 1918, aged just forty-nine. In 1950, on the fiftieth anniversary of Wilde’s death, Ross’s ashes were added to Wilde’s tomb. More Adey outlived his lover by a great many years, and died in a mental institution in 1942.

  Otho Lloyd Holland survived More Adey by a year. He eventually returned from exile and spent his dotage living in Bournemouth. He published a number of translations of Greek texts, including the Olynthiacs and Philippics of Demosthenes in 1901 and Sophocles’ Antigone in 1931. He had three children with his second wife, Mary. Horace, a brother to Eugene and Hester, was born after Constance died. Of his two sons from his first marriage, to Nellie, Fabian Lloyd went on to become a well-known avant-garde artist who went under the name of Arthur Cravan. A darling of the Dada and Surrealist group of artists, he wrote a controversial article in 1913 claiming that Oscar Wilde was still alive and had visited him. Cravan finally disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1918, when, having set out on a sailing trip from Mexico to Argentina, his boat never arrived and it was presumed he had drowned at sea.

  Among Otho’s papers left to his family was a newspaper cutting regarding Signor Bossi, the surgeon whom Otho blamed for his sister’s death. Under the headline ‘Woman’s Surgeon Shot, A Consulting Room Mystery’, the Daily Mail reported on 3 February 1919 that the Genoese gynaecologist had been found shot dead: ‘He was seated at his desk in his professional rooms with his pen still grasped in his hand.’ The Mail added that also in the room ‘were the body of an unknown man, who had been shot dead, and a woman lay mortally wounded’.

  Otho’s descendants continued to take an interest in the story of their forebear, and in 1963 they added the words ‘Wife of Oscar Wilde’ to Constance’s grave in Genoa.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart Davis, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (Fourth Estate, London, 2000), p. 633. This note is undated, and it remains conjecture that it was written on 28 February, although the schedule of events as presented in this chapter suggest that it was.

  2. The Illustrated London News (12 Jan 1895).

  3. The Ladies’ Treasury (1 Feb 1895).

  4. Constance to Lady Mount-Temple, undated. University of Southampton, Broadlands Archive (BR) 57/14/6.

  5. The Lady’s Pictorial (12 Jan 1895).

  6. Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster (ed.), Letters of Engagement 1884–1888: The Love Letters of Adrian Hope and Laura Troubridge (Tite Street Press, London, 2000), p. 103.

  7. Constance to Lady Mount-Temple, 5 Jan 1895. BR 57/22/8.

  8. The Young Woman, to which Constance contributed in 1895, had been carrying a regular column called ‘An Ideal Husband’ since October 1894 which aired these views. Authors of the column included Lady Jeune and John Strange Winter, both friends of the Wildes.

  9. The Illustrated London News (23 Feb 1895).

  10. ‘I want him to go off to stay at Tangier with Walter Harris as soon as possible. He has not been well for such a long time.’ Constance to Lady Mount-Temple, 4 Dec 1894. BR 57/22/3.

  11. Constance to Robert Ross, 28 Jan 1895. Library of William Andrews Clark Jr at the University of California in Los Angeles (Clark Library).

  12. In a letter to Lady Mount-Temple on New Year’s Eve Constance notes that the doctor was due on that day to give her ‘some electricity’. BR 57/22/7.

  13. Letter to Otho Lloyd Holland, 22 Jan 1895. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  14. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins, London, 2003), p. 534.

  Chapter 1: The sins of the parents

  1. This is how Captain John was described in Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser on the announcement of Ada’s second marriage, in 1878.

  2. Otho explains the family lineage and how Horace and Ada were related in a note to A. Symons, 22 May 1937: ‘John Lloyd … married “Molly” a sister of Holland Watson, a JP for the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire … John Lloyd’s son John Horatio married his first cousin Caroline 7th daughter of the above Holland Watson; and their son Horace, Constance’s and my father, also took to wife a cousin, his second cousin by the same Watson branch, Adelaide Barbara Atkinson of Dublin; her paternal grandmother née Judith Watson was one of Holland Watson’s many sisters. Holland Watson’s and their mother had been a Miss Judith Holland, a descendant of the well known “Lancashire Hollands”.’ Clark Library.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Otho made these comments scribbled in the back pages of his personal copy of Leonard Cresswell Ingleby’s Oscar Wilde (T. Werner Laurie, London, 1907). MSS collection of John Holland.

  5. Notes in the MSS collection of John Holland.

  6. Constance to Otho, 14 Jan 1882. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  7. Constance to Otho at Oriel College, 31 Oct 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  8. Otho to A. J. Symons Clark, 22 May 1937. Clark Library.

  9. Patrick Byrne, The Wildes of Merrion Square: The Family of Oscar Wilde (Staples Press, London, 1953), p. 91.

  10. Ibid., p. in.

  11. Notebook of Otho. MSS collection of John Holland.

  12. Notes from Otho in his copy of Ingleby’s Oscar Wilde. MSS collection of John Holland.

  13. Constance to Otho, 25 July 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  14. Notes from Otho, undated. MSS collection of John Holland.

  15. Otho to A. J. Symons, 22 May 1937. Clark Library.

  16. Constance to Otho, 3 Sept 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  17. Undated letter from Constance to Otho, marked private. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  18. Otho lists these friends in his notebook. MSS collection of John Holland.

  19. Rossetti painted Mrs Morris wearing such a peacock-blue dress with puffed sleeves.

  20. Undated letter from Constance to Otho. The reference to her mother’s marriage, however, indicates it was written in the autumn of 1878.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Constance to Otho, 21 Sept 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Constance to Otho, 31 Oct 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  25. Constance to Otho, 21 Sept 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  26. Constance to Otho, 3 Sept 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  Chapter 2: Terriby bad taste

  1. C. R. Elrington (ed.), Paddington, Bayswater, vol. 9
of A History of the County of Middlesex, Victoria History of the Counties of Britain (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989), pp. 204–12.

  2. Merlin Holland, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Collins, London, 2003) p. 18.

  3. Constance to Otho, 10 June 1881. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  4. Constance to Otho, 18 Nov 1881. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  5. Sir William Abdy had lent Belt the not insignificant sum of £2,000. When he failed to repay his debt, Belt presented Abdy with an invest ment opportunity. The sculptor had made the acquaintance of a Mrs Morphy, who Belt claimed had been part of a sultan’s harem. The sultan had given his mistress wonderful diamonds, which she now needed to sell to support herself. Belt brokered the sale of these precious jewels to Sir William, who promptly sued Belt when he discovered that they were nothing more than cheap stones he had sourced from a pawnbroker. In Oscar’s An Ideal Husband the blackmailing Mrs Cheverley is undone when it is discovered that a diamond brooch she has was in fact stolen by her in her youth. This crime is leveraged against her, and she is forced to yield the letter with which she is blackmailing Lord Chiltern.

  6. Notebook of Otho. MSS collection of John Holland.

  7. Constance to Otho, 3 Sept 1878. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  8. Otho’s notes in the back of Ingleby’s Oscar Wilde. MSS collection of John Holland.

  9. Constance’s signature, along with that of John Horatio, Aunt Emily and Otho, is still visible in the Royal Oak’s guest book.

  10. Constance to Otho, 9 Sept 1879. MSS collection of Merlin Holland.

  11. The Shield cites one such meeting occurring in February 1883, at which Mary Fedden was one of the speakers.

  12. Otho’s notebook. MSS collection of John Holland.