The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde

by Neil McKenna

  Queensberry was shrewd enough to know he would have to be able to justify the libel or face imprisonment. He knew that he would have to present convincing evidence to the court that the libel was true and that its publication was for the public good. If Trelawny Backhouse is to be believed, Queensberry had already employed the services of private detectives in the summer of 1894 to search out proof of Drumlanrig's love affair with the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. The detectives had found their proof at a hotel in Bourne End on the River Thames, where two maid servants said they had seen `concrete proofs' of sodomy on the sheets of a bed which Drumlanrig and Rosebery had shared. Queensberry almost certainly used the same detectives to find damaging proof of Oscar's sexual relationships with Bosie and with other young men. In a letter to Minnie, the wife of his son, Percy, written on the same day he left the card for Oscar at the Albemarle, Queensberry had urged Percy to `go and speak to Cook the detective' who `knows more about him (O.W.) than I do'.

  Queensberry was already in possession of at least one major piece of evidence against Oscar: a copy of his `madness of kisses' letter to Bosie. `Some Gentle Criticisms of British justice', published shortly after Oscar's conviction in 1895, was a pamphlet containing detailed and swingeing criticisms of the corruption and cant surrounding Oscar's trials. Its author, `I. Playfair' - the nom de plume of James H. Wilson - alleged that Queensberry bought the `madness of kisses' letter from a blackmailing solicitor he calls `Macpelah', whose real name was Bernard Abrahams.

  But such evidence against Oscar as Queensberry possessed was deemed insufficient by Charles Russell, who urged him to secure the services of the formidable Inspector Littlechild, a former Chief Detective-Inspector of Scotland Yard, and Frederick Kearley, a retired Detective-Inspector. Queensberry is said to have given Littlechild and Kearley £500, the equivalent of £30,000 in today's money, to secure sufficient evidence against Oscar to justify his libel. Russell was keen to enter the fray himself and poured his considerable energies into tracking down witnesses.

  Their initial investigations were not promising. Rumours of Oscar's sexual habits abounded, but hard evidence was in short supply, until Russell mentioned the case to Charles Brookfield. Brookfield was an actor and playwright who was currently appearing in An Ideal Husband, playing the role of Lord Goring's servant, Phipps. Brookfield hated Oscar and was only too ready to dig for dirt. According to Frank Harris, Brookfield `constituted himself private prosecutor in this case and raked Piccadilly to find witnesses against Oscar Wilde'. Although Oscar is said to have once snubbed Brookfield for wearing the wrong kind of suit, Brookfield's hatred of Oscar was out of all proportion to the slight. `With Brookfield alas! Wilde became a monomania,' wrote Vincent O'Sullivan, who knew both men. `There came a time when he could not keep Wilde out of his talk. I can only guess at the cause of this obsession.' Brookfield was driven by an irrational, visceral loathing of any manifestation of love and sex between men that would today be called homophobia.

  Brookfield's irrational fear and loathing of sodomy was extreme but hardly unusual. His views were shared by Queensberry, by Edward Carson and by Charles Russell - and by the vast majority of Victorian men who found the idea of sex between men utterly repugnant. It was a crime: a crime against nature, a crime against God, and a crime against the laws of the land. There was little comprehension of the arguments put forward by George Ives and other adherents of the Cause that their sexuality was prescribed by nature, rather than chosen by themselves. `Nature was in this matter a stepmother to each of us,' Oscar had said of his and Bosie's sexuality. In the eyes of the Victorians, there was only one thing worse than a sodomite, and that was a proselytising sodomite. Sex between men was a contagion, and Oscar was at the very heart of the darkness. He was high priest and prophet, physically corrupting young men into sodomy and preaching a diseased intellectual gospel. Destroying Oscar would not destroy sodomy at a stroke. But it would bring to an abrupt halt what many saw as the creeping contagion of his gospel of unnatural love.

  T Playfair' alleges that an unholy alliance - the corrupt, blackmailing solicitor Bernard Abrahams, Charles Brookfield and Queensberry's detectives, Littlechild and Kearley - now scoured the West End in search of witnesses. Abrahams probably supplied the names of Allen and Cliburn himself, from whom he had acquired his copy of Oscar's `madness of kisses' letter. Littlechild ran Cliburn and Allen to ground in Broadstairs. According to the journalist John Boon, it was `a fine old Irish Commissionaire', employed at one of the theatres where Oscar's plays were being performed, who unwittingly helped uncover crucial evidence. In answer to Brookfield's amiable questions, the commissionaire happily gave details of Oscar's friends who called for him at the theatre. One name was crucial: Alfred Taylor.

  It was a comparatively easy matter for two former Scotland Yard detectives to track down Alfred Taylor. They found out his previous addresses at 13, Little College Street in Westminster and 3, Chapel Street in Belgravia, where Taylor had lived until December 1893. Mrs Sophia Gray, the landlady at Chapel Street, was very helpful. Taylor had left the house owing her money. When Kearley turned up with Charles Russell, Mrs Gray was only too willing to hand over a 'hatbox full of papers' which Taylor had carelessly left behind. The hatbox was a veritable goldmine of information. There were several letters from Oscar, and various telegrams from him, making and breaking appointments with Taylor. `Obliged to see Tree at five o'clock so don't come to Savoy,' Oscar had telegraphed to Taylor. `Let me know at once about Fred. - OSCAR.' Who was `Fred'?, Littlechild and Kearley asked themselves. There were also documents concerning a number of young men: letters from `Jenny' Mayor, and two cheques, one for 30 shillings and one for £2 - made out to him.

  Kearley and Littlechild were also intrigued by a letter from Charles Spurrier Mason, Alfred Taylor's `husband', dated November 1891. `My dear Alfred,' Mason had written:

  Soon as you can afford to let me have some money, I shall be pleased and obliged. I would not ask you if I could get any myself, you know. Business is not so easy as one would think. There is a lot of trouble attached to it. I have not met anyone yet. Come home soon dear and let us go out sometimes together.

  It was signed `With much love, Charlie'. It did not take Littlechild and Kearley too long to work out that the `business' in question was prostitution. There were other names and addresses in Taylor's hat box too. Before long, Queensberry and Russell had a list of names: Alfred Taylor, `Jenny' Mavor, William Allen, Robert Cliburn, Alfred Wood, Fred Atkins and the Parker brothers, William and Charles. Charles Parker had joined the Royal Artillery. Littlechild and Russell tracked him down, and he was interviewed in barracks in Dover by Russell.

  Russell and Littlechild alternately cajoled and terrorised the boys they found into making statements. Their methods were crude but effective. According to `I. Playfair', one of Oscar's young renters, a boy he names `Hades', was interviewed by Russell while Littlechild waited in the adjoining room. `Hades' was told that if he did not make a statement incriminating Oscar, then he would be prosecuted. George Ives asserted that the boys were `terrified into giving evidence: they were even locked up and kept on bread and water'. `Such is justice,' Ives sighed into his diary, `when the sex taboos are made to come to the assistance of private malice.' Bosie wrote how one of Oscar's friends from the Uranian underworld, `a blackmailer and professional pederast', came `to forewarn Mr Wilde against what was going on'. The man told Bosie how:

  Mr Bernard Abrahams came up to me and asked if I was willing to go to -'s office to denounce Mr Wilde under oath. `I don't see why I should,' I replied. `I have never had any dealings with Mr Wilde in my life.' `Oh, that doesn't matter,' said Abrahams.

  As the days wore on, the net was widened. Littlechild and Kearley visited every hotel and every house where Oscar was known to have lived. They went to the Savoy, to the Albemarle Hotel, to St James's Place, to Goring and to Worthing. They interviewed everyone they could find, for the most part servants. There were hefty cash inducements on offer t
o loosen reluctant tongues. These tireless investigations yielded up the names of Walter Grainger and Alfonso Conway. They also came up with Edward Shelley's name, possibly through the malign offices of the publisher, John Lane.

  Constance was taking it all very badly. `We are very worried just now,' she wrote to the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes, turning down an invitation. Two nights before he was due to return to Marlborough Street Police Court for the adjourned hearing, Oscar, Constance and Bosie appeared in public together. True to Oscar's belief that `in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing', the three of them had dinner together in a restaurant, before taking a box at the St James's Theatre for a performance of Earnest. Oscar was making a public statement. If his wife found nothing objectionable in his friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, how on earth could anyone else? Constance smiled bravely, but found the whole experience excruciating. She was `very much agitated', Bosie recalled afterwards, `and when I said goodnight to her at the door of the theatre she had tears in her eyes'.

  Oscar made an ostentatious arrival at Marlborough Street Police Court on Saturday 9 March. The Evening News reported that `Oscar Wilde drove up in a carriage and pair, a magnificent turn-out with coachman and cockaded footman, accompanied by Lord Alfred Douglas.' Oscar himself was also magnificently turned out in a long blue overcoat with velvet collar and cuffs and a large white flower in his button hole. He was still sublimely confident that he was going to win. As yet he had no idea of the scale of the success of Queensberry's investigations, and no idea of the dangerous fruits they had yielded. To those of his friends who advised caution, or even flight, Oscar was airily dismissive. `Have no fear,' he quipped with unconscious irony. `The working classes are with me - to a boy.'

  Vexed and persecuted

  lovers

  'A short primer, When to Lie and How, if brought out in an attractive and not too expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, and would prove of real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people.'

  On the morning of Tuesday 19 February, Lord Rosebery, the Prime Minister, called an emergency Cabinet meeting to announce that he had made his mind up to resign. Reading a prepared statement, Rosebery said that, following a debate in the House of Commons the day before where he had been attacked by members of his own party, he did not feel he had the full support of the party and would therefore leave office. `God knows I never sought my present office and would have done anything consistently with honour to avoid it, and I renounce it to say the least without regret,' he told his Cabinet colleagues, who listened in shocked silence. `The whole thing came upon us like a thunderbolt, no one having the slightest idea that he would contemplate such an amazing coup tie tete,' wrote Lord Kimberley, the Foreign Secretary.

  Rosebery's bombshell was delivered the morning after Queensberry had left his card scrawled with `hideous words' for Oscar at the Albemarle Club. Were these two events connected? To Oscar and those in his circle who, in the course of Oscar's trials, came to believe that he was caught up in a political conspiracy, the answer was a resounding yes. When Queensberry threw down the gauntlet to Oscar by leaving his card at the Albemarle Club, had he also thrown down a similar gauntlet for Rosebery? Had he written to Rosebery demanding his resignation, threatening, as he had done the previous summer, to expose Rosebery as a sodomite to his enemy Henry Labouchere? And was this why, like a thunderbolt out of the blue, Rosebery had summoned the Cabinet and announced his intention to resign?

  `Loulou' Harcourt, son of Rosebery's great rival, Sir William Harcourt, and himself a leading Liberal, suspected that that there was more to Rosebery's resignation than met the eye. `George Murray says R is in no better mood today than he was yesterday,' Loulou wrote in his diary on 20 February, the day after Rosebery's shock announcement:

  He says this outburst has been brewing up for a long time and that the recent debate was not the causa causarus.

  Loulou even considered it `possible' that Rosebery might `commit suicide'. Two days later, however, Rosebery was prevailed upon to withdraw his resignation. It was clear to his friends and his enemies that the Prime Minister was labouring under an intolerable burden of stress and unhappiness. From the day he announced his resignation at Cabinet, Rosebery started to experience the symptoms of a sudden and extreme physical and mental breakdown. Officially, he was suffering from severe influenza, which somehow mutated into prolonged `insomnia'. He could barely sleep, rarely managing more than an hour or two a night. Rosebery felt he was caught up in a waking nightmare. `I cannot forget 1895,' he wrote later:

  To lie night after night, staring wide awake, hopeless of sleep, tormented in nerves, and to realise all that was going on, at which I was present, so to speak, like a disembodied spirit, to watch one's own corpse as it were, day after day, is an experience which no sane man with a conscience would repeat.

  Rosebery's symptoms, as recorded by his friends, by his doctors, and not least by himself, portray a man in absolute mental torture, suffering from a combination of grief at Drumlanrig's death, and terror of exposure and public shame at Queensberry's hands. Rosebery complained to his friends of loneliness and of depression. He spoke about marrying again and said he was `frightened' by it. He also spoke, more than once, about suicide, telling Lord Kimberley how `for the first time in his life he understood why people committed suicide'. Significantly, Rosebery had experienced similar symptoms of nervous illness once before, in 1893 when Queensberry had bombarded him with abusive letters about Drumlanrig.

  On 25 February, Rosebery's doctor, Sir William Broadbent, was shocked to discover that the Prime Minister's pulse was barely perceptible. Rosebery's illness was caused by `long-continued derangement of the digestive organs', he thought. It was `the most obstinate and puzzling case he had ever come across'. Two days later, on 27 February, Loulou Harcourt recorded in his diary that George Murray `thinks Rosebery's illness is more mental than physical'. Rosebery's health continued to deteriorate. By 13 March, Sir William was convinced that if the downward spiral continued `there must be fatal termination'. Rosebery might die.

  There were some who were convinced that Rosebery's declining health was in some way related to Oscar's prosecution of Queensberry. Four days before Sir William's dire predictions, there had been a development in the libel case which may have precipitated the sudden, significant deterioration in Rosebery's health. At the reconvened hearing at Marlborough Street Police Court on 9 March, Charles Humphreys had first alluded to the series of abusive and offensive letters which Queensberry had sent to Bosie and to his father-in-law, Alfred Montgomery. Though he wanted to introduce the letters as evidence, he did not want them read aloud in open court, the reason being, Humphreys said:

  with reference to one particular letter the names of exalted persons are used and I don't think it would be right to them that their names should be called into question in matters of this description.

  The key `exalted person' was Lord Rosebery. In a letter written to Montgomery on 6 July 1894, not long after he had turned up at Tite Street with a prize-fighter, Queensberry had said that Oscar had `plainly showed the white feather the other day when I tackled him - damned cur and coward of the Rosebery type'. Though Queensberry's comments could not be construed as a direct accusation of sodomy, they were still extremely damaging. By bracketing Oscar and Rosebery together as two of a `type', Queensberry's implication was clear. Oscar Wilde and Lord Rosebery were both sodomites. The press were quick to catch the whiff of scandal. Who were the unnamed `exalted persons', and were they in some way implicated in the sodomitical scandal that seemed to be unfolding before them? When the magistrate asked Humphreys and Carson to discuss the admissibility of Queensberry's letters in a private room, `a buzz of conversation filled the court'. `What was the reason for the retirement?' the reporter from the London Evening News demanded. `Was the case to be nipped in the bud in the interest of "exalted personages'-'- once or twice so distantly referred to?'

  Me
anwhile, Oscar and Bosie were prepared to go abroad. After the hearing at Marlborough Street on 9 March, Bosie declared that he and Oscar must both spend a week in Monte Carlo. `At a time when I should have been in London taking wise counsel, and calmly considering the hideous trap in which I had allowed myself to be caught,' Oscar said later:

  You insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting places on God's earth, that all day, and all night as well, you might gamble as long as the Casino remained open. As for me - baccarat having no charms for me - I was left alone outside to myself.

  Bosie refused to discuss `even for five minutes' the court case hanging over Oscar. `The slightest allusion to the ordeal awaiting me was regarded as a bore,' Oscar told Bosie in De Profundis. `A new brand of champagne that was recommended to us had more interest for you.'

  In view of Queensberry's energetic search for witnesses, Oscar and Bosie's trip to Monte Carlo appears to be decidedly quixotic. On 11 March, the day before he and Oscar were due to depart for Monte Carlo, Bosie wrote to his brother Percy, `I saw Humphreys today. He says everything is splendid and we are going to walk over.' But in truth everything was not quite so splendid as it might appear. Clouds were starting to bank up ominously on the horizon. On his own admission, Bosie knew by 9 March that Queensberry was trying to beguile and blackmail boys into making statements about Oscar's sexual activities. Was the trip to Monte Carlo designed to take Oscar's mind off the forthcoming trial, a distraction to stop him wavering?

  Oscar's short-lived surge of optimism and confidence was slowly beginning to bleed away. He was alarmed at news of Queensberry's determined search for witnesses among the Uranian demimonde. Though Oscar still clung to the belief that no one he had actually had sex with would dare make any admission for fear of incriminating himself, that still left those who could be bullied or bribed into swearing a false statement. He was beginning to feel unnerved by what he sensed as a widespread hostility towards him, made manifest when he and Bosie were asked to leave a hotel in Monte Carlo after the other guests complained about their presence.