When Ross arrived at the Avondale late that evening, he found Douglas already there. Wilde had hoped to consult with Ross alone first, but Douglas had turned up by chance, and was eager to involve himself in the deliberations.5 All three players were enthusiastic about taking legal action. It was the chance they had been waiting for. To all of them it seemed that the accusation had been made in the context of Queensberry’s hostility to Wilde’s friendship with Bosie. And it was in that context that they imagined taking action. There appeared to be every prospect of success. To defend a charge of criminal libel, the marquess would have to prove not only that the offending statement (that Wilde was a ‘sodomite’) was true, but also that it had been made ‘in the public interest’. How could Queensberry possibly do either? Wilde and Douglas were only too ready to defend their relationship as something exalted and Platonic. And when it came to the question of their sexual relations with each other, they could simply deny them. If Queensberry was planning to suggest that Wilde had corrupted his son, and might corrupt others, Bosie himself could surely refute the charge. Douglas began to look forward to having his father incarcerated, or sent to a lunatic asylum.6
The following day Wilde went – together with Ross and Douglas – to see Humphreys. They found the old solicitor encouraging. There was an awkward moment when he asked if there was any truth at all in Queensberry’s allegation. Wilde emphatically denied it. ‘If you are innocent,’ the lawyer replied, ‘you should succeed.’7 The question of money remained. Mounting a prosecution would be expensive, whatever fruitful results it might yield. Here Wilde hesitated. The money he might expect from his plays was yet to come. Douglas, however, insisted that his family would pay whatever was ‘required’, so anxious were they to see the marquess held to account. Supported by this promise, Wilde signalled for the inexorable legal process to begin.8
It moved quickly. A warrant was obtained that afternoon, and the following morning Queensberry was arrested in his room at Carter’s Hotel (a few doors down from the Albemarle Club). He was brought to Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court and charged with publishing a criminal libel. George Lewis, who had been summoned at short notice to represent Queensberry, at once asked for the case to be adjourned for seven days, and his client to be released on bail. The magistrate agreed, but first allowed the club porter to give his evidence as to Queensberry having written the offensive card. When Mr Wright asserted that the inscribed words ran, ‘For Oscar Wilde ponce and somdomite’, the marquess interjected that the phrase was, in fact, ‘posing as sodomite’.9 The correction was small but telling: as an accusation it was more nebulous, less serious, and perhaps rather easier to defend. Queensberry was quite uncowed by proceedings, insisting that he was delighted to have ‘succeeded’ in ‘bringing matters to a head’.10
This, however, did nothing to dim the mood in the Wilde camp. During that week Wilde was heartened to learn that George Lewis had withdrawn from the case, citing his friendship with Wilde and Constance, and passing on his instructions to the thirty-two-year-old Charles Russell. Less encouraging was the news that Russell – on the advice of his father, the lord chief justice – had secured the services of Wilde’s old Trinity contemporary, Edward Carson, as his lead counsel. Humphreys, on Reggie Turner’s advice, had been hoping to engage Carson for Wilde’s team. Wilde, however, refused to be unduly concerned, ignoring Carson’s ever-growing reputation, and recalling instead his career as a plodding second-class student at Trinity.11
The huge cost of the venture was becoming clear. Humphreys required an advance of £150 just to institute proceedings. Neither Lady Queensberry nor Percy were on hand. And although Wilde raised some £800 in advances from George Alexander and others, much of this was ‘swallowed up’ in paying his impatient creditors. Douglas – according to his own not very reliable testimony – also emptied his own bank account to contribute to the immediate legal expenses.12
Wilde’s arrival at the committal hearing on Saturday 9 March was made in grand style. He came – accompanied by both Bosie and Percy Douglas – in a coach and pair. Despite arriving ten minutes early, they found the cramped Marlborough Street courtroom already packed. There were some thirty journalists there. Wilde, resplendent in a dark blue velvet-trimmed overcoat, a white flower in his buttonhole, took a seat at his solicitor’s table. Bosie and his brother were, however, both ordered to leave the court when the magistrate entered. Carson was there to represent the marquess.
The hearing was a preliminary procedure to ascertain whether there was sufficient evidence against the defendant to warrant a criminal trial. Although largely taken up with legal niceties, it still had its telling moments. Wilde, when examined briefly by Humphreys, at once showed himself to be a less than ideal witness. Asked, ‘Are you a dramatist and author?’ he replied, loftily, ‘I believe I am well-known as a dramatist and author.’ The magistrate – ‘nipping the play of Oscarism in the bud’ (as the Pall Mall Gazette put it) – told him sharply to confine himself to answering the questions. Humphreys also sought to introduce some of the letters that Queensberry had written to Bosie and other family members, in which he appeared to libel Wilde. Piquing the interest of the press, he declined to read them out in court, on the grounds that they made reference to ‘exalted personages’. Carson, for his part, while indicating that Queensberry would be pleading ‘justification’, confirmed the notion that – in attacking Wilde – the marquess had been motivated solely by a desire to ‘save’ his son. The magistrate duly committed Queensberry for trial at the next sessions of the Central Criminal Court at the beginning of April. Wilde was bound over in the sum of £40 to attend and prosecute.13
Matters appeared to be going to plan. Humphreys was very positive. To aggravate Queensberry’s offence, and increase the seriousness of the case, he framed the indictment in two parts to claim that the insult ‘posing as somdomite’ might mean not merely that Wilde was ‘posing’, but that he had actually ‘committed and was in the habit of committing the abominable crime of buggery with mankind’.14 Having seen the lawyer on the Monday after the committal hearing, Bosie informed his brother that ‘everything is splendid and we are going to walk over’.15 Others, too, were optimistic. Arthur Humphreys (just completing work on the revised text of Oscariana) wrote on the same day to Wilde, enthusing, ‘I am confident of your success, as is everyone.’16
Although it might have seemed like a moment for taking counsel and making plans, Wilde allowed himself to be persuaded by Douglas – and the general air of optimism – that what was needed was another holiday. Pawning some jewellery to raise funds, they left for a week in Monte Carlo. While Bosie lost money at the casino, Wilde struggled to escape his anxieties about the approaching case.17
Back in London, Wilde found waiting for him new and massive legal bills (as well as several old domestic ones). He had to raise £500 to secure the services of Sir Edward Clarke as his lead counsel, together with Willie Mathews and Travers Humphreys as juniors. With Lady Queensberry still away in Florence, and Percy out of town, he was obliged to seek the assistance of friends. At very short notice Ada Leverson’s husband, Ernest, provided the required sum, supposedly as a loan until the money could be got from the Douglas family in ‘a week or ten days at most’.18 Wilde – accompanied, as ever, by Bosie (who was now referring to the action as ‘our case’) – met with Sir Edward in his chambers. The former solicitor general, a man of the greatest probity, asked (as Humphreys had done) whether there was any truth behind Queensberry’s charges, and was given the solemn assurance that they were absolutely false. Douglas came away from the interview under the impression that Clarke would be wanting to call him and his brother Percy as witnesses to testify against their father’s character. He was delighted at the prospect.19
It appeared that Queensberry’s plea would rest largely on the supposed ‘immorality’ – and ‘sodomitic’ character – of Wilde’s published writings, most notably The Picture of Dorian Gray. It was thin stuff. The arguments made
against Wilde’s story at the time of its first appearance were familiar and Wilde felt well equipped to counter them. There seemed even less to fear from the news that Queensberry was planning to produce a copy of The Chameleon in the belief that it would ‘substantiate what I said of this fellow Oscar Wilde’. The marquess was initially under the mistaken impression that Wilde was the author of an anonymous ‘story of sodomy’ about a young priest who enters into a suicide pact with the teenage acolyte for whom he has developed a consuming passion. Although when he subsequently discovered that the story had, in fact, been written by the magazine’s editor, J. F. Bloxam, he felt it ‘did not much matter’ since Wilde’s ‘name is in the magazine signed to a lot of his filthy principles’. The publication, he noted, also contained two ‘filthy’ ‘so-called poems’ by his son, ‘In Praise of Shame’ and ‘Two Loves’ – the latter ‘ending up with these words, “I am the love that dare not breathe [sic] its name” – meaning Sodomy’.20
Beyond literature, though, it was unclear what the marquess could produce. He had boasted to Percy’s wife that the detective, Cook, had incriminating information about Wilde. But the threat was left vague.21 From his own memory of the Tite Street visit (as well as from Queensberry’s various letters to Bosie) Wilde was aware of some of the marquess’s suspicions. He seemed to know that Wilde had been blackmailed over his ‘madness of kisses’ letter, and had heard rumours regarding his time at the Savoy. But this was little enough. Wilde was able to pre-empt the blackmail story, spinning Humphreys and Clarke the tale that the letter was an artistic effusion, almost a ‘prose poem’, and that it had, indeed, been translated into French verse and published in a magazine. The original letter, moreover, he was able to point out, had been returned to him without the payment of any blackmail.
Wilde’s sense of optimism received a check, however, when he approached Frank Harris to ask whether he would be prepared to give evidence that Dorian Gray was not an immoral book. Although Harris readily agreed, he remonstrated with Wilde against the absolute folly of going to court – where (whatever his solicitors might tell him) outcomes were never certain, and where an English jury would be most unlikely to give a verdict against a father who claimed to be ‘trying to protect his son’. Harris’s conviction was reinforced when, over that weekend, he began to make inquiries among his legal connections, and found all ‘people of importance’ agreed that Wilde would lose the case, and not just because of Queensberry’s pose as a concerned parent; Wilde’s actual guilt was generally assumed. Harris urged Wilde to desist – to go abroad with his wife, and leave Queensberry and Douglas to pursue their feud alone. It sounded a first, and disturbing, note of danger.
Wilde met Harris again the next afternoon (Monday 25 March) at the Café Royal to discuss the matter further. Bernard Shaw, who was lunching with Harris, also counselled Wilde to drop the case and leave the country. Harris suggested Wilde might write a plausible letter to the The Times giving reasons for his decision. The plan had a real attraction, at least on the surface, and Wilde seemed, for a moment, tempted to adopt it. There would be financial consequences: besides having to pay the £40 surety for abandoning his prosecution, Wilde would be liable for Queensberry’s legal costs to date. It is unlikely, though, that the impractical Wilde had calculated this side of the equation. And before he could, Douglas joined the party. He dismissed the scheme at once. ‘Such advice shows you are no friend of Oscar’s,’ he fumed at Harris, before storming out. Wilde followed meekly after, telling Harris, ‘It is not friendly of you, Frank. It really is not friendly.’ It was clear that his course was set, and that Douglas would hold him to it.22 Wilde drowned out the suggestions of Harris and Shaw with other voices. The ‘wonderful’ Mrs Robinson, Wilde reported to Ada Leverson, prophesied ‘complete triumph’.23
There was no let-up. Counsel on both sides were anxious that the case should be ‘speedily dealt with’. Although Queensberry’s lawyers claimed not to be able to deliver the plea of justification until Saturday 30 March, Wilde’s side decided against ‘adopting the customary course of asking for an adjournment’ in order to investigate its assertions, and the trial date was set for Wednesday 3 April.24 In the meantime yet more money was required. Wilde asked Walter Palmer for the loan of £400, though it seems doubtful that he received it.25 Constance raised £50 from her cousin Eliza Napier, and £100 from Eliza’s mother, as well as supplying £50 from her own funds.26
When, on the Saturday morning, the plea of justification was delivered, Wilde’s returning confidence vanished. Although the document cited both The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Chameleon as works ‘calculated to subvert morality and encourage unnatural vice’, these expected literary charges were preceded by a long, and unexpected, list of human ones. In paragraph after paragraph it was asserted that Wilde had solicited and incited young men ‘to commit sodomy and other acts of gross indecency’, although in each instance it was claimed that Wilde had succeeded only in committing ‘the said acts of gross indecency’ rather than sodomy itself. The wording nimbly relieved the defence from the difficult business of proving that ‘sodomy’ had actually occurred, and (as Sir Edward Clarke noted) relieved their witnesses from having to admit that ‘they themselves have been guilty of the gravest of offences’. At the same time it forcibly suggested that Wilde had done considerably more than merely ‘pose’ as a sodomite. Names, dates and places were given: Edward Shelley and Sidney Mavor at the Albemarle Hotel; Fred Atkins and Maurice Schwabe in Paris; Alfred Wood at Tite Street; Charles Parker at the Savoy; Walter Grainger at Oxford and Goring; Alphonse Conway at Worthing and Brighton. The catalogue ran back over three years. It was, as Reggie Turner recalled, ‘a knock down blow’. It was difficult to comprehend how such information could have been assembled.
Although Wilde remained in ignorance of the fact, the making of the case against him had been an oddly fortuitous business. At the outset of proceedings, Queensberry had little to back up his plea of justification besides hearsay, the tenor of Wilde’s published writings and one fulsomely phrased letter to Bosie that had come into his hands. Indeed Carson was, initially, reluctant to accept the brief, in part because he disliked the idea of appearing against his erstwhile classmate, but principally because he considered the case too weak. Queensberry’s solicitor, Russell, however, had encouraged him with news that his investigators (ex-Scotland Yard detectives Littlechild and Kearley) deployed on Queensberry’s instructions, were following several promising leads. And his mentor, Lord Halsbury, had further convinced him to take the case.
Even so Carson had, apparently, been inclined to advise Queensberry to plead guilty until only moments before the committal hearing at Marlborough Street. It was then that he learned that, following up a lead from the Savoy Hotel, Russell’s investigators had tracked down Charles Parker to his Royal Artillery barracks, and put pressure on him to make a statement about his sexual relations with Wilde. It was a difficult business as Russell was not acting for the Crown, so could not offer Parker immunity from prosecution for evidence that must necessarily be self-incriminating. Both legal threats and financial inducements played their part.
Following that first discovery other incidents were brought to light. Charles Brookfield, obsessed with his animus against Wilde, had begun his own investigation into Wilde’s sexual habits and clandestine contacts. Having elicited from an unsuspecting commissionaire at a London theatre the name of Alfred Taylor as one of Wilde’s associates, he passed it on to Littlechild and Kearley. At one of Taylor’s former addresses – 3 Chapel Street – Kearley discovered a ‘hatbox full of papers’ that Taylor had left behind. It contained much incriminating information. From various of Taylor’s letters and notes Russell was able to identify, track down and get statements from Sidney Mavor, Alfred Wood, Fred Atkins, Robert Cliburn and William Allen. Wilde’s past movements were tracked: at Oxford and Goring and Worthing; at the Savoy Hotel and the Albemarle. Former servants were interviewed and suborned. Walter Grainger, Alphonse Con
way and Edward Shelley found themselves caught in Russell’s net.27
Looking over the plea of justification Wilde may have noted that some of the precise details were incorrect. And he might have perceived that none of the charges was easy to prove in law. But he did recognize their essential truth. And it was blindingly clear that their discussion in open court could only mean complete social ruin. If they could be substantiated at all they must result not only in Queensberry’s acquittal, but also – very probably – in his own arrest. A vertiginous chasm had opened at his feet. From this time on, as Turner put it, he had ‘death in his heart’.28
A withdrawal must have looked even more attractive now. But it was too late. Indeed it had probably been too late even when Harris and Shaw had suggested it at the start of the week. If Wilde abandoned his prosecution it was most unlikely that Queensberry would allow the matter to rest. He would be entitled to bring an action against Wilde for having falsely accused him of libel. Or, as it now appeared, he could pass on a mass of damaging information about Wilde’s sexual liaisons to the director of public prosecutions. If Wilde went abroad (as Harris had urged) it would be construed as an admission of guilt. Wilde began to perceive that he had blundered into a ‘booby trap’.29 There was no option but to go forward. Wilde found himself – accompanied as ever by Douglas – back in the ‘ghastly glare’ of Humphreys’ bleak room, going through the plea of justification line by line, denying its veracity and ‘with a serious face telling serious lies to a bald man’.30
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