‘Bunthorne is to get his bride’
THE ENGAGEMENT RING that Oscar Wilde presented to Constance Lloyd remains in the possession of the Wilde family’s descendants today: a heart formed from diamonds enclosing two pearls, surmounted with another bow of diamonds. The design was apparently Oscar’s own.
In slipping this ring on to her finger, Constance knew that she was going to have to steel herself for a barrage of objections. When she informed her brother of her engagement, Constance revealed that, although the Dublin Atkinsons were delighted with the match, she held some concern that she would face opposition from the Lloyds, and specifically from Aunt Emily. ‘I am so dreadfully nervous over my family; they are so cold and practical,’ she worried. But in the same breath her determination to go her own way whatever was also clear. ‘I won’t stand opposition,’ she wrote, ‘so I hope they won’t try it.’1
Constance felt sure that Otho would be her ally in negotiating any objections from the Lloyd camp, not least because she had spent recent months smoothing the way for his own somewhat unconventional matrimonial ambitions. Otho had fallen in love with a beautiful girl called Clara, whose background was socially dubious, to the minds of the conservative Lloyds at least. In the summer of 1882 Nellie, as Clara was known, was sent to a finishing school in Lausanne in Switzerland – possibly at Otho’s expense, and as part of his longer-term ambition to marry her.2 Certainly by the following March it seems that these ambitions had been aired, and Constance, who had a genuine fondness for Nellie, was being drafted in as her advocate. Now, as far as Constance was concerned, it was Otho’s turn: ‘I want you now to do what has hitherto been my part for you, and make it all right.’3
Constance and Oscar had meticulously planned their assault on the Lloyd side. Oscar had left Ireland straight after proposing and travelled to Shrewsbury to continue his lecture circuit. On his arrival there he wrote to John Horatio, to Constance’s mother and to Otho regarding his intentions. Constance had written a note for Aunt Emily, no doubt pleading how much she loved Oscar, and had sent this to Otho, with instructions that he should hand it over when Oscar’s letters arrived, and ‘not before’. Then the plan was that Constance would take a Friday crossing which would return her to London early on Saturday 1 December. That same Saturday, Oscar, with a temporary break in his lecturing, could return to London and then visit Lancaster Gate the following Sunday to repeat his intentions in person before setting off on his next round of lectures. His commitments would then keep him and his fiancée apart until Christmas, a prospect that Constance was already dreading.
The minute Oscar left Constance in Dublin he began writing to her. And two days after his proposal she wrote back in the most passionate terms:
My own Darling Oscar
I have just got your letter, and your letters always make me mad for joy and yet more mad to see you and feel once again that you are mine and that it is not a dream but a living reality that you love me. How can I answer your letters, they are far too beautiful for any words of mine, I can only dream of you all day long and it seems as if everyone I meet must know my secret and see in my face how I love you, my own love. If you had your magic crystal you would see nothing, believe me, but your own dear image there for ever, and in my eyes you shall see reflected nought but my love for you. Oh Oscar how shall I ever love you … for your sweet love for me, and yet I worship you my hero and my god! You may give up your lecturing if you will, for as long as I live you shall be my lover. You must come to me on Saturday, I cannot live til Xmas without you, & yet I know if you do not come you cannot. All thro the early watches of the night your image is ever present with me, & I cannot sleep.4
But Constance’s and Oscar’s plans were quickly challenged. First there was that unfortunate letter from Otho that suggested a potential lack of support on his part for the engagement. In addition to this blow came news that Oscar had forgotten a commitment to lecture on the very Saturday that he planned to travel to London to talk to Constance’s family. And then there was further disappointment. Rather than giving his instant consent to his granddaughter’s marriage, John Horatio had responded to Oscar’s letter with the news that he intended to withhold his consent until Oscar could answer some important questions about his financial situation. After her initial elation Constance sank into a period of anxiety, fearing that it might be some weeks before she and Oscar secured the family blessing that was so preferable.
‘You will have discovered by this that your observation that with regard to Oscar was rather ill timed,’ Constance now wrote to Otho.
I don’t wish to know the story but even if there were foundations for anything against him it is too late to affect me now. I will not allow anything to come between us and at any rate no one can abuse him to me. I am sorry to say that he will not be up in town for 3 or 4 weeks because he has discovered that he has to lecture somewhere on Saturday. Please for my sake and because my happiness is dependent upon this thing do not oppose it, I’m desperately seedy with a very bad cold and can neither sleep nor eat now until this suspense is over.5
Otho replied by return. He had softened. He duly wrote to Oscar welcoming him into the family. With one of her concerns allayed, when Constance then heard that Oscar would cancel his Saturday lecture in order to meet the family, she was ecstatic.
More good news was forthcoming when the Swinburne-Kings gave their seal of approval too. Ada wrote to Lady Wilde explaining that she had already written to Oscar ‘to say how pleased I should be to welcome him as my son in law’. Ada said the couple were well suited to each other. ‘Both are … charming, gifted and what is to my mind even more essential to the beginning of married life, immensely attracted to each other. I have heard twice from Constance about the event and in each letter she says she is so intensely happy – I do indeed think that there may be a long and happy life in store for them both.’6 Now it was just John Horatio who needed reassurance.
On Friday 30 November Constance packed her bags and headed for the steamer that would carry her across the Irish Sea. At seven the following morning, by her own accounts so radiant that ‘all the fog in London will disappear’, she met Otho on a frosty platform in Euston station. Constance had specifically requested that her brother have a muffin with him for her breakfast. Whether he remembered this detail is not known. That evening Otho invited Oscar to dine at Lancaster Gate, and much of Sunday was spent at home with the Lloyds, in frank conversation.
Far from objecting to the marriage, the Lloyds were in fact happy to support it, provided Oscar could prove himself sufficiently responsible. John Horatio, too ill to write when he received Oscar’s letter on 27 November, had instructed Aunt Emily to lay out things as he saw it. John Horatio had ‘no objection to you personally as a husband for Constance’, she informed Oscar by return. ‘He believes that you and she are well suited to each other. He has confidence you will treat her kindly … But he thinks it right as her guardian to put one or two questions to you … He would like to know what your means are of keeping a wife.’ In addition, Aunt Emily pointed out that her father also insisted on knowing ‘if you had any debts’. Only when Oscar could answer these points would Constance’s grandfather ‘give a considered consent’.7
Constance was not fully aware of Oscar’s financial situation. She knew enough though to ascertain that he didn’t have the resources to support a wife and start a household.8 And so in the early days of her engagement she was working on the assumption that their marriage was not going to be possible until her grandfather died, a point at which she would be a beneficiary of his will.
John Horatio had written his will in February 1880. In it his personal effects were split between his three daughters and Otho, who was to receive his library. The remainder of his property was to be sold, and the money raised divided into four portions for investment. The income from these investments was for the benefit of aunts Emily, Carrie and Mary, with the last to cater for Constance and Otho. Constance had no capital bequest per se. Aunt Emily had pointed out in her letter to Oscar that on John Horatio’s death she might expect an income of £700 at least, but until then she had a limited allowance of just £250 a year.9
But John Horatio clearly wanted to help the couple. As requested, Oscar was transparent about his debts to the old man, which at that time were in the region of £1,500, and he must have made a good case for his capacity to earn an income. Perhaps knowing his own death was imminent and also, as Aunt Emily had conveyed to Oscar, making Constance’s happiness his first consideration, he prepared a financial package for the couple that would allow them to marry more quickly than Constance had anticipated. They would not have to wait for him to shuffle off his mortal coil. John Horatio revealed he would forward £5,000 to a trust fund. The trustees of this fund would in turn advance Constance the interest generated by this capital, and this would provide her with an income immediately. When John Horatio died, this capital advance would be deducted from her legacy. It meant that the couple could go ahead and marry; the only remaining issue was when.
And so by the evening of Sunday 2 December 1883, when Oscar boarded the Scotch mail train that would return him to his lecturing commitments, his engagement to Constance had been thoroughly digested and approved. It was just the matter of a wedding date that remained.
On this topic, correspondence between Oscar and the Lloyds continued in early December, with Aunt Emily acting as scribe for the bed-bound John Horatio. Constance’s grandfather was concerned that Oscar’s debts would place a burden on a young couple. He wanted Oscar to manage to pay off at least £300 in the next few months. The wedding could take place only when this was done.
If Oscar was criticized for his high living and spending, at the same time he had a drive and work ethic that were hard to match. He had undertaken to make a lecture tour of Britain every bit as gruelling and intense as that he had made in America. Over the next two years Constance would have to get used to being without Oscar at least as much as she was with him. If there had ever been any sense that Oscar was marrying Constance for her money, the limits of her actual marriage settlement meant that he was never going to be a kept man. Determined to succeed in his own right, he set out to work hard and milk every opportunity that was offered him. He told John Horatio that he could pay off the £300 of debts by April. And with this pledge he and Constance began to make plans for a wedding in that month.
Constance was so deeply in love with Oscar at this time that every day his lecturing kept him away from her pained her terribly. She pined for him desperately.
My darling love, I am sorry I was so silly: you take all my strength away, I have no power to do anything but just love you when you are with me, & I cannot fight against my dread of your going away. Every day that I see you, every moment that you are with me I worship you more, my whole life is yours to do as you will with it, such a poor gift to offer up to you, but yet all I have and so you will not despise it. I know it is only for 3 days, but – it is the wrench of the parting that is so awful, and you are so good to me I cannot bear to be an hour away from you: Do believe that I love you most passionately with all the strength of my heart and mind: anything that you asked me to do, I would in order to convince you and make you happy. I don’t think I shall ever be jealous, certainly not jealous now of anyone: I trust in you for the present: I am content to let the past be buried, it does not belong to me: for the future trust & faith will come, & when I have you for my husband, I will hold you fast with chains of love & devotion so that you shall never leave me, or love anyone as long as I can love & comfort …10
Constance’s reference to jealousy is intriguing. Had she and Oscar begun to discuss his past romantic and sexual histories? Was such a discussion prompted by the story that Otho had wanted to disclose about Oscar and that Constance didn’t care to hear? Had Otho suggested that Oscar had his eyes on other marriageable women at the same time he was courting Constance? Or did Otho have an even more controversial story – that perhaps Oscar was sexually interested in men? One can easily imagine Oscar making an honest confession about his past feelings for Florrie Balcombe and perhaps even Violet Hunt. But would Constance have even dared raise any suggestion that Oscar also had a penchant for men?
What Constance understood of homosexuality at this stage is impossible to know. The stifling old-world atmosphere in Lancaster Gate would not have been one in which such things were discussed. But as a bright woman with an inquiring mind who was in touch with the artistic community it also seems highly improbable that she would have failed to grasp the sexual ambiguity that Oscar’s Aesthetic pose presented, or the implication that lay beneath the public ridicule in which his effeminacy was so often held by publications such as Punch. And that she understood the ‘wicked’ sexual allusions in his poetry is clear.
The fact is that, in spite of his effete manner, Oscar’s sexual orientation in his twenties was predominantly towards women. He had had a genuine and rather conventional love affair with Florrie Balcombe at the very least. And his attentions to women elsewhere had been well noted.
That’s not to say that there was already an aspect of his personality that was drawn to sexual experimentation, and more unconventional or insalubrious sexual experiences. He had slept with prostitutes since his Oxford days. And while on his writing trip to Paris in the spring of 1883 he had continued this habit, as his friend the journalist and author Robert Sherard would later attest. Oscar first met Sherard in Paris in 1883, and they would remain lifelong friends. Sherard was a firm heterosexual who himself regularly used prostitutes in Paris, and he may well have introduced Oscar to the notorious Eden music hall, where he paid for the services of the infamous Marie Aguétant.
Sherard is a key character. His attitude to Oscar seems very close to that of Constance. Never for a moment did he consider Oscar’s ‘effeminacy’ indicative of homosexual tendencies. Oscar had a habit of kissing Sherard on the lips when they met, and calling him and everyone else for that matter by their first names. Oscar would send him letters that others might well interpret as being sexually suggestive and homoerotic in tone. But Sherard persisted in reading Oscar’s fruity letters and over-intimate behaviour as part of his Aesthetic affectation. It was his style. Sherard loved Oscar for all this. But not for a moment did he sense any predatory sexual attitudes on Oscar’s part towards him.
And if Constance had any doubt in her mind about Oscar’s behaviour, this is almost certainly the reassurance that she offered herself. Oscar was eccentric and shocking. He was playful and risqué. But at heart he was a conventional, ‘manly’ man. His devotion to her spoke for itself in this regard. Oscar was just as infatuated with her as she was with him, a fact revealed in Oscar’s letter to his friend Lillie Langtry.
‘I am going to be married to a beautiful girl called Constance Lloyd,’ he wrote,
a grave, slight, violet-eyed Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her. We are to be married in April. I hope so much that you will be over then. I am so anxious for you to know and like her. I am hard at work lecturing and getting quite rich, tho’ it is horrid being so much away from her.11
Although Constance’s life was taking a decided turn for the better, she was nevertheless haunted in these early days of her relationship with Oscar. Full of unspecified fear, she found herself sleepless and anxious at night. Her cousin Lizzie Napier, staying at Lancaster Gate, slept with her in an attempt to stop these night terrors.
‘I get so frightened at night,’ Constance confided to her fiancé. ‘The wind was howling furiously and suddenly there came a crash as if the house were coming down, & after a few minutes another. We have not yet discovered what had happened. The wind always makes me think of death & separation and terrifies me into a state of horrors.’12
Oscar did what he could to comfort his bride-to-be. Wherever he was in the country, he telegraphed her twice daily and sent her flowers as often as he could, often lilies. If he had a day off from his talks and London was within reach, he dashed back to see her, sometimes forfeiting sleep or supper for the privilege of an hour with his fiancée. Although Constance was delighted with this devotion, it also concerned her. ‘I wish you were not so tired,’ she wrote to Oscar.
Perhaps you had better not come to London next Sunday! You must not give up any more Saturday lectures, and if you won’t promise to have a proper supper you are not to come & see me on Saturday evening. I am still very angry with you for not telling me you were starving last Saturday, I think it was so unkind: so it was, I should have insisted on your having something only I never feel at home here, I am only just like a visitor myself.13
In the first three weeks of December, Oscar travelled from the north to the south of England, gradually working his way through the north-east and Birkenhead, then to the midlands and Worcester, before returning to London to lecture at the Crystal Palace on the 21st. The minute he was back in London, Constance was at his side. She took Oscar to have lunch with her aunt Mary Napier in Norwood before the lecture. For the following Christmas week, which Oscar had as a holiday, the couple were barely out of one another’s sight.
The engagement was announced in mid-December in Society and Truth magazines. The news spread quickly through a press for whom Oscar was now a regular topic, and Constance tasted the celebrity and public scrutiny that from now she would have to live with. By 20 December regional papers as far afield as Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester and Derby were carrying the news. ‘Bunthorne is to get his bride,’ announced the Liverpool Daily Post.
Oscar Wilde is going to be married … she is a Dublin girl, a Miss Lloyd, a niece of the late Sergeant Armstrong, very well known and much liked in Ireland. There was at first some fear lest London should lose its lion, and society its favourite source of admiration and ridicule. A terrible rumour had got about that Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde were to settle down in Dublin. Happily this danger is averted. We keep Oscar.
Constance discovered that she was now something of a novelty. She and Oscar went to the theatre most nights that week. At the St James’ the cast peeped through the curtains during the intervals to glimpse the future Mrs Wilde. On 23 December she found herself again the focus of fascination when Oscar’s friend the painter Whistler held a special breakfast function at which Oscar ‘and the lady whom he has chosen to be the chatelaine of the House Beautiful’ were guests of honour.
Aunt Emily was having problems adjusting to her niece’s new status. Constance was entering a bohemian, modern world that this spinster could barely grasp. Although a grown woman and now officially engaged, Constance had to fight for permission to attend every single event with Oscar. She barely made it to the Whistler breakfast. ‘I am afraid you will have to go to Mr Whistler’s without me,’ she had written to Oscar earlier in the month. ‘I am very sorry. Please don’t let him be offended or think I did not want to come.’14 It was Aunt Emily who was forbidding Constance to go. Oscar went into battle. Although Aunt Emily eventually gave in, she made her disapproval clearly felt in her letter to him.
‘As Constance tells me Mr Whistler has arranged his luncheon party expressly for her & she is heartily disappointed at not being permitted to go, I have determined to withdraw my objection on this occasion on the distinct understanding that it is not to be made a precedent for any more visiting of a like kind. So long as she remains under her grandfather’s roof it is also understood that her brother is to take charge of her.’ Emily did not want Constance to do anything ‘unbecoming to a young unmarried lady’.15
Despite the rather frosty and old-fashioned Aunt Emily, with whom he now had to negotiate access to his bride-to-be, Oscar was visibly delighted about his engagement. On Boxing Day he celebrated with the Sickert family and was so overcome with joy that he carelessly left two sovereigns behind him. Eleanor Sickert, the painter Walter’s mother, was amused by this turn of events. ‘We found two sovereigns on your chair,’ she explained. ‘I feel inclined to scold you for being so careless but you are too happy to mind even a severe lecture so I will not waste one.’16
Constance meanwhile found herself inundated with letters and cards congratulating her. Many of her friends and family prefaced their messages, asking whether the news was really true. Oscar was, after all, so famous, and Constance absolutely unlike the publicly visible Lillie Langtrys or Maud Howes with whom he was typically associated.
Constance responded to all who wrote with a brief note to which she attached a peacock feather – one of the motifs of Aestheticism. Whatever supply she had acquired was insufficient to meet a flood of interest in the news. In the end she cut up three of her own peacock feather fans as well as ‘numbers of feathers that I collected at Mrs Ainslie’s last year’. She tried offering one of these tokens to Otho, but he refused it, believing the peacock feather to be unlucky. Aunt Carrie, on the other hand, ‘not being superstitious took them, so now we shall have no ill-luck’.17
One person who was far from surprised on hearing from Oscar of his ‘Artemis’ was Lillie Langtry. ‘Oscar’s contemplated marriage did not surprise me,’ she said, ‘as I knew that he had for some time admired the girl.’18
And then in January, Oscar was off again and Constance’s life quietened. But Oscar did not leave before giving his betrothed a special gift, a pet marmoset to keep her company while he was away. It was christened Jimmy, possibly after Oscar’s friend the painter James Whistler.
Constance took her new pet and headed for Bagshot in Surrey to stay with the Cochranes. Basil Cochrane, later Vice-Admiral Sir Basil, and his wife, Cornelia, were old family friends.19 John Horatio was still very ill – if anything, his condition had deteriorated over Christmas – and Aunt Emily wanted Lancaster Gate vacated so she could be left alone to deal with her deteriorating father. Constance could read all the signs. She confided in Otho that she felt it unlikely the old man would survive the winter.
The philanthropic Cochranes kept Constance busy. They held a children’s dancing class, for which Constance had to play waltzes on the piano. She went with Mrs Cochrane to help out at the annual Sunday school tea. But at night, when Windlesham House in Bagshot fell silent, Constance’s trials continued. This time Mrs Cochrane crawled into bed with her, sleeping with her every night of her stay so that so she didn’t feel so frightened in the dark.
Constance had a tendency towards clumsiness and misadventure when it came to everyday life. Throughout her life she was known for losing umbrellas or purses, or dropping or tearing precious things. Little Jimmy somehow fell prey to this unlucky aspect of Constance’s life. Oscar’s pet met its untimely end on 4 January 1884; it could only have been in Constance’s care a matter of days. Constance broke the news to her betrothed. ‘My sweet little Jimmy is dead, died at 1 /2 past 5 o clock this morning: I am forlorn & miserable. Is it my fault that everything you give me has an untimely end? I don’t think he suffered much as he looks so pretty. I can’t bear to think of him; we are going to bury him presently.’20
Much of Constance’s time away from Oscar was spent in imagining what married life would be like. Oscar, who was much parodied in the press for his heavy smoking, loved the very highest-quality cigarettes supplied from the Parascho depot in Mayfair’s Park Street, conveniently close to Speranza and Willie. Constance began to wonder what it would be like to live with a smoker. She was not massively fond of the habit but told Oscar that ‘I would never ask you to give it up: I see no reason why you should not smoke as much as you like, only if you over-do it, I should think it would become a morbid craving like that for opium.’21
If Oscar’s fault in Constance’s eyes was his addiction to nicotine, Constance began to wonder what aspects of her character would grate with him. ‘Do get the list of my faults from Cenie!’ Constance urged. ‘I know two people who think I have none: one is Mrs Cochrane who wrote to me yesterday, the other a lady at Oxford who told Charlie Napier so: Charlie did not agree!’22
No matter that at the heart of their relationship lay the simple concerns of any ordinary couple; as far as the public were concerned, Constance and Oscar were extraordinary. Now, with news that they would marry in April, the speculation began regarding the wedding itself. Just what would an Aesthetic wedding be like? And what would the bride wear?
Any such questions were quickly answered. Constance’s wedding dress was made by March and went on show. This event in itself was enough to attract national attention. News travelled far and wide that the wedding attire of Mrs Oscar Wilde was ‘saffron hued, the colour the Greek maidens wore on their wedding day’.23
Anna Kingsford, a friend of Speranza’s, wrote to Lady Wilde keen to hear more about just this:
I am coming to town for the season in about ten days … please write me a line and say WHEN and WHERE the wedding is to take place! I hear the bridal robe is on view somewhere and I should greatly like to see it. So please give me the address of the artist who is responsible for it. I hope the illustrated papers will do their duty noble in regard to the marriage and this ‘sweetness and light’ of which it will be the radiant point.24
Oscar’s friend Robert Sherard alleged that Oscar himself designed Constance’s wedding dress. Constance’s son Vyvyan, however, later denied this. Oscar was often credited with matters of design at Constance’s expense, and the anecdote of the genesis of this outfit may well be the first instance of this. Given her art schooling and her natural interest in fashion and embroidery, it is far more likely that Constance designed her own outfit, in conjunction with her dressmaker Mrs Nettleship.
Adeline Nettleship was the wife of the painter John Trivett Nettleship, a one-time solicitor who had given up his conventional career in 1870 to paint and who had subsequently become a successful and regular exhibitor at the Grosvenor Gallery.25 Her business was based at 2 Melbury Terrace, St Marylebone, and it was probably here that Anna Kingsford and others would have gone to glimpse the gown ahead of the big day. While John Nettleship pursued his art on canvas, his wife created unique, dramatic and sometimes consciously bizarre outfits that were considered to represent the most outrageous and expressive end of the art dress market. Ada Nettleship was not dogmatic in her designs, but known for working with her clients, incorporating their own ideas into a final product that was always not only unique but also genuinely reflective of the wearer’s personality.
While Mrs Nettleship and her girls were busy working on Constance’s wedding and going-away gowns, Constance and Oscar got on with the pressing matter of where they should live. Oscar had already lived briefly in the exquisite Keats House that Godwin had designed for Frank Miles in Tite Street in Chelsea. Now there was another property coming up in that street. ‘We have been looking at a house in Tite Street, which I think we are likely to take,’ Constance wrote to family friends, the Harrises, at the end of March.
The problem for Oscar and Constance, however, was that, although they had found a house they liked, they still didn’t have a sufficiently large amount of cash to secure it. Although Constance now had an annual income arranged, to lease Tite Street the couple would have to come up with a lump sum. It may well have been this final hurdle in regulating their affairs that encouraged Constance and Oscar to delay their wedding until May.
John Horatio once again came to the aid of his granddaughter. On 29 April an arrangement was made by which a further advance of £500, to be offset against her future legacy, was paid into the Union Bank of London. This sum would allow Constance to acquire a six-year lease on Tite Street and the cost of the modifications to the house that they wanted to make.
And so eventually, after a brief six-month engagement, the public were delivered the wedding that they had been so eagerly anticipating. The event had been kept as low-key as possible, not least because of the state of John Horatio’s health. Only close family and friends were admitted to the ceremony by special ticket. The newspapers noted with disappointment that there were few literary or artistic glitterati amid the invitees. Whether Anna Kingsford made the ceremony is not sure. Jimmy Whistler telegrammed on the day that he would be late. People such as Oscar’s solicitor and family friend George Lewis and his wife attended, the latter in a costume of black and amber. Ada Swinburne-King and Speranza were in brilliant shades of grey, the former in rich grey satin with black mantle and bonnet and the latter in silver-grey brocaded silk and satin. The actress Mrs Bernard-Beere wore a jet-covered dress with a black hat trimmed with yellow flowers.
Underwhelmed by the celebrity quotient of the guests, the large crowd of Oscar Wilde fans who had gathered to see Constance emerge from her carriage outside St James’s Church, Sussex Gardens, at 2.30 p.m. on 29 May 1884 were then met with further disappointment. Those members of the public who had hoped to see her in that saffron dress which had been so talked about were instantly surprised. Rather than the deep golden yellow of the tip of the saffron crocus thread, Constance’s dress had just the merest tint of yellow. The Ladies’ Treasury described it as a ‘rich creamy satin dress … of delicate cowslip tint’, while the Lady’s Pictorial thought it more of an ‘ivory satin’. Oscar, meanwhile, ‘appeared in the ordinary and commonplace frock coat of the period’.
There were, of course, some more obvious concessions to Aestheticism. Rather than being bustled, the skirt of Constance’s dress was plain, with a long train. The bodice was low-cut with a Medici collar, and the sleeves were, of course, puffed. Instead of the traditional wreath of orange blossom, she wore a wreath of myrtle leaves, which the ‘Metropolitan Gossip’ column of the Belfast News informed its readers was ‘a more poetical and highly classical adornment’. According to the press, the most unusual aspect of the outfit, apart from its surprising simplicity, was the veil. Hanging from the back of her head, it was Indian silk gauze embroidered with pearls. And around her waist Constance wore a silver girdle, which was Oscar’s wedding gift to her. She carried a bouquet of lilies.
If anything, it was the bridesmaids who provided the spectacle that the crowd had been expecting. Six of Constance’s cousins, two them children, were dressed in terracotta, ‘after Sir Joshua Reynolds’. The elder girls had ‘bodices and short over skirts of figured nun’s veiling; the ground was pale blue, the flowers old gold. They wore high crowned straw hats trimmed with long cream feathers and knots of surah silk. All the bridesmaids wore yellow roses at the throat; amber necklaces, and carried bouquets of the fairest and most fragrant water lilies.’ John Horatio was too ill to attend the ceremony, and so it was left to Constance’s uncle Hemphill to give her away. Willie was Oscar’s best man.
Oscar selected an extremely unusual wedding ring that he gave Constance that day. At first glance it is a simple gold band. But on closer examination it is sliced in half, so that it opens to form two interlocking rings. On the inside of one is the tiny inscription ‘29th May 1884’ while the other bears the names ‘Constance and Oscar’.
After the ceremony the party retired for a brief reception at Lancaster Gate. There they ate a cake covered with sprays of jasmine and lily of the valley. By 4.30 that afternoon Constance and Oscar were on a train from Charing Cross en route to a honeymoon in Paris. Constance was wearing what one publication described as a dark mahogany, and another reported as a deep crimson, travelling dress. Both press accounts agree that she wore a large-brimmed hat to match. What no one needed to report, but everyone took for granted, was that above all Constance was wearing a huge smile.