4

Regina Versus Wilde

‘All trials are trials for one’s life.’

oscar wilde

It was not the only letter written that afternoon. Wilde, it seems, scribbled a note to Constance, urging her to let no one enter his ‘bedroom or sitting-room’. Queensberry’s solicitor, Charles Russell, meanwhile, wasted no time in writing to the Crown’s director of prosecutions, Hamilton Cuffe, enclosing ‘a copy of all our witnesses’ statements’ together with the trial transcript, in order that ‘justice’ might be done.1 Cuffe, besides seeking an immediate interview with Russell, also sent the particulars round to the House of Commons for the attention of Asquith, the home secretary, and the law officers Sir Robert Reid (attorney general) and Sir Frank Lockwood (solicitor general).

This high-level consultation is certainly suggestive: the case had acquired a political dimension. Clarke’s decision to read out Queensberry’s letters had had unintended consequences. The fact that the names of Rosebery and Gladstone had been mentioned (however obliquely) in court placed the Liberal establishment in an awkward position. They needed to be seen to be acting without fear or favour in their dealings with Wilde, lest it be claimed that they were involved in some sort of cover-up. Wilde’s three erstwhile Eighty Club colleagues – Asquith, Reid and Lockwood – swiftly agreed that a warrant should be applied for, and Asquith gave instructions that Wilde should be stopped ‘wherever he might be found’.2

The marquess, for his part, had stepped out of the Old Bailey to be greeted as a conquering hero by cheering bystanders and supporters. It was reported that he had sent a message to Wilde, declaring, ‘If the country allows you to leave, all the better for the country, but if you take my son with you I will follow you wherever you go and shoot you.’3 To the reporters who gathered at Carter’s Hotel that afternoon he suggested, however, that, rather than being allowed to flee, Wilde ‘ought to be placed where he can ruin no more young men’.4

If Wilde had decided to leave England for the continent that afternoon, it is probable that he would have been allowed to go, despite the stated hopes of Asquith and Queensberry that he be apprehended.5 But, as Percy’s statement – and his own letter – made clear, Wilde had resolved to stay. Quite why is less obvious. Ross had urged him to go to France. There was perhaps a touch of defiance in his refusal, but inertia probably played a greater part. Wilde was stunned by his reversal; ‘With what a crash this fell!’, he later lamented to Ada Leverson. ‘Why did the Sibyl [Mrs Robinson] say fair things?’6 Disappointed by fortune tellers, he seems to have surrendered himself to his fate, and become almost an observer of his own catastrophe.7

He did make one last small effort to face the crisis, calling at the offices of Messrs Lewis & Lewis, in nearby Ely Place. But his old friend Sir George was unable to help. ‘What is the good of coming to me now,’ the lawyer exclaimed. ‘I am powerless to do anything. If you had had the sense to bring Lord Queensberry’s card to me in the first place, I would have torn it up and thrown it in the fire, and told you not to make a fool of yourself.’8 Wilde had made more than a fool of himself.

Uncertain what to do next, he took his brougham and, having called at his bank in St James’s, went on to the Cadogan Hotel, where Bosie had been staying for the past week. His progress across town was tracked by a troop of journalists and by Queensberry’s hired detectives. As Wilde drove through St James’s he may have noticed his name being removed from the playbills outside the Haymarket and the St James’s Theatres. Over the three days of the trial it had been remarked that attendances at both theatres has ‘fallen off’.9*

Installed in Bosie’s rooms at the hotel by the middle of the afternoon, Wilde sat and waited with his trio of friends. He drank hock-and-seltzer with a steady determination. Already the evening papers were predicting his arrest. Ross was dispatched to take the news of Queensberry’s victory to Constance, who was staying with her aunt in Lower Seymour Street. She had Vyvyan with her; Cyril had been taken out of Bedales and sent to relatives in Ireland. Through her tears, she pleaded with Robbie to encourage Wilde to go ‘away abroad’.10 Wilde, however, remained unmoved and immovable. He deflected all suggestions of flight, with the assertion – quite untrue – that ‘the train has gone… it is too late’. There were, in fact, regular boat-trains from Victoria until quarter to ten in the evening. Bosie, unable to bear the strain of waiting, took himself off to the House of Commons to consult his cousin, George Wyndham, about the government’s plans to prosecute. While he was absent, a reporter from the Star arrived and informed Ross that he had seen confirmation on the news ‘tape’ that a warrant for Wilde’s arrest had indeed been issued. The authorities had acted with almost unexampled speed. When Ross relayed the news, Wilde’s face turned ‘very grey’.11

At around half past six came the knock on the door. Two plainclothes policemen entered. ‘Mr Wilde, I believe?’ Wilde rose to his feet. He would give no trouble. Pausing only to put on his overcoat, gather his gloves, and pick up a copy of Pierre Louÿs’s latest novel, he was led down to the waiting ‘growler’. He was driven first to Scotland Yard, where the arrest warrant was read, charging him under Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act with ‘committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons’. From there he was taken to Bow Street police station, where he was booked and taken down to a cell for the night. Neither Douglas nor Ross was allowed to see him.

At ten o’clock the following day the committal proceedings began, heard before the magistrate, Sir John Bridge, in the small – and crammed – ‘upper’ courtroom at Bow Street Police Court. Wilde found himself joined in the dock by Alfred Taylor, who had been arrested that morning at his lodgings in Pimlico. They greeted each other with a bow. Charles Gill – Carson’s junior in the Queensberry trial – acted as the prosecutor for the Crown. He began to lay out the case against Wilde and Taylor with slow deliberation. The witnesses mentioned by Carson began to be produced: the Parker brothers, Alfred Wood, Fred Atkins, Sidney Mavor and – in due course – Edward Shelley. The dangers and difficulties facing Wilde became horribly vivid. Ready to implicate themselves, it was apparent that the witnesses had been granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony. It became clear, too, that they had received – or were receiving – financial support from Queensberry’s solicitors. Edward Shelley had, it was said, received 20 guineas for his two days’ attendance during the libel trial, despite the fact that his weekly wage, when at the Bodley Head, was a modest 15s. Charles Parker appeared resplendent in a new suit paid for by the prosecution.12

Wilde had to listen as they detailed their various encounters with him: the dinners at Kettner’s, the nights at the Savoy, the parties in Taylor’s rooms, the assignations in rented lodgings, the clandestine visits to Tite Street and St James’s Place – and the sex. William Parker claimed that Taylor had told him and his brother that Wilde would like them to behave ‘the same as women’. Charles Parker described how he and Wilde had undressed and got into bed naked at the Savoy (before Gill interposed with ‘I don’t propose to take this further, in any detail’ – for the present). Alfred Wood’s account of what occurred between him and Wilde at Tite Street was so graphic as to be ‘unreportable’, even by the downmarket Reynolds’s Newspaper.13 After them came the first of a succession of hotel employees, lodging-house keepers, waiters and servants who had seen Wilde in more or less compromising circumstances. There was the masseur and the chambermaid at the Savoy who had noticed a ‘common’ boy in Wilde’s bed; the same maid had also been shocked by the ‘peculiar’ staining of Wilde’s bed sheets and night shirt, apparently smeared with Vaseline, semen and ‘soil’.14

Wilde was supported by the same legal team that had handled his unfortunate prosecution of Queensberry. Sir Edward Clarke – regretting, it seems, having advised Wilde to withdraw from that case – insisted that he and his juniors would give their services without charge.15 Humphreys, too, ceased to send in his bills (Taylor was represented by his own barrister, J. P. Grain). At the first hearing at Bow Street, one small victory was achieved. When Sidney Mavor was called to give evidence, he provided a full account of his visit to Wilde at the Albemarle Hotel but then – to the surprise of the prosecution (who had his very full statement to the contrary) – he flatly denied that any improprieties had occurred. The credit for this unexpected coup was claimed by Douglas; he had encountered Mavor in the corridors of the police court and told him, ‘For God’s sake, remember you are a gentleman and a public school boy. Don’t put yourself on a level with scum like Wood and Parker. When counsel asks you the questions, deny the whole thing, and say you made the statement because you were frightened by the police. They can’t do anything to you.’16 Mavor’s volte-face left the prosecution without its most outwardly ‘respectable’ witness, and also the one who linked Wilde most closely to Taylor.

The defence still faced many obstacles. The prosecution had determined that Wilde and Taylor should be tried together, an arrangement likely to be detrimental to Wilde’s chances. One day was not enough for the Crown to produce all its witnesses; two further hearings would be required, on 11 and 19 April. In the meantime an application for bail was denied, owing – it was stated – to the ‘gravity of the case’. Sir John Bridge, going considerably beyond his judicial discretion, suggested that ‘there is no worse crime than that with which the prisoners are charged’ – this, in spite of the fact, that ‘gross indecency’ was, technically, not a crime at all, but a misdemeanour.

The prejudice was typical. Queensberry’s victory and Wilde’s arrest had called forth an extraordinary outpouring of self-righteous vituperation from press and public alike. Among the sheaf of telegrams that the victorious Queensberry had received was one stating, ‘Every man in the City is with you. Kill the bugger!’17 George Wyndham noted that such hostility was common to ‘all classes’.18 Frank Harris thought it fiercest among the ‘puritan middle class, who had always distrusted Wilde as an artist, an intellectual and “a mere parasite of the aristocracy”’.19 Many old friends turned their backs.† In all quarters Wilde’s guilt was generally assumed. The Echo was living up to its name in announcing that ‘Mr Oscar Wilde is “damned and done for”.’ It was expected – and hoped – that more arrests might follow. Hooting mobs gathered outside Bow Street to greet Wilde’s arrival at his subsequent hearings. The more salacious details revealed by the witnesses were circulated in hastily produced pamphlets.20 Street songs of ‘questionable, if not infamous character’ relating to the case were sung ‘in many of the public thoroughfares, particularly in South London’.21

Condemnation, however, was not only personal but also artistic. Lucien Pissarro, writing to his father, described the hatred unleashed against Wilde, as less an attack on ‘sodomisme’ than an assault upon the artist and the human spirit. Wilde’s fall would mark the end of the Aesthetic movement in England, just at the moment when the rest of Europe was coming to admire it. ‘L’Anglais,’ Pissarro declared, ‘déteste l’Art.’22 The ‘English’ press certainly did now detest Wilde’s artistic vision. The National Observer, though no longer edited by Henley, announced, ‘There is no man or woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensberry for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents.’ He looked forward to the ‘legal and social sequels’ of Queensberry’s victory: ‘There must be another trial at the Old Bailey, or a coroner’s inquest – the latter for choice; and of the Decadents of their hideous conceptions of the meaning of Art, of their worse than Eleusinian mysteries, there must be an absolute end.’23

If Wilde had pulled down the temple of art upon himself, it was clear that others were to be injured in its fall. All modern artistic expression stood condemned, ‘lumped’ together as part of a perceived ‘Oscar Wilde’ tendency.24 Six prominent Bodley Head authors cabled John Lane, away in America, stating that unless he at once removed Wilde’s name from the Bodley Head catalogue and suppressed Beardsley’s work in the forthcoming volume of The Yellow Book they would withdraw their books. Lane hastened to comply.25‡

Having been denied bail, Wilde was moved from the police cells at Bow Street to Holloway to await his further committal hearings. Although he might be in gaol, as a prisoner on remand he was allowed to wear his own clothes. By paying a small supplement he received a large, fully furnished ‘special’ cell. He could have food sent in from a local restaurant. He was permitted to read books, write letters and see visitors. Despite such amenities, incarceration still took his toll. Smoking was not permitted. At his subsequent committal hearings, the press noted – with evident satisfaction – Wilde’s rapid physical decline. By the end of fortnight it was reported that his face was ‘grey’, his cheeks ‘fallen in’, his hair ‘unkept’ and his mien one of ‘general depression and sudden age’.26

He had few allies to hand. Both Ross and Reggie Turner found it advisable to leave the country and go over to France. Ross’s flight was, it seems, precipitated not by fear of arrest but by the fact that had been subpoenaed by the Crown to give evidence against Wilde.27 The Leversons remained wonderfully loyal and attentive. Sherard wrote a cheering letter from Paris to say that Wilde had the sympathy and support of Bernhardt, Goncourt, Pierre Louÿs, Stuart Merrill and other ‘artists’. Slightly less welcome was a letter from Willie saying that he was ‘defending’ him ‘all over London’. ‘My poor brother’, Wilde remarked; ‘he could compromise a steam-engine.’28

Wilde’s one constant visitor at Holloway, besides his lawyers, was Bosie. He had remained in London. He came daily but the interviews – held amid a cacophony of other prison visitors, across a divide patrolled by a warder – were distressing. Wilde, following his ear infection, found it increasingly hard to hear. Nevertheless the mere sight of Bosie brought comfort. ‘A slim thing, gold-haired like an angel, stands always at my side,’ Wilde wrote to the Leversons. ‘His presence overshadows me. He moves in the gloom like a white flower.’29 Wilde had come to dramatize his predicament as the climax of a doomed romantic passion. He had, so he now claimed, been motivated in his legal action solely by a desire to defend Bosie from his father.30 And now, in his misery, he was sustained by ‘the beautiful and noble love’ that he and Douglas shared:31

What wisdom is to the philosopher, what God is to his saints, you are to me. To keep you in my soul, such is the goal of this pain which men call life. O my love, you whom I cherish above all things, white narcissus in an unmown field, think of the burden which falls to you, a burden which love alone can make light. But be not saddened by that, rather be happy to have filled with an immortal love the soul of a man who now weeps in hell, and yet carries heaven in his heart. I love you. I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool springs are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfume of the cassia tree. Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other.32

It was a notion that Douglas readily endorsed. He announced that, should Wilde be convicted, he would buy a house next to the prison, and live there until his release. That Douglas might be himself arrested, and charged along with Wilde and Taylor, was a prospect eagerly anticipated in many quarters. But Bosie’s relatives were aware, from early on, that there would be ‘no case’ against him;33 the authorities had convinced themselves that not only was there insufficient evidence to secure a conviction, but that Douglas’s ‘moral guilt’ in the matter ‘(assuming his guilt)’ was ‘less’, since he had been corrupted and led astray ‘when a boy at Oxford’ by the ‘great influence’ that Wilde had exerted over him.34

Constance, having rescued her personal effects from Tite Street, had retreated again to Babbacombe, taking Vyvyan with her. She was now being advised and assisted by George Lewis, and also by Burne-Jones’s son, Philip. Both men counselled that she must abandon her husband to his troubles, his debts and his fate. Tite Street, too, should be given up. ‘If the landlord means to distrain for rent – let him,’ counselled Lewis; ‘Simply leave it – for the landlord to enter and distrain if he wishes.35

Trapped at Holloway, Wilde struggled to attend to the details of his disintegrating life. He was distraught at not being on hand to help his mother with the regular doles that he ‘provided for her subsistence’.36 He had little time to prepare his defence. Despite the efforts of his counsel to delay the case, it was set for trial on 26 April. Meanwhile his many creditors were anxious to recover their debts (even before Queensberry could add his legal costs to the equation). Wilde, though, had little money to hand; his plays might continue to run, but to ever-dwindling houses.§ And there was no hope from America. An Ideal Husband, which had opened to good reviews in New York on 12 March, had already been taken off; The Importance of Being Earnest, which opened on 22 April, lasted barely a week.37 Sarah Bernhardt’s plans for a Parisian production of Salomé were abandoned. Wilde’s hope that the actress might buy the rights to the play (for £400) was not fulfilled. Bernhardt sent messages of sympathy and made promises of help. But, in the event, the time was inconvenient. She had nothing to give.38

Three tradesmen succeeded in getting a judgement against Wilde for their outstanding bills – totalling ‘about £400’ – ‘principally for cigarettes and cigarette cases’. The bailiffs were put into Tite Street. And in a chaotic ‘sheriff’s auction’ held on the premises, on 24 April, there was a general sale of Wilde’s effects – his books, his pictures, his papers, his furniture, his clothes, even the toys from his children’s nursery.¶ Some of Wilde’s friends attended, in an effort to salvage something from the ruins. The Leversons, ever ready to assist, bought the Harper Pennington full-length portrait, among other pieces (they got it for £14, the same amount as was paid for ‘Carlyle’s writing desk’). Although a few items fetched ‘fancy prices’ – notably the inscribed copies of Wilde’s own books – many pieces, especially towards the end of the sale, went for absurdly low amounts. Will Rothenstein got a Monticelli for £8; Joseph Pennell picked up a Whistler etching for a shilling. The total realized was slightly under £300.39

On the same day as the auction Douglas, yielding to the pleas of his family and Wilde’s legal team, finally left London for France, joining Ross and Turner at Calais. The afternoon before his departure he had seen Wilde at Newgate, where the prisoner had been brought while the grand jury made their ruling that the trial could go ahead. Wilde kissed the end of Douglas’s finger through the iron grating, and begged him to remain true to their love.40 They could, at least, continue to correspond. Over the coming days Wilde reported to Ada Leverson of his regular letters from ‘Jonquil’ or ‘Fleur de Lys’, and told of the joy they brought him. To Bosie he wrote: ‘Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars and comforts me, your love is the light of all my hours… I stretch out my hands towards you. Oh! may I live to touch your hair and your hands. I think your love will watch over my life.’41

In An Ideal Husband Sir Robert Chiltern remarks, ‘when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers’. As a schoolboy Wilde had hoped that he might be the hero of a cause célèbre – the defendant in such a case as ‘Regina versus Wilde’. Now that moment had come. On the morning of Friday 26 April 1895, he found himself in the dock at the Old Bailey, together with Alfred Taylor. Justice [Arthur] Charles was presiding. The two men were charged under a single indictment. There were twenty-five counts alleging acts of gross indecency by both men, as well as conspiracy to procure the commission of such acts. Taylor was also charged with having acted as the procurer for Wilde. The charges against Wilde concerned his ‘misconduct’ with Charles Parker, Fred Atkins, Sidney Mavor, Alfred Wood, with unknown ‘male persons’ at the Savoy, and with Edward Shelley.

After three weeks on remand, Wilde looked ‘haggard and worn’, his long hair no longer carefully arranged. Taylor appeared dapper beside him, as the long list of charges was read and legal arguments were entertained. Clarke tried, unsuccessfully, to have the conspiracy charges removed, as being different in kind to the charges of gross indecency. Charles Gill then opened for the prosecution, outlining – at some length – the circumstances of the case, and his proposed plan of procedure. It was a tedious recital and the spectators in the crowded courtroom grew restless. Wilde appeared bored. His boredom, however, soon passed when the witnesses began to be called.

Charles Parker came first. The reticence of the police court proceedings was abandoned. Gill encouraged the witness to give graphic accounts of his assignations with Wilde. However, it was perhaps to the surprise of his own counsel that Parker – going beyond the charges on the indictment – declared that, on their first night together at the Savoy, Wilde ‘committed the act of sodomy with me’. He went on to describe Wilde asking him ‘to imagine that I was a woman and that he was my lover. I had to keep up this illusion. I used to sit on his knees and he used to play with my privates as a man might amuse himself with a girl.’ Although Parker readily admitted to ‘tossing [Wilde] off’, and being tossed off by him in return, he claimed that he had resisted Wilde’s several attempts ‘to insert “it” in my mouth’.

And so it went on and on for five gruelling days (with the Sunday off): William Parker telling of how, over dinner at Kettner’s, his brother had repeatedly accepted preserved cherries from Wilde’s own mouth; Alfred Wood recounting how, during dinner in a private room at the Florence restaurant, Wilde had put his hand inside Wood’s trousers, and persuaded Wood to do the same to him; Fred Atkins describing how he had come back from the Moulin Rouge to find Wilde in bed with Maurice Schwabe; Edward Shelley reluctantly confessing that Wilde had ‘kissed’ and ‘embraced’ him after supper at the Albemarle Hotel; most of them telling of how they had slept with Taylor in the low double bed at his draped and scented lodgings. And, in between, came a succession of landladies, hotel servants and others, all willing to link Wilde to Taylor and both men to the key witnesses. Mary Applegate, the landlady at Atkins’s lodgings in Osnaburgh Street, like the chambermaid at the Savoy, reported finding horribly stained bed sheets following Wilde’s several visits to her tenant.

On the third day Gill read out the full transcript of Wilde’s cross-examination from the Queensberry trial, adding its revelations and arguments to the record. At the beginning of the fourth day Gill announced that the conspiracy charges would, after all, be withdrawn. If this had been done at the start of the trial – Clarke pointed out – there would have been a strong argument for the cases against the two prisoners being heard separately. Now it was too late. As Gill remarked of Wilde’s chances, ‘only a miracle can save him’.42

Clarke did his best to discredit the main witnesses, pointing out that the young men (except for Mavor and Shelley) were self-confessed blackmailers, thieves and liars. Atkins, indeed, was ordered from the witness box by the judge after it was proved that he had perjured himself in denying that he had ever been taken to Rochester Row police station in connection with an attempt to blackmail a gentleman that he had picked up at the Alhambra Music Hall. Clarke was able to show that Shelley, besides being mentally unstable, had continued to see, and to write to, Wilde as a friend for many months after the supposedly distressing incidents at the Albemarle had taken place. As to the ‘disgusting’ state of Wilde’s bed sheets at the Savoy and Osnaburgh Street, he suggested they might have been the result of nothing worse than diarrhoea.43**

In Wilde’s defence Clarke suggested that no man would have instituted proceedings against Queensberry if he were guilty of any wrongdoing; and that it was even less possible to believe a guilty man would have stayed in the country having seen Queensberry’s plea of justification. ‘Insane would hardly be the word for it, if Mr Wilde really had been guilty [of the deeds listed in the plea] and yet faced the investigation.’44

Wilde then stepped from the dock into the witness box. While admitting his ‘association’ with the various witnesses, and the various presents bestowed and dinners given, he denied that any of the ‘alleged improper behaviour’ had taken place. He gave his evidence with quiet deliberation. Although Clarke had sought to dismiss all discussion of Wilde’s works – such as had occupied Carson during the libel trial – Gill insisted on addressing ‘the literary part of the case’. Ignoring The Picture of Dorian Gray, though, he turned his attention to The Chameleon – and not to Wilde’s own contribution, but rather to Douglas’s two sonnets ‘In Praise of Shame’ and ‘The Two Loves’. Both were read out. At the close of the second, Gill demanded to know, ‘What is the “Love that dare not speak its name”?’ – was it ‘unnatural love’?

Wilde replied:

The ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

Wilde’s words created a sensation in court, and there was an outburst of clapping from the public gallery – mingled with some hisses. These were ideas, and even phrases, that Wilde had been rehearsing for many years: they informed ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’; they echoed the defence of his own behaviour that he had made to the Crabbet Club. But to deliver them, unprepared, in court, with such wonderful fluency and assurance, was something exceptional. The writer Robert Buchanan considered it nothing short of ‘marvellous’. By some it was declared to be ‘the finest speech of an accused man since that of St Paul before Agrippa’.45

Max Beerbohm (back from America, and in the court that day) wrote to Reggie Turner:

Oscar has been quite superb. His speech about the Love that dares not tell his name [sic] was simply wonderful, and carried the whole court right away, quite a tremendous burst of applause. Here was this man, who had been for a month in prison and loaded with insults and crushed and buffeted, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice. He has never had so great a triumph, I am sure, as when the gallery burst into applause – I am sure it affected the gallery.46

How much it affected the jury was another matter. While it may have reflected Wilde’s idealized vision of his love for Lord Alfred Douglas, it was scarcely germane to his fleeting encounters with Parker, Wood and co. The social and intellectual imbalance in these relationships was certainly dwelt on by Gill in his cross-examination:

Gill: Why did you take up with these youths?

Wilde: I am a lover of youth!

Gill: You exalt it as a sort of god?

Wilde: I like to study the young in everything. There is something fascinating in youthfulness.

Gill: So you would prefer puppies to dogs and kittens to cats?

Wilde: I think so. I should enjoy, for instance, the society of a beardless, briefless barrister quite as much as the most accomplished QC.

Gill added to the laughter in court with the rejoinder: ‘I hope the former, whom I represent in large numbers, will appreciate the compliment.’ He then went on: ‘These youths were much inferior to you in station?’

‘I never inquired, nor did I care, what station they occupied. I found them, for the most part, bright and entertaining. I found their conversation a change. It acted as a kind of mental tonic.’47††

At the end of that fourth day, after Wilde and Taylor had given evidence, counsel made their closing speeches. Sir Edward Clarke argued that Wilde’s openness – in his association with the various witnesses, in his dealings with staff at the Savoy, in his appearing in the witness box, in his initiation of the libel action against Queensberry – was the ‘best proof of his innocence’. His behaviour throughout had shown none of ‘the cowardice of guilt’. ‘Mr Wilde,’ he admitted, ‘is not an ordinary man’. His writings might be ‘inflated, exaggerated, absurd’ – but that should not condemn him. In his generous association with the young Atkins, Wood and Parker he had found himself sadly ‘taken in’ by an unscrupulous gang of practised blackmailers. ‘I do not defend Mr Wilde for this,’ he intoned; ‘he has unquestionably shown imprudence, but a man of his temperament cannot be judged by the standards of the average individual’. If these ‘tainted witnesses’ now came forward ‘in a conspiracy to ruin’ his client, their evidence should not be credited. Urging the jury to put from their minds all the ‘bias’ occasioned by the prejudicial reporting and discussion of the case, he trusted that ‘the result of your deliberations will be to gratify those thousands of hopes which are hanging upon your decision, and will clear from this fearful imputation one of our most renowned and accomplished men of letters of to-day, and, in clearing him, will clear society of stain’. His final ringing words were greeted with applause. Wilde was visibly affected by the oration, and scribbled a note of appreciation and gratitude. It was handed down to Clarke, who returned a nod of thanks to the prisoner in the dock.48

Grain, in his address (on behalf of Taylor), reiterated the idea that the uncorroborated evidence of known blackmailers such as the Parkers could not be accepted. Gill, however, in the final speech of the day, asked, ‘Why should any of the witnesses have sought to give false evidence? What end could they serve? What good could they get by it?’ Corroboration was never likely to be possible concerning incidents that were almost invariably private. But the many gifts that Wilde had given these ‘lads’ – invariably made after he had been alone with them ‘at some rooms or other’ – told their own tale. ‘In these circumstances even a cigarette case is corroboration.’ Though Clarke might ‘protest against any evil construction’ being put on Wilde’s gifts and dinners for these ‘vulgar, ill-bred’ youths, ‘in the name of common-sense what other construction is possible?’

However impressed Wilde had been with Clarke’s advocacy, he held little hope for the outcome of the trial. That evening he wrote, from his cell at Holloway, a long letter to Bosie, beginning, ‘My dearest boy. This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonor be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently.’49

The proceedings next morning (Wednesday 1 May) began with the judge’s summing up. Over the course of three hours, in an exceptionally crowded court, he went over the evidence, listened to in ‘breathless silence’.50 It was a measured performance, leaning, perhaps, wherever doubt existed, towards the defendants. He approved the removal of the conspiracy charges from the indictment; he found that there was nothing to answer in relation to the counts involving Sidney Mavor, since Mavor had insisted that no improprieties took place; and they too were struck out. On the literary part of the case, he thought it ‘absurd’ to hold Wilde responsible for things that he had not written in The Chameleon. He remarked of Wilde’s actual contribution, ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’, that ‘some are amusing, some cynical, and some of them – if I may be allowed to criticize them myself – silly; but wicked, no.’ He questioned whether it was right to regard Wilde’s extravagantly phrased letters to Lord Alfred Douglas as ‘horrible and indecent’, not least because Wilde himself appeared to be proud of them. He mentioned Shelley’s ‘very excited state’ in the witness box, and the inconsistencies in his behaviour. He drew attention to Atkins’s extraordinary piece of perjury – ‘a falsehood so gross that you would be justified, if you think fit, in declining to act on any of his evidence’. He admitted that, to him, it seemed ‘strange’ that, if what the Savoy servants alleged with regard to seeing a boy in Wilde’s bed were true, ‘there were so little attempt at concealment’. He mentioned, too, that Wilde had ‘the right to ask you to remember that he is a man of highly intellectual gifts, a person whom people would suppose incapable of such acts as are alleged’ – and Taylor, too, ‘though nothing has been said about his abilities’, was ‘well brought up’.

The jury went out shortly after half past one. It was generally expected that their deliberations would be brief, and that the guilt of the prisoners would be confirmed. But those in the court who had witnessed Justice Charles’s summing-up were less certain. And their doubts seemed confirmed as the time lengthened, the hours passed. At three o’clock lunch was called for. Rumours began to circulate that there might be disagreement. It was not until quarter past five that the jury filed back into court.51

Wilde and Taylor were brought back into the dock; Beerbohm reported that ‘Hoscar stood very upright’, looking ‘most leonine and sphinx like’. Taylor seemed insignificant beside him.52 The suspicions in the courtroom were confirmed: the jury had been unable to reach an agreement, except on ‘the minor question’ relating to Atkins, where they found the defendants ‘not guilty’. Formal ‘not guilty’ verdicts were also returned on the conspiracy charges, and the charges relating to Mavor. Wilde received the news ‘without any show of feeling’.53

Gill at once announced that the case would ‘certainly be tried again’ and probably ‘at the next sessions’ (in three weeks’ time). An application for bail was again refused, and Wilde was returned to the tedium of Holloway.54

* Of the performances on 5 April it was noted (by the Glasgow Herald) that at neither theatre ‘was there any hostile demonstration’, although at the St James’s the audience ‘was much smaller than usual’. And ‘in one or two places slightly discordant remarks were made’ – chiefly from the gallery – ‘especially when reference was made to the town of Worthing’ – which was now associated with Wilde’s seduction of Alphonse Conway.

† Ettie Grenfell would recall how her husband, Willie, had taken Wilde’s side during the early stages of the libel trial, protesting that the claims made against him were ‘impossible’. But, as the case proceeded, his innocence was shocked. He said, even before Wilde’s arrest, ‘We can never have him to Taplow again.’

‡ Lane, already greatly distressed by the fact that his publishing house had been mentioned in the Queensberry trial, as the place where Wilde had met Edward Shelley, was even more perturbed by press reports that Wilde had left the Cadogan Hotel after his arrest with The Yellow Book under his arm. The volume was in fact Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite, bound – like all French novels – in yellow wrappers.

§ An Ideal Husband, having transferred from the Haymarket to the Criterion (on 13 April), where Wilde’s name was actually restored on the programme, did not close until 27 April; although on the night following the verdict in the Queensberry trial, ‘the house dropped to £11’. The Importance of Being Earnest continued to play at the St James’s until 8 May, a run of eighty-three performances.

¶ Ross, prior to his departure for France, had retrieved from Tite Street – at Wilde’s request – several unpublished manuscripts, including The Florentine Tragedy and La Sainte Courtisane. These he entrusted to Ada Leverson.

** The evidence of the Savoy masseur and chambermaid – about having seen a ‘boy’ in Wilde’s bed, though forceful, was incorrect. They had confused Wilde’s room with the adjoining one belonging to Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde, anxious to defend Bosie, had not mentioned this fact. Douglas, away in France, did – it seems – wire to Wilde’s lawyers, eager to point out the error. He was informed that his intervention was ‘most improper’ and that any further attempts at interference ‘can only have the effect of rendering Sir Edward [Clarke]’s task still harder than it is already’.

†† Wilde might have done better to suggest that he associated with these youths for their benefit, rather than his own. A benign interest in corrupted working-class youth was one of the accepted forms of late Victorian philanthropy. Gladstone gave tea parties for ‘reformed’ prostitutes. And such interest could be used to justify more dubious behaviour. In 1895 Wilde’s friends Professor Ray Lankester and George Alexander were both cleared of charges of consorting with (female) streetwalkers by claiming that they were seeking to assist them.