STORIES
The trials of Oscar Wilde – his downfall was a tragedy in three acts
In the spring of 1891, John Sholto Douglas (1844-1900), the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, was a very angry man. In particular, he was furious with the public antics of his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, aged 20. He sat down to write a long letter to him on 1 April, and spent two paragraphs lambasting the handsome youth for ‘loafing and lolling about’.
Then he addressed the main purpose of his missive. He wrote: ‘Secondly, I come to the more painful part of this letter – your intimacy with this man Wilde. It must cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies. I am not going to try and analyse this intimacy, and I make no charge; but to my mind to pose as a thing is as bad as to be it. With my own eyes I have seen you both in the most loathsome and disgusting relationship as expressed by your manner and expression. Never in my experience have I seen such a sight as that in your horrible features as you cavorted shamelessly in public with this dreadful man.
‘No wonder that people are talking as they are. Also I hear on good authority (but this may be false) that his wife is petitioning to divorce him for sodomy and other ghastly acts. Is this true or do you not know of it? If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public knowledge, I should be quite justified in shooting him on sight.’
The reply from Lord Alfred Douglas was brief. He sent back a telegram to the family home at Kinmount House in Dumfries near Carlisle on the Scottish border. The message read, ‘What a funny little man you are!’
As you can imagine, the contents of this brief telegram sent the Marquess into a blind rage. And when The Marquess became really angry, things started to happen. He really was more than just ‘a funny little man’. To judge by his behaviour in the Wilde affair and at other times, the Marquess was quite mad.
Douglas senior was a passionate sportsman whose name is still remembered through the Queensberry Rules, the code of fair play in Boxing that he drew up. In his youth he had been an amateur lightweight champion, was an accomplished athlete at the 2 miles steeplechase event, and led the local hunt as Master of Hounds. And he was never afraid of controversy: as an outspoken atheist, he won notoriety by refusing to take the oath at The House of Lords, dismissing the ritual as “Christian tomfoolery!” His quick and excitable temper once led him to chase after the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, with a dog whip. The same uncontrolled temper caused his children to detest him, and his wife to divorce him on grounds of cruelty.
Lord Alfred Douglas, known to his mother and lover as ‘Bosie’ was the third son of the Marquess and a poet renowned for his delicate good looks. It was in January 1891, as a youth of 20, that he first met the famous Irish playwright and author Oscar Wilde; and an intimate relationship soon developed between them. Wilde was aged 37 and already famed as a decadent celebrity. As an undergraduate at Oxford University he had helped to found the cult of ‘aestheticism’ or pursuit of beauty, which was parodied in Gilbert and Sullivan’s the comic opera ‘Patience’.
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854 and by 1891 he was living in Chelsea, London where he was acclaimed as a successful playwright, novelist and poet. Known for his barbed wit, he was one of the most accomplished playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. But his legal clash with The Marquess was to lead to his ruin.
Wilde and Alfred Douglas were clearly infatuated with each other, and the relationship inspired Wilde to write some of the best work of his life, such as the sparkling comedies, ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ and ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’. Though Wilde was married, he was a promiscuous homosexual and ‘Bosie’ was unquestioningly aware of it. The older man wrote a number of florid letters to his young companion which inevitably fell into the hands of blackmailers and then, fatally for Wilde, into the possession of the Marquess of Queensberry.
The Marquess responded to his son’s telegram by threatening him with a severe horse-whipping, adding ‘If I catch you again with that man I will make a public scandal in a way you little dreamed of.’ Queensberry then started visiting restaurants frequented by the famous gay couple, warning managers not to admit them. One night he arrived unannounced at Wilde’s Chelsea home with a prize fighter acting as his ‘minder’. Following a bitter verbal exchange, Queensberry and his man left only after Wilde threatened to call the police.
The mad Marquess nursed his anger for years. On 14 February 1895, he turned up at the Haymarket Theatre for the first night of ‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ bearing a monstrous bouquet of vegetables which he intended to present to Wilde as his audience looked on. But Wilde had been forewarned, and Queensberry was refused admittance to the theatre. He prowled around for hours, muttering vile threats against the Irish playwright before finally dumping the bouquet at the stage door and leaving.
Four days later the Marquess arrived at Wilde’s club, (The Albemarle), and left a card with the hall porter, instructing him to present it to his sworn enemy. The card read, ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite’.
It was this brief message (with the key word ironically misspelt) which brought three trials and ruin to Oscar Wilde. Perhaps spurred on by ‘Bosie’ (who detested his father as much as Wilde did), he decided that he had to prosecute his persecutor on grounds of criminal libel. The decision was certainly foolish, for Wilde not only ‘posed as’ but was, after all, a practicing homosexual, and had never been especially discreet about it. More foolish still was his decision not to confide in his solicitor whom he assured, on his honour, that there was no truth in the allegation.
Queensberry was formally arrested on 2 March 1895, and the trial opened a month later. The Central Criminal Court at London’s famous Old Bailey was to stage each act in Wilde’s three-part tragedy. Queensberry’s defence was led by Edward Carson QC, who had been a fellow undergraduate of Wilde at Trinity College, Dublin. “No doubt he will perform his task with all the added bitterness of an old friend,” quipped Wilde when he heard the news, and indeed the verbal duel fought out between the two former classmates has gone down in legal history as a courtroom classic.
During his initial verbal exchanges with Carson, Wilde was brilliant. He was questioned about a story with homosexual undertones named ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’. Carson asked him, “You are of the opinion, I believe, that there is no such thing as an immoral book?” “Yes”, replied Wilde. Carson then asked, “May I take it that you think ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ was not immoral?” Wilde: “It was worse then that. It was badly written.”
Carson then introduced the letters written by Wilde to Lord Alfred. In one Wilde referred to ‘those rose red leaf lips of yours are made for the madness of kisses.’ Another described Lord Alfred as being ‘the divine thing that I want’, and complained of his ‘curved lips saying hideous things to me.’
Carson: “Is that an ordinary letter?” Wilde: “Everything I write is extraordinary. I do not pose as ordinary, great heavens!”
These and other rejoinders had onlookers in the packed courtroom helpless with laughter. But the mood changed as the names of a succession of young working-class men and boys were brought up: valets, grooms and coachmen with whom Wilde had dined privately in curtained rooms, and to whom he had given money. (Note: homosexual acts and male prostitution were illegal in the UK until 1967).
Reference was made to a 16-year-old boy named Walter Grainger. When Carson asked Wilde if he ever kissed the boy, the playwright replied with airy nonchalance; “Oh dear no! That poor boy is extremely ugly.”
Carson pounced: “Was that the reason you did not kiss him?” Wilde: “Oh Mr Carson. You are being impertinently insolent.” Carson: “But why sir, did you mention that the boy is ugly?”
Wilde: “For this reason. If I were asked why I did not kiss a door mat, I should say because I do not like to kiss door mats. I was stung by the insolent question you put to me and the way you have insulted me throughout this cross-examination. Am I to be cross-examined because I do not like it?”
Carson continued to harangue Wilde on his sexual tastes; Wilde started to bluster and the damage was done. Gone was the laughter. The whole tone of the trial was now soured. Carson made his opening speech for the defence on the third day of the trial, announcing the names of a large assortment of young ‘rent boys’ who had served Wilde and whom he intended to put into the witness box. Wilde’s counsel suddenly declared that he was prepared to withdraw his case against The Marquess. The latter was freed, and the cheering was loud as Queensberry walked from the court.
The tables had turned dramatically. Wilde had been exposed as a homosexual and homosexual acts were then, under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, punishable by up to two years of hard labour. Everyone assumed that Wilde would flee the country, for Queensberry’s solicitor sent all the witness statements to the Director of Public Prosecutions. By 5pm on the day of the collapse of the trial, a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Oscar Wilde.
Now was the time for the famous playwright to take a train to Dover and from there a ship to Calais, France; but he did no such thing. For some unknown reason he sat drinking hock in the Cadogan Hotel until 6.30pm when Inspector Richards and a colleague from Scotland Yard arrived to arrest him.
Wilde’s humiliating downfall was greeted with a terrible, gloating relish in the London press. Arthur Ransome wrote, ‘Few men have been sent to perdition with a louder cry of hounds baying behind them.’ His books were withdrawn from shops, his two plays, running at the Haymarket and St James’s, closed. Wilde had long been living on credit and now the bailiffs moved into his Chelsea home and stripped him of almost every possession. Scorned, shunned and bankrupted, Oscar Wilde was ruined even before his trial began.
He reappeared at the Old Bailey, this time as a defendant, on 26 April and was charged with a man named Taylor (who had been a procurer for him) with 25 counts of gross indecency. Queensberry’s private detectives had been busy seeking evidence among male prostitutes in London’s seedy underworld, and much sordid material was now made public.
Wilde was this time careful not to show off as he had done before. Instead, looking pale and haggard, he quietly but firmly denied the charges. The case presented by his counsel was that the whole affair had got up by, and relied on the testimony of, blackmailers hired by Queensberry. Only when he was questioned about a line in one of Lord Alfred’s poems (‘I am the love that dare not speak its name’) did he speak out, and when did so he was eloquent. He defended the spiritual love which may exist between an older and a younger man, “when the elder man has intellect and a younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.” He spoke of David and Jonathan, of male love pervading the works of Shakespeare, Plato, Michelangelo and the love between Achilles and Patroklos, and Alexander and his teenage Persian lover, Bagoas. There was loud applause in the court when he finished and it was obvious that the power of that impromptu speech helped to save him at this second trial, for the jury could not agree on a verdict. Wilde was therefore released on bail.
Unfortunately, he was allowed only a temporary and miserable freedom. A gang of thugs hired by the avenging Queensberry made sure that no hotel would admit him. Wilde staggered across the threshold of the London house of his alcoholic brother Willie, saying “Please give me shelter Willie. Let me lie on the floor or I shall die in the streets!” (The befuddled Willie never fully appreciated the issues at stake in the trial. “Oscar was not a man of bad character”, he once told George Bernard Shaw; “you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere!”)
Friends later helped Wilde out with accommodation and cash, advising him to jump bail and escape to France. But Wilde strangely refused, and when a new trial was arranged for 20 May, he returned for a third time to the Old Bailey. Much of the evidence against him was recycled at this trial, and it was obvious that the famous playwright was now a broken man. A new jury found him guilty of 25 counts of gross indecency. The sternly disapproving judge sentenced him to the maximum term of two years’ hard labour. Outside the court room a large crowd cheered the verdict, and the London press again feasted gloatingly on the lurid details of his misdeeds.
Wilde served out his sentence at Wandsworth and later at Reading, where he composed his dark poem, ‘The Ballad of Reading Goal.’ On his release, he moved to Paris where he remained an exile and a bankrupt, abandoned by all but his most loyal friends. When French Customs asked him if he had anything to declare, Wilde replied, “Only my genius!” It was true: Wilde was wiped out financially.
He never expressed regret for his homosexual pursuits, but what did distress him was a sense that he had somehow failed to defend himself with adequate daring and panache. And that he had deliberately lied to his solicitor, Mr Humphreys. To a satirical wit like Wilde, being evasive and deceitful was not quite as bad being a bore.
Oscar Wilde died in a seedy Paris Hotel on 30 November 1900, and was buried in the famous Pere-La Chase cemetery where in later years he was joined by doomed singers Jim Morrison and Edith Piaf.
Ironically, the Marquess of Queensberry had died on 31 January that year, the victim of a mania by which he believed himself to be persecuted by friends of Oscar Wilde. In his will, the Marquess had insisted that his body was to be buried upright and without religious ceremony. It was strongly rumoured that the grave-diggers subsequently inserted his body into the earth head first.
IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979
The Thief and the Scorpion
The decline of US credibility is complete after the humiliating death of Saddam Hussein and the sharp escalation of violence in Iraq that followed it. News editors of US television channels describing the situation as “the United States is losing the war in Iraq” clearly failed English grammar at school, by mixing up their gerund-participle in place of the appropriate past participle, ie, “the United States has lost in Iraq”.
The fact that America’s moral obligations have not kept pace with its technological capabilities has been brought to the fore once again, by the country’s attack on Somalia’s apparent sanctuaries for al-Qaeda, even as the US forsakes any responsibility toward the innocent victims of Sudan’s genocidal leaders. It is a matter of some wonder to observers that a US administration can practice non-intervention in the same breath as active bombardment.
The malaise is not only American, as other countries such as Britain appear equally culpable, albeit of other offenses. The suspension of an investigation into alleged bribing of members of the Saudi royal family by a British defense contractor was explained as a measure to safeguard English jobs. That economic interest has been at the forefront of all societies’ cultural, religious and moral evolution, only highlights the more generic disease prevalent across the Western Hemisphere.
It isn’t only in the area of foreign policy that such hypocrisy is evident. Environmental concerns have also caused Western leaders to leap headlong into denial, adopting the same strategies of pseudo-science that tobacco companies used in past few decades to pooh-pooh links between smoking and cancer. In the end Islamic terrorism may produce the unintended consequence of reducing global warming, in essence by scaring over-consuming Western societies into actually changing their habits.
None of this would matter but for the fact that North America and Europe are hopelessly addicted to cheap financing and rising import demand (respectively) from emerging superpowers. It would be erroneous to assume that the latter group needs the former; instead it is the other way around. Why then are global financial markets showing less risk than would otherwise be prudent?
The emperor has no clothes, darling
Eloquence can be defined as the ability to describe the balloon-smuggling star of Baywatch, Pamela Anderson, without using one’s hands. In much the same way, watching a number of financial news channels, I am struck by the inability of any commentators to explain the low returns in US financial markets without using their hands to draw elaborate castles in the air. Seeing as most of these channels are US-owned, perhaps they are not permitted to utter the obvious truth, which is that US bonds and stock values are inflated.
With even ill-tempered minnows such as Venezuela thumbing their noses at American officials, it is almost surreal to observe the continued stability of financial markets, which observation brings into focus the role of the biggest holders of US debt. Rather than being beholden to the stability of the US economy, countries such as China and those in the Middle East are merely withdrawing air from the bubble ever so slowly.
The expected rise in bond yields this year, and associated expectations for a decline in US stock valuations, are already being reflected in financial markets, which currently show surging enthusiasm for all things non-American. There has been no need thus far to effect a “zero-sum” approach of selling one group of financial assets to buy another, because of ample global liquidity. The decline in oil prices of late is actually negative for that liquidity as it reduces the surpluses.
Smart money, though, is chasing returns away from the US and even the European Union. While that strategy by itself leaves much to be desired, at least it proves more defensible than the air of resignation that surrounds anyone forced to invest in the US economy.
The Catalyst. Chinese banks pay their depositors less than what US banks pay theirs. Even so, the former cannot keep away their surpluses, which eventually wind their way back through the financial markets to the US. But this calculation only works as long as the returns on US assets exceed the currency-adjusted return for Chinese banks. In the past two years, that was certainly not the case, as the Chinese currency appreciated more than the nominal yield differential between the two classes of assets.
While this loss may have been bearable a few years ago when China had less than US$150 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, its current position of more than $1 trillion means that even a 1% loss as described above translates into a mind-boggling figure of $10 billion. In practice, the Chinese government loses more than that every year to keep the peace with the Americans and Europeans.
On the benefits side of the equation, China gets to keep manufacturing jobs that could otherwise be lost - albeit not to North America or Europe, but rather to other Asian economies lower down in the manufacturing value-addition scale, such as India and Vietnam. The forsaking of domestic demand for this purpose is going to look, at some stage, like an overly high price to pay. I expect that between a sudden decline in property or stock prices and continued pressure from the US administration, China will push through a staggered revaluation of its currency against the US dollar this year and next.
Market Reaction. Financial markets are already signaling this eventuality, as the rising prices of Chinese financial companies now show. The country’s largest bank and its largest life-insurance company are, respectively, the third- and second-largest by market capitalization in the world. Behind this creditable achievement lies the expectation of foreign investors to benefit from significant currency appreciation, rather than any overt trust in the fundamentals of such companies.
Chinese banks continue to face huge challenges, ranging from their excessive deposits to their large and growing book of problem loans. Meanwhile, Chinese insurance companies face the threat of a staggeringly quick demographic decline, which, when measured against the poor returns on less risky assets in the country, implies that growth in overall income is likely overstated.
Thus the primary reason for investors to partake of such assets, at inflated prices, is the expectation that they can profit from the rise before any downturn. Investors in US or European assets can hardly complain on this front, seeing as the assets they are holding appear equally subject to overoptimistic valuations. At one stage during the emerging markets crisis of the late 1990s, the value of one US company exceeded the combined market capitalization of all emerging markets. It is the natural order of things that the boot is now on the other foot.
In Summary. If the sting of a scorpion surprises a burglar, he is caught between the need to scream, risking capture, or silently bearing the pain before gingerly withdrawing into the night. Much the same logic rules the financial markets these days, where the poor returns to be had in the US markets have driven many investors to search for alternatives, even if these appear overvalued themselves.
This global epidemic of pseudo-logic will end in tears for many investors, but at least the people with the real savings have the ability to recover, which the US economy appears to lack.
Copyright 2007 www.atimes.com
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