Franny Moyle (42 page)

Without properly taking into consideration the damaging effect that a legal case of this nature was likely to have on Constance and the boys, Oscar took Bosie's advice. He allowed himself to be persuaded that the loss of his luggage was a sufficient barrier to flight, and that action through the courts would prove fruitful.
⁴²
And so while Constance was left to mull over the ramifications of what she had just been told, Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde knocked on the doors of Mr Humphreys' offices in Giltspur Chambers, Holborn Viaduct. Humphreys asked if there was any truth in Queensberry's allegations, and on hearing Oscar's vehement denial he advised that Oscar did then indeed have a case.

In a moment of doubt over the wisdom of proceeding, Oscar pointed out that he could not afford the cost of a court case, given his current financial embarrassment. But Bosie instantly assured Humphreys that his family – that is, his brother and his mother, who was divorced and alienated from Queensberry – would meet the expenses. Oscar had no further excuse to prevent proceedings.

Humphreys, Bosie and Oscar hailed a cab that took them the relatively short distance from Holborn to Soho, and here at the Great Marlborough Street police station they applied for a warrant for the arrest of Queensberry. On the morning of 4 March 1895, Constance, along with anyone else who took
The Times
, was able to read how that arrest had been made two days earlier.

In the Police section of the paper, it was reported that:

At Marlborough Street on Saturday, the Marquess of Queensberry, aged 50, described as having no occupation and as residing in Carter's
Hotel Dover St., was charged before Mr Newton on a warrant of defamatory libel concerning Mr Oscar Wilde on February 18th. Mr C. O. Humphreys, solicitor, prosecuted; and Sir George Lewis, solicitor, appeared for the defence.

If Constance had not already been aware of the fact, the realization that George Lewis was not acting for them but for the other side must have come as a terrible shock. However, she may have felt momentarily reassured by the manner in which the paper seemed to be reporting events: ‘Mr Humphreys stated that Mr Oscar Wilde, who was a married man and lived on most affectionate terms with his wife and children, had been the object of a system of most cruel persecution at the hands of Lord Queensberry.'

But if there was some solace to be found in the reference to her husband's married status, and the note of his victimization by Queensberry, reports of the warning shot that Lewis fired back across the courtroom at his adversary were ominous:

Let me say one word sir … I venture to say, when the circumstances of this case are more fully known, you will find that Lord Queensberry acted as he did under feelings of great indignation … I do not wish this case to be adjourned without it being known that there is nothing against the honour of Lord Queensberry.

Queensberry's bail was set at £1,000, and the court was adjourned until the following Saturday. A week later the whole of London woke up to the scandal. The kind of crowds Oscar had formerly attracted outside theatres were now in Great Marlborough Street, waiting for his return to court and queuing for the limited number of places available in the public gallery. He did not disappoint. Arriving ten minutes early for the hearing, Oscar drew up with great style in a carriage and pair with a coachman and footman to boot, and with Bosie and Bosie's brother Percy in tow. Constance was noticeably absent.

On 9 March the same parties reassembled, but with one profound difference. Sir George Lewis was not present. In his stead a new solicitor, a Mr Russell, had taken over the defence of Queensberry
and was now joined by Edward Carson QC. After the hearing, which went over similar ground to the first, the case was duly committed to trial in the Old Bailey.

Oscar's side may well have chosen to read Lewis's sudden withdrawal from the case as a positive indication of the likely outcome. Oscar and Bosie seemed to be ploughing ahead with utter confidence in their ability to win, and were blinkered to the realities of their likely success in the case. Almost somnambulant, they moved onwards without realizing that the whole of London was predicting that, on the contrary, Oscar was about to be exposed. For Lewis's resignation was less a sign of confidence in Queensberry than an indication that, with a sense of the evidence Queensberry was gathering, he was about to crucify his old friend and client. This was something he could not bring himself to do.

Constance had made statement appearances at court in the past. But she was absent now from a case concerning her own husband. That Constance did not want to expose herself to public ridicule or abuse would have been perfectly understandable. But another contributing reason was almost certainly her ill health. In spite of her restful stay at ‘Babb', in March Constance's mobility problems had taken another turn for the worse. She had been temporarily forbidden to walk by her doctors and was consequently preparing to leave Tite Street for a short stay with her aunt Mary Napier in Lower Seymour Street, where she could be properly nursed. She was, she told Robbie Ross, preparing for an operation in the third week of March, though if Oscar wanted her in Tite Street before this date, she would postpone it until after the case.

Bed-bound at her aunt's house, Constance seems to have become reliant on Robbie's preparedness to play messenger between his two friends Constance and Oscar Wilde. Constance must have been mortified then to discover that Bosie, on seeing his father committed to trial, had suggested that he and Oscar head for Monte Carlo, and that her husband, seemingly prepared to accede to any whim presented by his young friend, had agreed. Resigned, Constance sent some correspondence for Oscar to Robbie, along with a note pointing out that
she had arranged for someone to care for Oscar's mother, Lady Wilde while he was absent and she was incapacitated: ‘I don't know Oscar's address … as I am forbidden to walk I shall not be able to come over to Oakley Street, but I will leave directions about his mother having everything she needs.'
⁴³

With a thirty-two-hour journey ahead of them, Oscar and Bosie must have left on or around 12 March to arrive in Monte Carlo, as noted in the
Pall Mall Gazette
, on the 14th. In spite of all the troubles at home, Bosie and Oscar launched themselves into one of the most fashionable, crowded, talked-about and written-about resorts in Europe, if not the world. They could not have appeared more publicity-seeking.

They stayed in the Hôtel Prince de Galles for a week. Back in London, society was scandalized by the audacity of this holiday
à deux
. While the
Pall Mall Gazette
was careful to separate Oscar and Bosie's simultaneous arrival at the Principality by a few lines in their foreign column, other papers were less afraid of innuendo. The
Aberdeen Weekly Journal
was quick to point out what readers of the
Pall Mall Gazette
might have missed: ‘The following two paragraphs appeared in the
Pall Mall Gazette,'
it pointed out knowingly: ‘“The Marquess of Queensberry [meaning here Bosie] has arrived in Monte Carlo via Paris from London.” “Mr Oscar Wilde has arrived in Monte Carlo.”'

Constance's aunt, meanwhile, seems to have dissuaded her from having the surgery that was scheduled for March to correct her mobility problems,
⁴⁴
and apparently whatever home remedies and nursing she had provided her niece did some good, enough to get Constance up and about once more.

There is an account of her at this period that indicates that she did attempt some normalcy in her life and even continued her ‘at homes'. One of her contemporaries encountered her at ‘a little party for table-turning'.

On this particular occasion the charming but always a little clumsy Constance was carving a chicken, after communications with spirits had been completed. Suddenly the chicken slipped off its plate and
ended up on the floor. Constance and her socialite friends laughed so much that they all ended up crying.

‘I am weak with laughing!' she said, after this disaster, turning helplessly to me as she sank into a chair. She was dressed in some soft shade of grey with a picturesque large brimmed hat, from beneath which her laughing face looked out framed, in its soft brown hair and lit by big luminous eyes. She looked a mere girl, and was merrier than us all … A few days later, my friend came to me and said: ‘Constance Wilde told me she had taken such a fancy to you, and she did wish you would come to see her. Will you come on her next “At home” day?' I went, but my friend and I were almost the only visitors. Mrs Wilde received us with the gentle courtesy which characterized her, but we noticed that that she seemed depressed and distracted, and as we walked away my friend remarked to me: ‘I cannot make out what has happened – usually the street is thronged with carriages and her rooms so full that one cannot even get near her – today there was no one there.'
⁴⁵

This particular memoir puts this ‘at home' merely two days before the libel trial, on Monday 1 April, or April Fool's Day. It is entirely possible that memory has misted the exact timing of these events and that, although ringing very true in the description of Constance, they may have happened at an earlier date than suggested. But if accurate, it may suggest that there was a last-minute display of bravado by the Wildes as the full scale of Oscar's folly in pursuing Queensberry finally dawned on Saturday 30 March.

Oscar and Bosie returned from Monte Carlo on 25 March. Their initial action vis-à-vis the looming trial was to visit Mrs Robinson, a fashionable fortune-teller. It wasn't the first time the duo had sought her prophecies; indeed, it seems that visiting her was a little ritual they enjoyed. The previous summer the Sybil of Mortimer Street, as Oscar called her, had suggested that he and Bosie would travel abroad together in January, a prophecy that no doubt encouraged Oscar to include Bosie in his holiday plans when Constance had first suggested he sample North Africa. Now she predicted ‘complete triumph' in the trial. Effervescing with optimism, the couple chose to believe her.

Despite her husband's ridiculous and insensitive behaviour towards her in the period immediately before the trial, Constance did what she could for Oscar. She went to friends and relatives to raise as many funds as she could to help him: £50 was forthcoming from cousin Eliza and £100 from Aunt Mary Napier, to which she added a further £50 from her own funds.

On 28 March the press reported that a trial date had finally been set and proceedings would begin at the Old Bailey on Wednesday 3 April. Queensberry was going to plead justification for the libel. Queensberry's legal team had intimated to Oscar's side the nature of the plea of justification, and promised that a full plea would be delivered by Saturday the 30th for the prosecution to study. In spite of these intimations, Oscar's team wished ‘that this case should be speedily dealt with, and hence it was that the prosecution were not adopting the customary course of asking for a long adjournment in order to meet the plea of justification'.
⁴⁶

This act of legal folly, which committed Oscar to trial without time to consider properly the defence Queensberry intended to level against him came to haunt him when, on 25 March, Queensberry's team did indeed deliver their plea in full detail. In addition to accusations that Wilde's literature referenced ‘the relations, intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural tastes habits and practices' there was the far more devastating accusation that Oscar had solicited and incited young men to commit ‘sodomy and other acts of gross indecency and immorality'. There were fifteen different counts, in which Wilde was accused of soliciting more than twelve boys to commit sodomy, of whom ten were named. Edward Shelley's name was there, as was Sidney Mavor's. Freddie Atkins, Maurice Schwabe and Alfred Wood were all noted. Then there was a man called Charles Parker, another called Ernest Scarfe and yet another, Herbert Tankard. Walter Grainger, the under-butler from Goring, was cited, as was Alfonso Conway, whom Oscar had met during his holiday in Worthing.

While Oscar had been in Monte Carlo, Queensberry had been very busy. He had hired private detectives, who had turned over
every stone in order to drag up the details of Oscar's clandestine homosexual activities, and their findings had leaked into the wider gossip-ridden society. The full nature of Oscar's friendship with young men, at which cartoonists and satirists had been hinting for so long, had been kept as an open secret for years within Oscar's circle of liberal friends. They had guarded it so well that it had never passed into the hands of those who could use such information against Oscar. They had even guarded against Constance discovering the full truth about her husband. But in the past weeks one of the circle had broken ranks. A disgruntled actor, Charles Brookfield, who astonishingly was playing in
An Ideal Husband
, had revealed all he knew about Wilde to Queensberry's investigative team. The news then spread like wildfire.

And this is perhaps why, if the account is correct, Constance bravely held her ‘at home' on April Fool's Day. It is just possible that, knowing she was about to cancel it, Oscar had either written to her or visited her on that Saturday after he had seen the evidence against him and asked her to continue with her social engagements in a gesture of support and defiance. This is, of course, speculation. What is certain, however, is that he asked her to accompany him to dinner and then the theatre that evening. Oscar had finally realized that his wife was his greatest asset in this whole matter. Instead of visiting Monte Carlo, he should have spent more time with her, and certainly more time with her where the public could be reminded just how beautiful and loyal she was. Of course, Constance did exactly as she was asked. She put on one of her most beautiful outfits and made arrangements to go out. It was too little, far too late.