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OPC GLOBAL And Its Associates Seeks The Home Secretary To Recommend A Free Posthumous Pardon For Oscar Wilde For His Conviction In 1895 By Giovanni Di Stefano


John Sholto Douglas, the Marquis of Queensberry was an arrogant, ill-tempered, eccentric and perhaps even mentally imbalanced Scottish nobleman best noted for developing and promoting rules for amateur boxing (the ‘Queensberry rules’).  Queensberry became concerned about his son’s relationship with ‘this man Wilde’.  His concern was temporarily alleviated at the Cafe Royal in late 1892, when his son introduced him to the noted literary figure.  Wilde charmed Queensberry over a long lunch with many cigars and liqueurs.  By early 1894 Queensberry concluded the Wilde was most likely a homosexual and began demanding that his son stop seeing Wilde: ‘Your intimacy with this man Wilde must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies,’ Queensberry wrote in April.  ‘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.’  Douglas replied in a telegram: ‘What a funny little man you are.’

Queensberry began taking increasingly desperate measures to end the relationship.  He threatened restaurant and hotel managers with beatings if he ever discovered Wilde and his son together on their premises.  In June of 1894 Queenberry, accompanied by a prize-fighter, showed up without warning at Wilde’s house in Chelsea.  An angry conversation ensued, ending when Wilde ordered Queensberry to leave saying, ‘I do not know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Oscar Wilde rule is to shoot on sight.’

Queensberry’s subsequent letters to his son, who he had already ceased to support, grew increasingly intemperate.  ‘You reptile,’ he wrote, ‘you are no son of mine and I never thought you were.’  Douglas answered, ‘If O. W. was to prosecute you in the criminal courts for libel, you would get seven years’ penal servitude for your outrageous libels.’
On February 14, 1895, Wilde’s new play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ was set to open at the St. James Theatre.  Wilde learned that Queensberry planned to disrupt the opening night’s performance and harangue the audience about Wilde’s alleged decadent lifestyle.  Wilde arranged to have the theatre surrounded by police.  His plan blocked, Queenberry prowled about outside for three hours before finally leaving ‘chattering.’
Four days later at the Albemarle Club–a club to which both Wilde and his wife belonged, Queensberry left a card with a porter.  ‘Give that to Oscar Wilde,’  he told the porter.  On the card he had written: ‘To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic].’  Two weeks later Wilde showed up at the club and was handed the card with the offensive message.  Returning that night to the Hotel Avondale, Wilde wrote to Douglas asking that he come and see him.  ‘I don’t see anything now but a criminal prosecution,’ Wilde wrote.  ‘My whole life seems ruined by this man.  The tower of ivory is assailed by the foul thing.  On the sand is my life split. I don’t know what to do.’
The next day, Wilde, Douglas, and another long-time friend named Robert Ross visited a solicitor, Travers Humphreys.  Humphreys asked Wilde directly whether there was any truth to Queensberry’s allegation.  Wilde said no.  Humphreys applied for a warrant for Queensberry’s arrest.  On March 2, Queensberry police arrested Queensberry and charged him with libel at the Vine Street police station.
The Marquis of Queensberry was charged under the Libel Act 1843 s.4 which stated as follows:
‘If any person shall maliciously publish any defamatory libel,
pay such fine as the court shall award.




The Libel Act 1843 s.6 was expanded well before the Trial of the Marquis of Queensberry to read in full as follows:




The actual wording used by the Marquis of Queensberry was ‘To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [sic].’ The word used is not ‘sodomite’ but ‘somdomite.’



In all his eloquence and esteem Sir Edward Clarke erred. The case should properly have been stopped there and then by the Trial Judge upon examination of the actual publication. If one considers carefully the Libel Act 1843 s.6 in its entirety namely the section that permits a defence the words used by the legislators are ‘the truth of the matters charged may be inquired into, but shall not amount to a defence.’

There is no such word in the English dictionary as ‘somdomite’ and as such neither could such a word be deemed or covered by the Libel Act 1843 since a non-existent word or phrase cannot de jure be deemed Libel and as a consequence nor could any defence be presented compliant to The Libel Act s.6 since no offence was committed.

Sir Edward Clarke erred and as the exhibits were presented in Court and available the Trial Judge should have at that stage, or prior to such, intervened. The Libel Act 1843 was a penal statute and as such had to be strictly interpreted. The word ‘somdomite’ which was the actual de facto and de jure word used which deemed a libel was erroneously referred to by Sir Edward Clarke as ‘sodomite’ which of course would have been subject to criminal libel.


Defence Counsel Edward Carson at no stage in his speech on April 4th and 5th 1895 did he seek to comply with the ‘public interest’ element which was a pre-requisite under The Libel Act 1843 s.6 but more important failed wholly to deal with the actual published criminal libel the word ‘somdomite’ instead concentrating on the word ‘posing.’ In his closing speech Carson confirms this approach by saying:Sir Edward Clarke on the 5th April 1845 concedes the verdict of ‘not guilty’ against the Marquis of Queensberry solely on the basis of the word ‘posing’:

‘Lord Queensberry has undertaken to prove that Mr. Wilde has been ‘posing’ as guilty of certain vices.’


‘Under these circumstances I hope your lordship will think I am taking the right course, which I take after communicating with Mr. Oscar Wilde.  That is to say that, having regard to what has been referred to by my learned friend in respect of the matters connected with the literature and the letters, I feel we could not resist a verdict of not guilty in this case–not guilty having reference to the word ‘posing.’  Under these circumstances I hope you will think I am not going beyond–the bounds of my duty, and that I am doing something to save, to prevent, what would be a most horrible task, however it might close, if I now interpose and say on behalf of Mr. Oscar Wilde that I would ask to withdraw from the prosecution.’

As a consequence Wilde was subsequently prosecuted, wrongly since had the trial against the Marquis of Queensberry been stopped as it should have been since ‘somdomite’ is a non-existent word and The Libel Act 1843 did not carry defamation by innuendo as the subsequent Defamation Acts would in the next century, and jailed.
Under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 s.11 – that cost Wilde two years in Reading jail- there was no definition given of what, exactly, constituted ‘gross indecency,’ as Victorian morality demurred from giving precise descriptions of activity considered immoral. In practice, ‘gross indecency’ was widely interpreted as any male homosexual behaviour short of actual sodomy which remained a more serious and separate crime.
Yet it was ‘sodomy’ that was the basis of the criminal prosecution of Queensberry under the Libel Act 1843 s.4

For the posthumous pardon of Oscar Wilde email your support to:

The Life And Trials Of Oscar Wilde


  Book cover: The Picture of Dorian Gray



Oscar and Bosie

A young Lord Alfred Douglas


Bosie referred to Wilde as “the most chivalrous friend in the world” and was willing to forsake his birth-right for the friendship. They exchanged letters, with some of Wilde’s containing what could be interpreted as expressions of passionate love.
‘It is a marvel that those red-rose leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing,’ Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred in 1893. ‘Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry.’

Bosie was flagrantly and openly homosexual, a spendthrift and gambler, according to Wilde’s biographer, Richard Ellman. He was a dropout at Oxford, a ne’er-do-well who was as loose with his morals as he was with his purse. He had his family’s temper, which flared when he didn’t get his way.

‘Bosie’ chalk and pastel drawing by Sir William Rothenstein Oxford, 1893

Bosie knew of Wilde’s affection for him early on and succeeded in using it to his advantage. He relied on Wilde’s money when his own ran out and would pout and threaten self-injury when Wilde complained of his behaviour or criticised his literary skills. For the length of their relationship, Lord Alfred used Oscar’s love for him as a means to get what he wanted. In the end, Wilde sacrificed himself to protect Lord Alfred, who remained a loyal, yet manipulative, friend.

For Wilde, who was much more low-key about his sexuality, it was a love-hate relationship, almost akin to the moth and flame. He lusted for Lord Alfred, but knew that Bosie would only hurt him. His head told him the cost of Bosie’s love was too expensive, his heart considered it a bargain.
‘Wilde wanted a consuming passion,’ Ellman wrote. ‘He got it and was consumed by it.’
‘Gross Indecencies’
A sexual morality and social improvement movement in the 1880s resulted in strong legislation against pedophilia, as well as sodomy. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 and section 11 of the act made “gross indecencies” punishable by imprisonment as a misdemeanor. Prior to the Criminal Law Amendment Act a sexual assault against a child between 13 and 16 was not a criminal offence, and Parliament had intended section 11 to apply only to pedophilia cases. Instead, conservative judges began to consider homosexual sodomy cases under the gross indecencies clause. (No lesbians were ever prosecuted because when she approved the act, Queen Victoria was said to be flabbergasted at the idea of Sapphic love.) Prosecution was still rare, however, and pursued only in the most indiscreet cases. Wilde, on the other hand, was not a man to be discrete in any activity.

Oscar Wilde & Lord Alfred Douglas, 1893 (Library of Congress)

In 1894 Lord Alfred published a poem, “Two Loves,” in the controversial British literary magazine The Chameleon, which also featured works by Wilde. The romantic poem, probably Bosie’s best effort, ends:

Then straight the first did turn himself to me
But I am Love, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till he came
Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill
The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’
Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will,
I am the love that dare not speak its name.’

The poem was published at about the same time The Picture of Dorian Gray was making waves in the literary world. Lord Alfred’s poem, considered a paean to homosexuality, caused quite a stir in England, especially in the home of the Marquis of Queensberry.

Queensberry Rules

Marquis of Queensberry


Marquis of Queensberry’s boxing rules

Queensberry seemed obsessed with sex, perhaps because his second wife had sought an annulment soon after marriage because of ‘malformation of the parts of generation, frigidity and impotence.’ His first marriage had ended because of his adultery.
The Marquis had difficulty getting along with his son. The Marquis could barely stand to be in the same room with Lord Alfred and the feeling was mutual. Everything Queensberry was, Lord Alfred was not. Lord Alfred was a poet and dreamer. He was handsome, frail and fair, where Queensberry was windblown, tough and leathery. The Marquis was a fighter and Lord Alfred was a philosopher.
Queensberry loathed Lord Alfred’s way of life and let him know it in no uncertain terms. Lord Alfred once replied to one of the Marquis’s rantings with, ‘What a funny little man you are.’
In normal circumstances, the Marquis and his son would merely avoid each other, and they traveled in different circles. Upper class London was small, but not so small that one could not live a full life without encountering the other.
Queensberry suspected Wilde was a homosexual and was bent on seducing Lord Alfred. The publication of ‘Two Loves’ proved it to him.
The Marquis tried everything he could to pull his son from Wilde’s clutches. He stalked the men as they went about London and accosted any restaurateur who served them. He threatened his son with excommunication from the family. Still Lord Alfred and Oscar remained close friends.

“Your intimacy with this man Wilde must either cease or I will disown you and stop all money supplies,” Queensberry threatened in 1893. He publicly scolded his son and even showed up at Wilde’s house with a champion boxer to threaten the author. Wilde’s response was, “I do not know what the Queensberry rules are, but the Wilde rules are to shoot on sight!”


Book cover: The Importance of Being Earnest

The feud between Queensberry and Wilde went on for several years and came to climax as Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest was set to premiere in London. Queensberry threatened to disrupt the premiere and ruin the performance. Given that he had previously successfully carried out a similar threat, Wilde took Queensberry seriously. He hired a cordon of guards to stand outside the theatre while the play was on. The Marquis tried to make good on his threat but was thwarted. He paced outside the theatre with a bouquet of vegetables until the performance was over.

Queensberry wrote once more to his son, following through on his threat to disown him. ‘You reptile, you are no son of mine and I never thought you were.

Lord Alfred answered, ‘If O.W. was to prosecute you in the criminal courts for libel, you would get seven years’ penal servitude for your outrageous libels.’
‘To Oscar Wilde’

It was a high time for Wilde. Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest were both critical and popular successes as was another play, The Ideal Husband. Master of the epigram and the bon mot, Wilde was the toast of London and a popular guest at parties. Seemingly uncaring that Queensberry was planning his downfall, he openly consorted with ‘renters’ young male prostitutes and held court in some of London’s finest establishments.


At the Albemarle Club where Wilde dined, Queensberry left his calling card complete with misspelling of the libelous word: ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite.’ Wilde felt he was left with no other choice but to defend his honour and sue for criminal libel. Queensberry had been stalking him, had threatened his livelihood, and now insulted him publicly.
The Marquis expected no less and was prepared. In police court on Bow Street he made the statement ‘that not only had he called Wilde a sodomite, he had done so for the good of the general public.‘ This last statement was important, because now, if Wilde lost, the government would have no choice but to pursue criminal charges for gross indecency. To do otherwise would show favouritism for the elite.
Sir Edward Clark, Wilde’s Barrister-in-law

Wilde approached one of England’s most respectable barristers, Edward Clarke, and asked him to take the case for the prosecution. Clarke’s reputation was one of immense respectability and correctness. He did not often take cases in which he suspected his client was guilty and he demanded honesty from those he represented. His previous experience with sodomy cases was in the divorce court, where he represented jilted wives.
‘I can only take the case, sir,’ Clarke said, ‘if you assure me on your honour as an English gentleman that there is not and never has been any foundation for the charges that are made against you.’
Wilde very firmly said Queensberry’s charges were groundless and false and Clarke agreed to take the case.
The suit was doomed from the start, and Wilde’s closest friends knew it. The general feeling among those who cared in London was that Wilde was gay and that Queensberry’s allegations were true. It was also commonly believed that no jury would rule against Queensberry, for he could easily play the desperate father trying to save his son from Wilde.

The Libel Trial

Edward Carson, Queensberry’s Barrister-in-law

When Wilde learned whom he would face in court, he replied in typical Wildean fashion: ‘No doubt he will pursue his case with the added bitterness of an old friend.’
‘Who are you to set back the clock 50 years?‘ asked his friend Frank Harris. ‘You haven’t a dog’s chance.’
But Bosie laid down an ultimatum. It’s them or me, he told Wilde, storming out of the meeting. Suddenly realizing the enormous stakes, Wilde could only shrug and say it was too late to go back.
‘The words of that letter, gentlemen, may appear extravagant to those in the habit of writing commercial correspondence, or those ordinary letters which the necessities of life force upon one every day’ Clarke said. ‘But Mr. Wilde is a poet, and the letter is considered by him as a prose sonnet, and one of which he is in no way ashamed and is prepared to produce anywhere as the expression of true poetic feeling, and with no relation whatever to the hateful and repulsive suggestions put to it in the plea in this case.’
Opening Round
Several years prior, while Lord Alfred was in school at Oxford, he gave a suit of clothes to a down-and-out friend, Alfred Wood. Unbeknownst to Lord Alfred, the letters from Wilde in which he wrote of Alfred’s ‘kissable lips’ were in the suit and were found by Wood.
Clarke then asked Wilde to tell of his relationship with Queensberry.
‘I pointed him out to my servant,’ Wilde said after recounting the episode in which Queensberry came to Oscar’s home uninvited. “I said, ‘this is the Marquis of Queensberry, the most infamous brute in London. You are never to allow him to enter my house again.’
Next, Clarke asked Wilde if he was a homosexual.
‘It is not true that I was expelled from the Savoy Hotel at any time. Neither is it true that I took rooms in Piccadilly for Lord Queensberry’s son,’ Wilde said emphatically denying the allegations Queensberry was spreading.
Trying to drive the point home, Clarke rephrased the question.
CLARKE: ‘Is there any truth in any of these accusations?’
WILDE: ‘There is no truth whatever in any one of them.’
Carson’s First Jab

‘You stated that your age was 39,’ Carson said, looking at the floor, his brow furrowed as if deep in thought. Then he stared directly at Wilde.’I think you are over 40. You were born on 16th October, 1854?’

Wilde tried to dismiss the lie with a wave of his hand. ‘I have no wish to pose as being young. I am 39 or 40. You have my certificate and that settles the matter.’
But Carson was not going to let him off that easy. His age, and the age of Lord Albert was an important matter in this case. ‘But being born in 1854 makes you more than 40?’
Wilde conceded the point, ‘Ah! Very well.’
After asking Wilde how he met Lord Alfred, Carson turned to literary matters. Specifically, Carson wanted Wilde to address a scandalous story in The Chameleon, ‘The Priest and the Acolyte,’ which appeared in the same issue as some of Wilde’s work and Lord Alfred’s poem ‘Two Loves.’ Wilde had made it clear in the forward to Dorian Gray that he considered no literary work moral or immoral and Carson sought to test his philosophy:
CARSON: ‘You have no doubt whatever that that was an improper story?’
CARSON: ‘May I take it that you think ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’ was not immoral?’
WILDE: ‘It was worse; it was badly written.’
‘I take it, that no matter how immoral a book may be, if it is well written, it is, in your opinion, a good book?’ the defence attorney asked.
‘Yes, if it were well written so as to produce a sense of beauty, which is the highest sense of which a human being can be capable,’ Wilde replied. ‘If it were badly written, it would produce a sense of disgust.’
CARSON: ‘A perverted novel might be a good book?’
WILDE: ‘I don’t know what you mean by a ‘perverted’ novel.’
CARSON: ‘Then I will suggest Dorian Gray as open to the interpretation of being such a novel?’
WILDE: ‘That could only be to brutes and illiterates. The views of Philistines on art are incalculably stupid.’
Carson began drawing Wilde in for the kill. He had the witness saying that only ‘brutes and illiterates’ would consider Dorian Gray to be a perverted novel. The question now became, just how many people could interpret Dorian Gray as documenting the homosexual love of an artist for his model?

CARSON: ‘The majority of persons would come under your definition of Philistines and illiterates?’

WILDE: ‘I have found wonderful exceptions.’
CARSON: ‘Do you think that the majority of people live up to the position you are giving us?’
WILDE: ‘I am afraid they are not cultivated enough.’
CARSON: ‘Not cultivated enough to draw the distinction between a good book and a bad book?’
WILDE: ‘Certainly not.’
Carson had landed a powerful punch. If a Philistine would interpret Dorian Gray as promoting homosexuality, and a majority of Wilde’s audience were Philistines, then the general perception of the book was that it approved of homosexuality, regardless of Wilde’s intent.
CARSON: ‘Do you mean to say that that passage describes the natural feeling of one man towards another?’
WILDE: ‘It would be the influence produced by a beautiful personality.’
Moving away from Wilde’s literary works, Carson tried to get Wilde to read his letters to Bosie, but Wilde refused. Carson read them himself.

‘…I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion. I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me. I would sooner-than have you bitter, unjust, hating…. I must see you soon. You are the divine thing I want, the thing of grace and beauty; but I don’t know how to do it,’ looking up from the letter, Carson asked a final question of a very pale and nervous witness.  ‘Is it the kind of letter a man writes to another?’

‘It was a tender expression of my great admiration for Lord Alfred Douglas,’ Wilde replied quietly. A Knockdown

First Carson asked Wilde if he had ever dined with Alfred Wood, his blackmailer. Wilde admitted that he had. Next, Carson wanted to know, what was the nature of Wilde’s relationship with the clerk at his publisher’s office?
Wilde bristled at the insinuation.

‘I first met him in October when arranging for the publication of my books,’ Wilde replied. ‘I asked him to dine with me at the Albemarle Hotel.’

The Albemarle Hotel in Piccadilly


‘Well, for him, yes,’ Wilde said hesitating. ‘We dined in my own sitting-room, and there was one other gentleman there.’
‘On that occasion did you have a room leading into a bedroom?’ Carson asked
‘Did you give him whiskies and sodas?’
‘I suppose that he had whatever he wanted. I do not remember.’
‘One day when the fishermen were launching a boat on the high beach, Conway, with another lad, assisted in getting the craft down to the water. I said to Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Shall we ask them to come out for a sail?’ He assented, and we took them. After that Alphonse and I became great friends, and it is true that I asked him to lunch with me. He also dined at my house, and lunched with me at the Marine Hotel.’
CARSON: ‘Was his conversation literary?’
WILDE: ‘On the contrary, quite simple and easily understood. He had been to school where naturally he had not learned much.’
‘It is not true that I met him by appointment one evening and took him on the road to Lancing, kissing him and indulging in familiarities on the way,’ he asserted.
His opponent figuratively on the ropes, Carson jabbed again, landing a stinging blow. Regarding a boy named Walter Grainger, Carson asked, ‘Did you kiss him?’
Without thinking of the consequences, Wilde replied.
‘Oh, dear no,’ he said. ‘He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly. I pitied him for it.’

Carson took on an exaggerated look of confusion. ‘Was that the reason why you did not kiss him?’

Wilde refused to answer directly.
CARSON: ‘Why sir, did you admit this boy was extremely ugly?’
But Carson was relentless. Three more times Carson asked the same question, each time Wilde was unable to answer. Carson then began sharply repeating, ‘Why? Why?’ Carson’s repeated sharply: ‘Why? Why? Why did you add that?’
Finally Wilde was forced to admit he had been acting in a cavalier manner during the questioning. At the edge of exasperation he said, ‘You sting me and insult me and try to unnerve me; and at times one says things flippantly when one ought to speak more seriously. I admit it.’
CARSON: ‘Then you said it flippantly?’
WILDE: ‘Oh, yes, it was a flippant answer.’
Much has been made of Edward Carson’s cross-examination of Oscar Wilde. He matched Wilde in intelligence and he clearly conducted a skilful interrogation. But was it one for the ages? Richard Ellman, a Wilde apologist, thinks not.

Regardless, Edward Carson’s inquisition flattened Oscar Wilde.

Edward Carson

The Next Round
Arrest and Destruction

His boot on Wilde’s neck, Queensberry prepared to deliver the coup de grace. He told his solicitor to send the notes from the libel trial and all of the evidence his private detectives had turned up about Wilde’s interest in boy prostitutes to Scotland Yard. This move left authorities with no choice but to arrest Wilde and charge him with gross indecency. Next Queensberry sent word to Wilde alerting him to what he had done. He ended the note with a threat. ‘I will not prevent your flight, but if you take my son with you, I will shoot you like a dog,’ Queensberry wrote.

Wilde’s wife, Constance, and son Cyril

Again Wilde wavered on whether he should flee the country. His wife Constance urged him to leave England, as did some of his friends. Few, if any, argued that he should stay and face the charges. But Wilde’s ego was such that he couldn’t bear being known as a coward and outlaw. He was deathly afraid of prison, but even more so of the disgrace that faced a gentleman who ran away from legal troubles.

Constance Wilde

‘Will I be allowed bail?’ an obviously intoxicated Wilde asked his captors.

The world quickly crashed around Wilde. His name was taken down from the marquees where his two plays had been showing, to packed houses, and an American tour of ‘A Woman of No Importance’ was cancelled. A sale of his work ‘Salome’ fell through. His ‘friends’ backed away from him and refused to help post bond, even though a magistrate had set no amount. Others who had been named in the papers as friends of Wilde fled the country lest they be charged themselves. Those who did stand by him were ostracized by London society and were evicted from apartments and expelled from clubs.

The Marquis had one more opportunity to punish Wilde. He had spent 600 pounds defending himself against the libel charges and had a judgment against Wilde to pay the court costs. He demanded payment in full, forcing Wilde into bankruptcy. Some of Oscar’s most prized possessions, including first editions of his own books, and artworks by his friends Whistler and Aubrey Bearsdley were seized and sold at auction to pay the bill. Oscar himself was brought into bankruptcy court in chains to answer Queensberry’s charges. Once his estate was liquidated and Oscar Wilde was returned to jail to await trial, he had lost everything.

The First Trial

A grand jury indicted Wilde and Alfred Taylor, the local procurer whose name had come up several times, in Queensberry’s investigation, with indecency and sodomy. The evidence against Taylor was at least as damning as that against Wilde, and the young man was under tremendous pressure to turn state’s evidence against Wilde. Taylor declined.

The prosecutor, Charles Gill, another Oxford classmate of Wilde’s, called a succession of young men, some working class gentlemen and others of more ill repute.
The most damaging witnesses were the brothers Charles and William Parker. admitted prostitutes, who had apparently been brought into the trade by Alfred Taylor. Parker’s testimony was particularly harmful.
PROSECUTOR GILL: ‘More drink was offered you there?’
PARKER: ‘Yes, we had liqueurs. Wilde then asked me to go into his bedroom with him.’
GILL: ‘Let us know what occurred there?’
PARKER: ‘He committed the act of sodomy upon me.’
Queensberry had done everything he could to keep his son’s name out of the investigation and trial, but even he could not guarantee Bosie’s safety now. Reluctantly, Lord Alfred joined Wilde’s other gay friends in Calais.
Some of the other men who testified against Wilde included Alfred Wood, who had blackmailed him for the letters he sent to Bosie, and Robert Clibborn, who had earlier blackmailed both Wilde and Bosie. Others testified to Taylor’s odd habit of keeping the shades drawn in his ‘perfumed’ apartment and to having young boys who dressed as women there.
The circumstantial evidence against the men was substantial. A chambermaid testified to faecal stains on a sheet in Wilde’s rooms, another man told jurors that he had come to give Wilde a massage only to find a young man already asleep in Wilde’s bed.
The high point of the first criminal trial came during Wilde’s cross-examination by prosecutor Gill. It showed the world that, while Wilde might have appeared physically broken, his spirit was undaunted. The interaction came as Gill was asking Wilde about his literature.
‘What is ‘The Love that dare not speak its name?” Gill asked, undoubtedly hoping for a straightforward response. It is unlikely he was prepared for Wilde’s off-the-cuff response.


Oscar Wilde


For a moment, Wilde must have thought the worst was over. He was wrong. Gill immediately stood and announced the Crown’s intention to retry the case. This time, however, Wilde was granted bail.
The Second Trial
The second trial was a repeat of the first. The same witnesses came forward and told the same stories. One of the few surprises to come out was that each of the witnesses against Wilde had been receiving a five pound stipend from the prosecution since the beginning of the first trial. The Parkers repeated their claims that they had engaged in sodomy with Wilde for money. Edward Shelley, the publisher’s clerk whom Wilde had tried to seduce, also testified about his dinner with Oscar. The letters from Oscar to Bosie were introduced into evidence and Oscar was forced to try and defend them.

‘The last day of the trial, 25 May, was the Queen’s birthday,’ wrote Ellman. ‘(The prosecutor) made his final speech…He raked Wilde over; he dealt with the suspect letters to Douglas, the payment of blackmail to Wood, the relations with Taylor, Wood, Parker…which he insisted corroborated each other.’

‘This trial seems to be operating as an act of indemnity for all the blackmailers in London,’ he said. ‘If on an examination of the evidence you, therefore, feel it your duty to say that the charges have not been proved, then I am sure that you will be glad that the brilliant promise which has been clouded by these accusations…(has) been saved by your verdict from absolute ruin.’

In the English system, the judge is charged with summing up the facts of the case for the jurors, and then presenting them with the questions of guilt or innocence. Justice Wills was a homophobe and, despite his education, one of the Philistines Wilde had railed against in his first trial. Wills was as sober and unimaginative a man as ever sat on the bench, and he ranked sodomy just slightly below murder in terms of atrocity. His summation proved this. He spoke of the letters to Bosie in the most unflattering terms and finished by saying, ‘This is the worst case I have ever tried.’

 Justice Wills


Standing in the dock, Wilde blanched and reeled as if he had been struck. His face contorted in pain, he was heard to mutter, ‘My God. My God. May I say nothing, My Lord?’

Prison and After


Shortly after being read the rules of the prison system, utter silence at all times, Wilde was taken to his cell and fed a typical meal of watery porridge and a slice of bread. From Newgate he was taken to Pentonville Prison, where he was placed on the treadmill. At night he was returned to his cell, where he slept on a wooden plank without mattress.

‘Already Wilde has grown much thinner,’ wrote a contemporary newspaper. ‘He has great difficulty in getting to sleep, and from time to time he loudly bemoans the bitterness of his fate.’
 Book cover: The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Slowly, over time, Wilde adapted to prison and it to him. He was later allowed writing materials and was transferred to better surroundings. It was in Reading that he developed one of his best works, ‘A Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ The Ballad is an allegorical biography of Wilde’s downfall and was prompted by Wilde’s witnessing of an execution. In it, he wrote what could almost serve as his obituary:

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what haunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Wilde’s other prison work, ‘De Profundis,’ was a biography, a confession and absolution for Bosie. The two men saw little of each other in the first months of Wilde’s freedom but they did exchange a number of letters, most lost to history.
The love that had brought Wilde down in England was somewhat rekindled in Europe much to the dismay of Wilde’s wife and his friends. It alienated Wilde and Bosie from everyone who had stood with Oscar over the years and it would prove too painful for even Wilde and Lord Alfred to bear. They separated after a short time in Europe. Wilde continued to write and entertain, and be his egotistical self, up until the end. He lived long enough to see the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ published in London anonymously to great success, and was convinced by his publisher to add his name to the poem for the seventh printing.

He died in 1900.

Oscar Wilde, remembered in stained glass at Westminster Abbey

Much of Wilde’s writing is autobiographical, not so much in relation of events, but in thoughts and desires. ‘Dorian Gray’ is probably the most self-reflective. One of its characters expresses Wilde’s philosophy of life: ‘We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.’


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