Oscar Wilde renewal. He immediately wrote to the Society of Jesus requesting a six-month Catholic retreat; when the request was denied, Wilde wept. "I intend to be received into the Catholic Church before long", Wilde told a journalist who asked about his religious intentions. He spent his last three years impoverished and in exile. He took the name "Sebastian Melmoth", after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of "Melmoth the Wanderer" (a Gothic novel by Charles Maturin, Wilde's great-uncle). Wilde wrote two long letters to the editor of the "Daily Chronicle", describing the brutal conditions of English prisons and advocating penal reform.
William Melmoth May 1693. Records show that he was admitted as a "gentleman." On his admission to the Bar he was called to take the Test Act oath that served as an oath of allegiance to William III and Mary II and the Protestant succession, he was troubled by Jacobite non-juror concerns of legitimacy. He wrote to John Norris, the religious writer, to ask whether swearing allegiance to an usurper might not make him an accessory to the usurpation. However, Melmoth did take the oath, and in 1699 he moved to Lincoln's Inn, working mostly in chancery cases. He married, and this