Oscar Wilde Part III the impending doom

In 1895 Wilde had 4 plays running in the West End including his master work, the Importance of Being Earnest.  He was noted for his witty dialogue, his love of paradoxical statements which amused the audience, his charming upper class characters and the wit and humanity of his work.  He was a success, financially and socially.

 His marriage was still intact and he was a loving father, but he and Constance were no longer close.

 Within a few years of the marriage, Oscar had embarked on an affair with Robert Ross, a boy some years his junior.  Robbie had been born in France and his father was Canadian but he was educated in England and had ambitions to write.  (Ross later became his literary executor)

 Robbie was open about his sexuality even at college and is said to have seduced the older Oscar and to have been his first male lover. 

When Wilde had been at college himself, he had been aware of homosexuality and some of his friends had been involved in homoerotic relationships, but he himself had been more cautious or perhaps not fully aware of his own sexual nature.  But within a few years of his marriage, he had become disillusioned with heterosexual marriage, finding his wife unattractive and “falling out of love” with her.  He turned to Robbie Ross, who was unashamed of his sexual desires and perhaps he finally realised that he did not sexually love women.

In the 1890s, after meeting Alfred Douglas, he became more involved in a gay lifestyle. But he was heading toward disaster, and didn’t seem to realise that his new lover was unstable and involved in a bizarre family quarrel.  
John Sholto Douglas, Lord Queensbury was extremely eccentric and aggressive and unusually for an upper class man, had been divorced from his wife.  He was concerned about her spoiling Alfred and his sons’ getting into bad company.  He became increasingly upset when in 1894, his oldest son, Francis Viscount Drumlanrig died in a shooting accident.  It might have been accidental but there were rumours that Francis was involved in a sexual relationship with another man.  
He worked as private secretary to Lord Rosebery – and there were persistent rumours that Rosebery was bisexual.  So Francis may have killed himself because of this. 
Queensbury grew increasingly bad tempered and irrational and believed that “snob queers” like Rosebery had ruined his son.  He then began to obsess about Alfred’s friendship with Oscar Wilde, to believe that it was more than a friendship.  He started to storm about London, threatening his son and Wilde and Alfred fanned the flames of his father’s temper…

Queensbury was, in his own view, trying to save his younger son, already spoiled and selfish and extravagant, from the shame and decadence of an illegal relationship with Wilde. He began to follow the two men around, and planned to throw rotten vegetables at one of Oscar’s plays.   Wilde heard of the plan and managed to avert it, but then Queensbury left a card at his club, stating “To Oscar Wilde posing “somdomite”. (A spelling or handwriting mistake!).  Wilde, pressed by Alfred, decided to sue Queensbury for libel. 

Some of his friends tried to persuade him not to do this, but Bosie was eager to make his father look foolish and to upset and enrage the easily excited peer. He hated him.  Wilde too was finding Queensbury’s campaign problematic and embarrassing, and he was so enamoured of Bosie that he wanted to do whatever made his friend happy.

However the problem was that in essence, Queensbury’s attack was founded on truth.  It would have been wiser for Wilde to ignore the man’s behaviour, to tone down his own flamboyance and (as friends suggested) move abroad.

Wilde went into court, and was soon floundering under cross examination.  He lost the libel case, since it was proven that he had in fact been involved with a number of rent boys and that he had written love letters to Alfred Douglas... so having lost the case, he was forced to pay Queensbury’s legal costs, (which was the law at the time) and faced with the prospect that he might be charged with illicit sex with boys.