Oscar Wilde's Last Stand by Philip Hoare

Author:Philip Hoare
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781628727630
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

* Billing’s London address was close by; he lived at 3 Essex Court, The Temple, EC4.

* Rosebery succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister in 1894. The Marquess of Queensberry suspected Rosebery of homosexuality, and of corrupting his son, Drumlanrig – Rosebery’s private secretary. Queensberry pursued Rosebery in much the same manner as he did Wilde, albeit less successfully. In 1893 he followed Rosebery to Bad Homburg with a dogwhip, but was ordered to leave by the Prince of Wales. Drumlanrig committed suicide the following year, possibly fearing blackmail over his relations with Rosebery, whom Queensberry referred to as one of ‘the Snob Queers … that cur and Jew friend [?fiend] Liar …’. When Wilde came to trial, Rosebery considered helping him, until he was warned by Balfour that doing so might lose them the coming election. He didn’t, and they lost it anyway.

† In March 1915 Marie Belloc Lowndes recorded in her diary having met Primrose and a diplomat, Frank Rattigan (father of Terence Rattigan) at a dinner given by Mrs de Rothschild, at which Primrose ‘talked a good deal about British prisoners’, who were on ‘practically starvation rations’.

* During the Douglas-Ross libel trial in 1914, a retired police inspector named West had volunteered evidence to the effect that during fifteen years’ service in the West End, he had known Ross as an associate of ‘sodomites’ and ‘male prostitutes’.

* Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922), Soul, poet, and traveller, was imprisoned that year for his activity in the Irish Land League.

* Even in 1951, when reviving the scandal, the Evening Standard substituted a dash for the word ‘clitoris’.

* Ernest Charles Thomas Troubridge, son of the 3rd Baronet, was an accomplished officer with a sweep of silver-blond hair and a penchant for long cigarette holders; he had been called ‘the handsomest man in the British Navy’. He married Una, his second wife and twenty years his junior, in 1908. Troubridge was posted as Head of the British Naval Mission to Serbia in 1915. Months later, with her husband miles away, Una met and fell in love with Radclyffe Hall. As Troubridge’s son was Billing’s political agent, it is likely that Billing knew about Una’s lesbian relationships, already common knowledge by 1918 and further evidence of society decadence.

* It is an indication of that tangled internecine society that Laura Hope, née Troubridge, had been a good friend of Wilde’s, and had once illustrated one of his poems. She married Adrian Hope, who was a relative of Constance, Wilde’s wife. During his imprisonment, the couple had been guardians to Wilde’s children.

* Prolific novelist, of whose work The Wooden House Robbie Ross wrote, ‘he is endowed with unusual imaginative gifts, not quite so wholesome as he fancies them to be’. Walpole was supposed – by Truman Capote – to be a lover of both Henry James and Harold Nicolson. For this reason, he could well have been suspected of being one of the ‘47,000’, especially as a friend of Robbie Ross. However, his attendance was probably due more to innate curiosity than anything else.

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