Literary Society Meeting: 18 October 2019 by Bill Doherty

Oscar Wilde  and the Black Douglas  18/10/19

Lord Gawain Douglas

Counter-intuitively, in view of his most recent appearance at the Lit. Soc. – characterised by an impassioned  recital of a series of poems from memory – Lord Gawain Douglas introduced this talk with a medieval Northumbrian lullaby assuring a young child that they need not fret as Gawain’s ancestor, the original Black Douglas, would not get him. This boon companion of Robert Bruce and hero of Scotland’s 14^th century Wars of Independence acquired the sombre epithet either from a sallow complexion or the belief that even in that notoriously violent age, Sir James Douglas was particularly bad for your health. Our speaker is a scion of a line of the Douglas clan which assumed centre stage in the history of

mid-17^th century Scotland and acquired the title Marquess of Queensbury. Some might argue that  lineal descendants the 9^th Marquess, of Rules of Boxing fame and Gawain’s great-grandfather, and his son, Lord Alfred Douglas ( Gawain’s great-uncle), might have represented a revived Black Douglas menace. Both were  active principals in the 1895 libel trial featuring Oscar Wilde which scandalised respectable late-Victorian England.   

We received a brisk background summary of the case explaining that a  handsome recent Oxford undergraduate with literary aspirations, Lord Alfred Douglas,  was introduced to the prominent man of letters, Wilde, in 1891. Although Oscar was 20 years older and married, the pair plunged into an illegal, homosexual love affair which came under very public scrutiny when Alfred’s father, the 9^th Marquess of Queensbury, goaded Wilde into opening libel proceedings, with public accusations of sodomy. Although Wilde abandoned the case mid-trial, evidence had emerged of his consorting with male prostitutes and he was subsequently charged with, tried for and convicted of gross indecency which resulted in a sentence of 2 years imprisonment with hard labour. After brief interludes in Pentonville and Wandsworth, he served the last 18 months of his sentence in Reading prison.  

In the contemporary spirit of reputation management, our speaker sketched out his mission to rescue his great-uncle from the opprobrium incurred after the trial where some felt he had ruined Oscar and to advance Lord Alfred or “Bosie’s” claims to greater appreciation of his poetry. He currently languishes at 275^th in all poetry.com’s “500 Greatest Poets”. These goals are broadly in line with those of Douglas Murray’s biography, “Bosie”, published in 2000. 

We learnt that although Bosie never visited the prisoner, he remained loyal to Wilde and even petitioned Queen Victoria on his behalf. Once granted writing materials, Oscar penned a 50,000 word missive to Alfred eventually entitled “De Profundis” after the opening line of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord”. This was to be given to Douglas by the journalist and a  former lover of both Wilde and Douglas, Robbie Ross. For a suggested variety of reasons, Bosie never read this until it surfaced inopportunely in his later career as a serial litigant when he had Arthur Ransome arraigned for libel over Ransome’s book on Wilde. “De Profundis” was described as the greatest character assassination of all time – “Yet each man kills the thing he loves”? Oscar and “Bosie’s” relationship survived these explosive opinions and they spent Wilde’s last 2 years on the Continent together. 

Within a year of Oscar’s death (1900), Alfred had written in his favoured sonnet format “The Dead Poet” which opens with him dreaming of Wilde and ends in bathos – “And so I awoke and knew that he was dead.”   The death of someone close inspired another of his better poems “In Memoriam”, another sonnet “…the tribute of a song …” dedicated to his admired, elder brother, Francis, who died accidentally at a shoot in 1894, albeit with rumours of a homosexual liaison with the then Home Secretary and future Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, hanging over him. Some critics disparagingly class earlier poems in W.S.Gilbert terms as “…greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery…” stuff suffused with the immature synthetic melancholy of autumn leaves and winter sunsets.  

“Bosie’s” life followed an eventful if erratic course after Wilde’s death with conversion to Roman Catholicism, marriage to the bisexual Olive Custance, fatherhood, bankruptcy and lawsuits. The strangest of these came when, apparently influenced by a current of opinion which held that Britain’s Great War effort had been impeded by a coven of Germanophile homosexuals buried within the Deep State, he accused Winston Churchill and “the Jews” of murdering Lord Kitchener and trying to “throw” the Battle of Jutland. Churchill sued for criminal libel and Douglas was sentenced to 6 months in Wormwood Scrubs. There, he wrote the remarkable 17 canto “In Excelsis”, possibly a conscious contrast to Wilde’s prison oeuvre “De Profundis”, This reads more like an “Apologia pro Vita Sua” in which he lauds chastity, denounces Wilde for leading him astray, flays “the Jews” and “ bought” politicians but concludes with the defiant line “I will never bend the Douglas knee to Baal.”   Although latterly informally separated from Olive, the pair quietly lived out their lives as amicable neighbours in Sussex, “Hove, actually”, till their deaths in 1944 (Olive) and 1945 (Alfred).  

The Lit. Soc. audience clearly appreciated another entertaining Gawain Douglas performance complete with trademark verve, vigour and concentration.  He had referred to his mad, bad family during the presentation but none of his questioners asked if he had sought genome testing. Still the family history is fascinating.