Lord Alfred Douglas

In 1891 a 20-year-old university student met the famed Irish writer and wit Oscar Wilde. The student, a golden-haired aristocrat and poet named Lord Alfred Douglas, soon began a romantic relationship with Wilde, who was 16 years older and married with two children. Their relationship exploded a long-running feud between Douglas and his father, which led to a series of lawsuits and trials involving charges of homosexuality. In 1895 Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to penal servitude, an experience that ruined him financially and contributed to his death, at age 46, in 1900. Although Douglas survived Wilde by another four decades and became a well-regarded poet, he never escaped the infamy of the trials.

Noble background and son of Queensberry

Descended from a noble Scottish family, Lord Alfred Douglas came from privilege and a line of ancestors who were no strangers to scandal and tragedy. He was born on October 22, 1870, at Ham Hill House, his family’s country estate in Powick, Worcestershire, England. His mother, Sibyl Montgomery Douglas, was the daughter of Alfred Montgomery, a famous dandy and the private secretary to the marquess of Wellesley (who was thought by some to be Alfred Montgomery’s true father).

Douglas’s father, John Sholto Douglas, was the 9th marquess of Queensberry; his family had suffered many well-publicized misfortunes, including the death of his younger brother in a mountaineering accident. That tragedy led the marquess of Queensberry to become a radical atheist, and as a peer in the House of Lords he refused to swear allegiance to God and the queen. An enthusiastic sportsman, the marquess had a code of boxing rules named for him, the Marquess of Queensberry rules. A domineering, violent-tempered man, Queensberry was sued for divorce by his wife in 1887 on the grounds of cruelty and adultery.

Education and early poems

Nevertheless, Douglas (the third of five children) had a childhood of wealth and physical comfort. At a young age he acquired the nickname “Bosie,” derived from his mother’s habit of calling him “Boysie.” He was educated at prep schools, including Winchester College, where he took an interest in writing and editing the school magazine. In 1889 he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where he published poems in the university’s magazine. His preferred poetic form was the sonnet.

By his own admission Douglas had passionate (but possibly platonic) relationships with fellow male students beginning in prep school. At Oxford he was admired for his physical beauty and presented himself as openly homosexual; this was during an era when male homosexuality was punishable under the Offences Against the Person Act, enacted in the United Kingdom in 1861. Homoerotic themes are prevalent in Douglas’s poetry, most famously in his sonnet “Two Loves” (1892). That poem and its last line—“I am the Love that dare not speak its name”—would soon become notorious.

Relationship with Oscar Wilde

Douglas was introduced to Oscar Wilde, who had also attended Magdalen College, in 1891 by a mutual friend. He later described their meeting as “just the ordinary exchange of courtesies,” while noting that he was “very much impressed” by Wilde’s conversation. A few days later they met again, and Wilde gave Douglas a copy of his recently published novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which Douglas claimed to have already read multiple times. Centering on a beautiful young man whose decadent lifestyle is influenced by an older male aesthete, the novel’s plot in some ways mirrors the relationship that Douglas and Wilde soon formed.

Their friendship became sexual the following year, which they made little effort to hide despite anti-homosexuality laws and Wilde’s marriage and fame. Most accounts depict their relationship as affectionate yet tempestuous. Rash and entitled, Douglas alienated some of Wilde’s circle after the famous writer requested him to translate Wilde’s French play Salomé (written in 1893); Bosie’s results were inadequate, but he refused to accept criticism of his translation. More recklessly, he encouraged Wilde to hire male sex workers, which would play a damning role in Wilde’s trials.

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Feud with father and trials and imprisonment of Wilde

In 1893 Douglas left Oxford without taking a degree. Meanwhile, his relationship with his father had turned volatile. Queensberry was convinced that numerous members of his family, including Douglas and his eldest brother, Francis, were involved in homosexual intrigues. He frequently sent abusive letters to his children, including one to Douglas in which he threatened of Wilde, “I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight.” Adding fuel to the fire, Douglas responded with a mocking telegram: “What a funny little man you are.”

Tragedy again struck the family in 1894 when Francis was killed by a gun wound during a hunting party on the eve of his wedding. Ruled an accident, his death was rumored by many to have been a suicide or a murder. In the aftermath Queensberry continued to send threatening letters to Douglas and other family members, and in early 1895 he attempted to confront Wilde at the premiere of Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest in London. Denied entry at the theater, he went to Wilde’s private club four days later and left a note accusing Wilde of being a sodomite.

At Douglas’s instigation Wilde sued Queensberry for libel. The case, which went to trial in April 1895, quickly went against Wilde. His works were plumbed in court for their homoerotic themes, and evidence emerged of his use of sex workers. Wilde dropped his suit, possibly to protect his beloved Bosie from being called as a witness, but he was later arrested for acts of gross indecency. In that trial Wilde testified brilliantly, drawing both applause and hisses after giving an eloquent speech about the “great affection of an elder for a younger man” throughout history, in answer to the court’s inquiry into the meaning behind Douglas’s poem “Two Loves.” Meanwhile, Douglas fled to France, where homosexuality was legal. Although the jury in Wilde’s second trial failed to reach a verdict, in the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years’ hard labor.

In prison Wilde wrote a long letter to Douglas filled with recriminations against him for encouraging Wilde in dissipation and distracting him from his work. Wilde’s literary executor, Robert (“Robbie”) Ross, was instructed to make copies and give the original to Douglas, but the letter’s intended recipient claimed to have never received it.

Meanwhile, Douglas remained loyal to Wilde, publishing a letter in a British magazine in June 1895 in which he railed against anti-homosexual views and alleged, “I personally know forty or fifty men who practise these acts. Men in the best society, members of the smartest clubs, members of Parliament, Peers, etc., in fact people of my own social standing.”

After Wilde’s release in 1897, Douglas reunited with him and supported him financially, and for a time they lived together in Italy. (Wilde’s wife had died while he was in prison, and their two children were raised by extended family.) In 1900, however, Douglas suffered the loss of both his father and Wilde. Douglas commemorated his friend the following year in a sonnet:

I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress
And all the world was an enchanted place.

Life after Wilde

Before Wilde’s death Douglas had begun publishing collections of his own verse. Because Wilde’s disgrace in the eyes of the public also embraced Douglas, he at first published his works anonymously or under a pseudonym. His book of nonsense verse Tails with a Twist (1898) was credited to “A Belgian Hare.” The following year Douglas published some of his poems in The City of the Soul and another collection of nonsense verse, The Duke of Berwick.

In 1902 Douglas married Olive Custance, the daughter of a wealthy magistrate and former commander in the Boer War. They had one son, Raymond, before separating. Their son was later permanently admitted to a psychiatric institution.

Libel charges, religious conversion, and incarceration

Between 1907 and 1910 Douglas was editor of The Academy, a magazine whose snarky reviews made him more enemies among the political and literary set, including the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw (though Shaw later forgave him). In 1909 Douglas published the collection Sonnets (it was reissued in a later edition with additional poems). By this time Douglas had turned highly litigious; very often he or the publications he edited were being sued for libel or he was suing someone for allegedly defaming him.

In one of these cases, brought by Douglas against Arthur Ransome, the author of a Wilde biography that portrayed Douglas as vain and treacherous, Bosie was finally presented with the full content of the bitter letter that Wilde had written to him while in prison. Although the letter had been published posthumously in 1905 under the title De Profundis, much of the material about Douglas had been cut. During Ransome’s defamation trial, however, the uncensored letter was read out loud in court while Douglas sat in the witness box, an experience that wounded and humiliated him.

Douglas’s longest-running feud was with Ross, Wilde’s literary executor and first male lover. Their rancorous relationship can in part be explained by Ross’s jealousy after Bosie had replaced him in Wilde’s affections and by Ross’s devotion to redeeming Wilde’s legacy. Another factor was Douglas’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1911. (Both Queensberry and Wilde had similarly converted on their deathbeds.) Catholicism’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin put Douglas into conflict with his past, and for many years after his conversion he attacked others in print for their alleged homosexuality. Ross was one of his most frequent targets. Douglas also publicly repudiated his relationship with Wilde, at one point calling his former mentor “the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years.…He was the agent of the devil in every possible way.”

Perhaps Douglas’s lowest point came after he founded the newspaper Plain English in 1920 and published sweeping antisemitic claims that implicated several political figures in war profiteering and various conspiracies with Jewish financiers during World War I. One of these was Winston Churchill. In 1923 Douglas was arrested for criminal libel of Churchill and spent six months in prison. Humbled, he produced a sonnet sequence, In Excelsis (1924), that is widely considered his best work and confirmed his religious (and antisemitic) beliefs.

Later life and death

In his later years Douglas wrote two memoirs, Autobiography (1929) and Without Apology (1938). By this time bankrupt, he received some financial support from a surprising source, British birth-control advocate Marie Stopes, whom he befriended after she sought his advice on her poetry. He also became friends with younger poets such as John Betjeman and found an unlikely ally in the socialist Shaw, with whom he kept up a long correspondence (published in 1982), in which the two men sparred affectionately over religion and politics. Douglas’s financial state became so precarious that Stopes and other prominent figures, including Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh, wrote on his behalf to receive a poet’s pension from the government. The application was rejected, reportedly because of lingering scandal about Wilde.

Yet, Douglas ultimately reconciled himself with his past. In 1940 he published Oscar Wilde: A Summing-Up, in which he not only remembers his former friend with fondness but also expresses regret that he did not stand as a witness in Wilde’s trials and makes a stirring plea for tolerance of homosexuals. Although he was steadfast in his religious belief that homosexuality is “a sin of the flesh,” he argued that it “is no worse than adultery or fornication” and added, “Sooner or later the criminal law will have to be revised on the basis of admitting this fact, which involves the principle that the law is not concerned with sin but merely with crime.”

Douglas died in 1945 and is buried beside his mother in the cemetery of the Friary Church of St. Francis and St. Anthony in Crawley, West Sussex.