HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-04-05T12:31:06.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Famous last words: what did Winston Churchill, Walt Disney and Marie Antoinette say on their deathbeds?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/famous-last-words-what-did-winston-churchill-walt-disney-and-marie-antoinette-say-on-their-deathbeds/2026-04-05T12:30:45.000Z
1. “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go”
Oscar Wilde
The Irish author and playwright – best known for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) – is an enduring source of witty, pithy adages, such as “I can resist everything except temptation” and “always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much”. Oscar Wilde kept that unique brand of humour until the end: on his deathbed, in a Paris hotel room, he reportedly quipped about the dingy wallpaper. Evidently, the wallpaper won the duel, since 46-year-old Wilde passed away of meningitis shortly afterwards, on 30 November 1900.
2. “I’m bored with it all”
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill suffered his eighth stroke on 15 January 1965, after a decade and a half of failing health. All the cigars, booze and rich meals had caught up with him. He had been the prime minister who led Britain through the Second World War with impassioned oratory and declarations of “We shall never surrender”, but, if his last words are anything to go by, his battle was fought. With his son-in-law Christopher Soames by his side, Churchill muttered, “I’m bored with it all,” before slipping into a coma. Nine days later, on 24 January, he died at the age of 90.
3. “What the devil do you mean to sing to me, priest? You are out of tune!”
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Having described music as “the language of the heart”, the French composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau was a major force of the Baroque period of the 18th century, and remained active until his dying day, 12 September 1764. Indeed, the last contribution he made to music was a critique of the quality of religious singing being performed in his room. Perhaps he was already hearing the choirs of angels, and so earthly melodies no longer enthralled him the way that they had during his long career.
4. “Nothing, only ‘love one another’”
William Henry Seward
The death of Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state was also intended on that fateful night in 1865. At the same time that the US president was shot, one of John Wilkes Booth’s fellow conspirators stabbed Seward in the neck and face multiple times. In a bizarre twist of fortune, it was a splint on his jaw, the result of a stagecoach accident several days earlier, that saved his life. His death actually came on 10 October 1872. Sensing the end, his family gathered around and asked if he had any last things to say. His response was simply to “love one another”.
5. “Pardon me, sir. I did not do it on purpose”
Marie Antoinette
King Louis XVI lost his head in the French Revolution and his queen, Marie Antoinette, would follow him to the guillotine. She had become so hated among her people as the epitome of extravagance (that said, she never uttered “let them eat cake”) that all efforts were made to make her execution as humiliating as possible.
On 16 October 1793, she was forced to dress in front of her guards, had her hair chopped off and hands bound behind her back, and was taken through the streets on the back of a cart, jeered all the way. Yet Antoinette maintained her composure, even apologising politely when she accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot.
6. “One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes”
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock is rightly celebrated as one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema, directing dozens of iconic movies like Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho. Dubbed the ‘master of suspense’, he meticulously crafted every scene and knew exactly where the plot was going. His Hitchcockian style and immense talent for storytelling could not be called upon, however, when it came to the grand denouement of his life, as his last words illustrate. He died from kidney failure, aged 80, on 29 April 1980, relying not on plot but his Catholic hopes.
7. “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance”
John Sedgwick
On the morning of 9 May 1864, John Sedgwick set about inspecting the line at the battle of Spotsylvania Court House. A general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, he had been wounded at Antietam in 1862 but did not share his men’s concerns about Confederate sharpshooters that began to make their presence known. He scolded his staff, stating that the enemy “couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” – right before being felled by a bullet under his left eye.
8. “How’s this for your headline: French Fries!”
James Donald French
How did murderer James Donald French react as he was taken to the electric chair on 10 August 1966? He made a pun for the press. Far from fearing death, the 30-year-old American had been longing for it for years. Following his first murder in 1958, he requested execution and was disappointed to receive a life sentence. So, in 1961, he strangled his cellmate and again demanded the death penalty. It took three separate trials, and French’s constant pleas not to accept any appeals, before he finally got his wish and went out with a gag.
9. “I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man”
Che Guevara
The man from all those posters and T-shirts, Che Guevara became a globally recognised name for his role in putting Fidel Castro in power in Cuba. But it was in a doomed insurgency in Bolivia that the Marxist revolutionary had his final fight. Captured by CIA-backed soldiers, he was held in a mud schoolhouse deep in the jungle when the decision was made to have him executed. When, on 9 October 1967, a soldier entered his rudimentary cell, Guevara barked out his final words before being shot. He may have been only a man, but his face became a ubiquitous and enduring icon of revolution.
10. “I must go in, for the fog is rising”
Emily Dickinson
By the time that Emily Dickinson – little known in her lifetime but now regarded as the influential and ever-popular American poet of the 19th century – died, it is fair to say that her spirit had been broken. In the preceding years, she endured numerous deaths of family and friends, most traumatically her young, favourite nephew, and her health collapsed. “The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me,” she wrote in a letter. Dickinson passed away at 55 on 15 May 1886, shortly after penning one last verse that ended, “I must go in, for the fog is rising”.
11. “Turn me over. I’m done on this side”
Lawrence of Rome
Lawrence served as one of the seven deacons of Rome in the third century; this was not a good time to be a Christian as, in AD 258, Emperor Valerian ordered that the pope and clergy be put to death. According to the legend, Lawrence’s method of execution was being burned alive on a gridiron, similar to cooking meat on a barbecue. Lawrence saw the funny side of this image, it seems, since during his martyrdom he supposedly joked that his tormentors should turn him over to ensure he cooked fully. These last words may be apocryphal, but Lawrence is still honoured as patron saint of comedians.
12. “Kurt Russell”
Walt Disney
After Walt Disney’s death from lung cancer on 15 December 1966, his body was not cryogenically frozen, as the urban myth goes. Yet the death of Mickey Mouse’s creator comes with another oddity: the mystery of his final written note. While the meanings of “Ron Miller”, “Way Down Cellar” and “CIA – Mobley” remain unknown, Disney also wrote the name Kurt Russell (misspelled as “Kirt”). The teen actor had signed a 10-year contract with Disney, and it seems that the ailing businessman wanted to plot out the young star’s next project before the end. Even without it, though, Kurt Russell became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
13. “Thomas Jefferson survives”
John Adams
On 4 July 1826, exactly 50 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, a 90-year-old John Adams lay dying. Three decades earlier, he had been elected as the second president of the United States, and his final thoughts were with the man who succeeded him. Adams’ last reported words were “Thomas Jefferson survives”.
While the two men had fallen out over how their new country should be governed, they renewed their friendship in their later years, so maybe Adams was hopeful at the end that one of the Founding Fathers remained. Unfortunately, he was wrong: Jefferson, aged 83, had actually died just a few hours before Adams.
14. “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn”
Joe DiMaggio
The retired baseball great Joe DiMaggio may have been married to the glamourous movie star Marilyn Monroe for less than a year, but he remained devoted to her for the rest of his life. He took the lead in arranging the funeral after Monroe was found dead in 1962, and for the next 20 years he sent roses to her grave every week. DiMaggio never remarried and as he lay dying on 8 March 1999, aged 84, he clung on to one hope: that he and Monroe would finally be reunited.
15. “Nothing but death”
Jane Austen
The beloved author of Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Emma died at the age of 41 on 18 July 1817. The cause remains a matter of debate, although it is known that she suffered with pains and illnesses for at least a year, which may explain her last sentiments, expressed by her sister Cassandra in a letter to Austen’s niece, Fanny. “When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death,” it read. These were probably not her final words, however, as Cassandra also refers to Austen saying, “God grant me patience, pray for me, oh, pray for me.”
16. “I did not get my SpaghettiOs, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this”
Thomas J Grasso
With his execution by lethal injection scheduled for 20 March 1995, convicted murderer Thomas J Grasso put in a rather elaborate request for his final meal. It included two dozen steamed mussels, two dozen steamed clams, six barbecued spareribs, a Burger King double cheeseburger, a can of SpaghettiOs with meatballs, half a pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and strawberries. He clearly was not fully satisfied, since he wanted his last statement to be a complaint to the chef that he received spaghetti instead of the canned version he asked for.
17. “More weight”
Giles Corey
During the Salem Witch Trials, hundreds were accused of witchcraft in the small Massachusetts village, resulting in 19 hangings, at least five deaths in prison, and one man – a farmer in his 80s named Giles Corey – being pressed to death. Having refused to enter a plea, he was stripped and laid on the floor with a wooden board across his body, on which heavy stones were gradually put on top. The torture lasted days and was expected to end in confession; instead, Corey kept crying out for “more weight”. He finally succumbed on 19 September 1692.
18. “Thanks be to God. I have but lived this day and now I die content”
Horatio Nelson
It is a well-worn story that when Lord Nelson was shot at the battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, he asked of his friend, and flag captain of HMS Victory, “Kiss me, Hardy”. They were not the great admiral’s last words, though. Taken belowdecks, Nelson continued to issue orders and lived long enough to receive word that several French ships had surrendered. Only then did he say, “Thanks be to God. I have but lived this day and now I die content.” After the battle, his body was placed in a cask of brandy to keep it preserved for its voyage back to England.
- Read more | “A monster of egotism”: Dominic Sandbrook reveals the secret to Admiral Nelson’s unstoppable success
19. “I shoot better”
Hannie Schaft
During the Second World War, a young woman named Jannetje Johanna Schaft signed up to fight for the Dutch resistance. To them, she became ‘Hannie’, but to the Nazis, who came to fear her marksmanship, she was ‘the girl with red hair’. After carrying out numerous assassinations, Schaft was finally captured in 1945 and executed just three weeks before the end of the war. Although, according to her legend, she did not go down easily: the first shot only grazed her, leading Schaft to yell out, “I shoot better!” The executioner did not make the same mistake again.
20. “I am just going outside and may be some time”
Lawrence Oates
Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four other men – Dr Edward Wilson, Captain Lawrence Oates, Lieutenant Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Petty Officer Edgar Evans – had set out to be the very first to reach the South Pole, but on reaching it in January 1912 they discovered that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had just beaten them.
Defeated and demoralised, they began the 800-mile trek back to base camp. None of them survived. Oates, suffering from frostbite and gangrene, made the ultimate sacrifice by leaving the tent in a blizzard with the now-immortalised words, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” His body was never found.
21. “Now comes the mystery”
Henry Ward Beecher
In life, Henry Ward Beecher was the most famous preacher in the United States: a passionate minister in Congregational Protestantism, a gifted orator, and a social reformer calling for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. His works had a profound influence on American Christianity in the 19th century and beyond. As he faced the end of his mortal life, having suffered a stroke in early March 1887, his last words were filled with the philosophical curiosity and hopefulness that permeated much of his preaching, as he pondered what awaited him: “Now comes the mystery.”
]]>"It wasn't very open about its queer connections": the hidden history of the National Trusthttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/it-wasnt-very-open-about-its-queer-connections-the-hidden-history-of-the-national-trust/2026-03-06T15:30:11.000ZCharlotte Vosper: In A Queer Inheritance, you explore histories of sexual difference connected to the National Trust. What drew you to those historical figures and their stories?
Michael Hall: That goes back a long way. For quite a few years I worked for Country Life magazine, and in that role I wrote articles about country houses. I actually began with one of those I mention in my book: Packwood House in Warwickshire. It was acquired in 1904 by an industrialist for his son, Graham Baron Ash, who spent years renovating and transforming the property. It struck me that he never got married – and the idea that a bachelor might do up a house and then give it to the National Trust to look after seemed quite intriguing. I didn’t really spot that it was part of a pattern until I wrote a similar article on Anglesey Abbey. That’s when I realised that there was a story about the National Trust that hadn’t really been told before. It’s important to mention that I’ve never worked for the Trust, and A Queer Inheritance isn’t an official National Trust book in any way. I don’t speak on the Trust’s behalf – and indeed they may very well disagree with a lot of what I say.
The National Trust was founded in 1895, when homosexual acts of ‘gross indecency’ were still illegal in Britain – yet in your book you suggest that the Trust had queer connections from its very beginnings. Can you expand on this?
That’s actually quite a complicated question. The origins of the National Trust were rooted in an anxiety about London’s urban poor and how they could be morally improved. Its founders thought that if the urban poor could be given access to architectural and natural beauty, this would do away with what they saw as their worrying vices – of which homosexuality was a rather prominent example. Yet several people on the Trust’s original council and executive committee were in fact queer. They included the 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was worried that he might be named in the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, and Octavia Hill, who had a long and loving relationship with Harriot Yorke.
Can you tell us about some queer landowners connected to the Trust’s estates?
William John Bankes, who inherited the great estate of Kingston Lacy in Dorset, had to go into exile in 1841 after he was caught having sex with a guardsman in London’s Green Park. He then redecorated and remodelled the house remotely, while living in Venice. It’s a very interesting story about a gay man shaping a house even when away from home.
In the book I also talk about Clumber Park, site of a lost house that was demolished in 1938. Several generations of the Dukes of Newcastle were based there. One of the 5th Duke’s sons, Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, enjoyed relationships with a famous pair of young Victorian men who cross-dressed as Fanny and Stella; later, the 7th Duke, ‘Linny’, was friends with Oscar Wilde.
I should emphasise that the book is not primarily about country houses. The National Trust manages a wide range of buildings, one of which is Clouds Hill, a little cottage in Dorset that was home to TE Lawrence (of Arabia). His sexuality has been hugely debated, and I draw my own conclusions about this in the book.
- Read more | Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Man
A site that’s much less controversial is Smallhythe Place in Kent, home of the great 19th and early 20th-century actress Ellen Terry. Her daughter, Edith Craig, was a theatre director of considerable eminence who lived next to that early 16th-century house with two close lesbian friends. They welcomed lots of their likeminded friends there, so you can discover a lot of lesbian history in the 20th century just by visiting Smallhythe.
How do we know that these people were queer? Would the historical figures you discuss have understood themselves in that way?
Not particularly as queer, I don’t think. But as a historian, you have to look at the story and ask: how can I best interpret this? I think the advantage of the term ‘queer’ is that it avoids attaching very precise labels to people.
The word itself goes back to the 16th century, when it just meant odd or unusual. Around the end of the 19th century, though, ‘queer’ was becoming a term of abuse, meaning homosexual. But by the 1980s, ‘queer’ was very much taken back by gay activists, particularly during the Aids crisis, as a way of reclaiming their identity. Today, ‘queer’ is the term preferred by most historians.
One of the issues historians face is how to talk about people who didn’t have access to the terms we would use now, such as ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’. I think ‘queer’ is quite useful because a modern audience knows what that means, but it’s also not imposing something on the past. I also think that the fact it’s clearly anachronistic is actually rather helpful, because it emphasises the difference between the past and the present.
There is an amazing amount of argument about these terms, and you can debate these things forever, but as a historian you just have to get on and do the history. And when you do, there’s a lot of anxiety about finding evidence that people were gay – but I think the response must often be, well, what’s your evidence that they were heterosexual?
How have National Trust estates been influenced by the queer people who lived in them or were connected to them?
I wanted to write about places that queer people had shaped in some way – by building them, decorating them, furnishing them or making them part of their life history. This isn’t always obvious. Today, lesbians visit Knole, a country house in Kent, because our contemporary perception of the building is shaped by our knowledge of the relationship between Vita Sackville-West, who lived there, and Virginia Woolf. Yet there’s almost no evidence of Vita’s influence that you can see on the property, other than the original manuscript of Woolf’s Orlando, which she inspired.
Returning to TE Lawrence’s Dorset cottage, Clouds Hill, there are just two rooms upstairs, one of which he used as a guest bedroom. In the 1930s, he curiously lined that room with metal foil – a rather art deco look. I became intrigued by the fact that Siegfried Sassoon, a gay writer who was a friend of Lawrence, visited Clouds Hill with his lover, Stephen Tennant. Now, one of the best-known photographs of Stephen (shown above), by Cecil Beaton, shows him in his own bedroom – which he had lined with silver paper. I thought it was an interesting queer link which, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t been made before. It says something about Lawrence’s own sense of identity in terms of sexual orientation, and also about networks. Early on in my research, I began to realise that many of these houses and people linked up.
A lot of the queer people associated with the Trust’s properties were connected, and many came from a privileged background. Is there a relationship here between class and queerness?
Yes, definitely – though I don’t write only about elite people in the book. The 5th Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Paget, who lived at the family seat of Plas Newydd on that island, is a good example of such privilege. On the death of his father in 1898 he inherited a huge fortune, which funded his love of dressing up. He liked to put on theatrical productions and go to fancy-dress parties in a very gender-bending way. This got him into the newspapers, and he was laughed at and ridiculed relentlessly. Eventually, he went bankrupt.
In a sense, Paget was able to dress up and perform because he was very, very rich. But the downside of his wealth was that he attracted an enormous amount of public curiosity. Endless stories about him appeared in the press. He wouldn’t have suffered such a blow to his reputation if he had been an obscure commoner. Clearly, although privilege could facilitate queer experiences, it could also attract much unwanted attention and expose scandal.
When exploring past queer experiences, we are often dealing with the feelings and emotions of historical figures. What sources did you use to explore these?
Sources pose a massive question for any historian, but queer topics have always been particularly hedged with problems. Prior to 1967, all homosexual acts between men were illegal in England and Wales [even then, they were permitted only between two consenting adults over the age of 21], and this creates obvious issues with the sources from before that period. But what struck me was that if you go back to the original sources – the contemporary biographies and letter compilations of these late 19th and early 20th-century figures – it seems that many people probably knew what was going on. The Victorians weren’t fools. You just have to tune in when reading the sources, and you’ll learn a lot.
The National Trust has faced some backlash for trying to reclaim minority history more widely. How has its attitude towards queer people evolved?
Traditionally, the Trust wasn’t very open about its queer connections – but then nobody was terribly open about these issues for many decades. Homophobia played a role in the modernisation of the National Trust. From the 1950s, it began trying to run its houses on a more professional basis, appointing curators. There was a bit of a standoff between the land agents – the traditional men in tweeds who dealt with forestry and estates – and the curators, who dealt with hanging the pictures and arranging the furniture.
This division reflected an essential binary within the Trust: whether it should be concerned primarily with places of historic interest or of natural beauty.
One of the ways that people who thought the National Trust wasn’t paying enough attention to nature directed criticism against the curators was through homophobia. This made life rather tricky for any gay men within the organisation, and by the 1960s and 70s the Trust attracted considerable criticism, accused of being run by queer aristocratic men. To be fair to the critics, there was considerable truth in that.
Beyond its employees, the Trust remained coy about queer connections to the houses it acquired. For example – and it’s extraordinary to say now – it wasn’t until 2008 that any official publication by the National Trust about Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s later home, also in Kent, mentioned her same-sex relationships.
So it’s only pretty recently that the organisation has been open about this kind of history. In 2017, it made a big effort to catch up and tell these stories, and I think generally there was a feeling that this was going in the right direction. It did, however, bring up an interesting dilemma. Objections were raised by relatives and friends of some of the people who were being described as queer, criticising the National Trust for ‘outing’ them.
I don’t think that it makes any sense to talk about historical figures in terms of ‘outing’ – because, really, if you object to somebody in the past being described as queer, or raising the question about whether or not they were what we would now call gay, that might imply that you find homosexuality shameful.
It’s interesting that the controversy around ‘outing’ these historical figures hasn’t applied so much to queer women. I don’t think people find women’s sexuality as threatening as they find men’s sexuality. And it’s most often men who get upset about other men being described as gay. Look at Lawrence of Arabia: dozens of biographies have been written about him, almost all by men and almost all hostile to the idea that he was gay.
What impact do you hope A Queer Inheritance will have?
I hope that people will realise that queer history is a very rich subject, and that there’s a huge amount more that can be said about the queer lives connected to the National Trust.
Everyone I’ve spoken to about my book says: “Oh, but you haven’t said anything about X.” So, there’s lots more to explore, and different approaches that could be taken. A woman or a young person would have written a completely different book, I think.
This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Manhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/gender-history-new-woman-man-oscar-wilde/2024-06-10T14:22:14.000ZIn the 1890s, two new social identities emerged that represented the first widespread challenge to gender stereotypes in Britain. This was the time of the ‘New Woman’, who possessed levels of daring regarded as masculine, and of the effeminate ‘New Man,’ who loved ‘art for art’s sake’.
Her determined persistence to go her own way, and his foppish indifference to soldiering and other established notions of ‘manliness’, were both deemed equally appalling to Victorian elders. Indeed, to some commentators, it seemed as if men and women were losing their distinct characteristics.
As a Punch magazine writer noted in a verse titled ‘Sexomania’:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
No one need ask which was the man.
Bicycling, footballing, scarce human,
All wonder now “Which is the woman?”
But a new fear my bosom vexes;
To-morrow there may be no sexes!
Unless, as end to all the pother,
Each one in fact becomes the other.
This was a seismic shift, and one partly driven by changes in the UK population. By the 1890s, women outnumbered men by around a million, and by the 1901 census, the gap had grown to 1.25 million. There were not enough husbands to go around due to the higher death rate of men from their more dangerous jobs, their tendency to violence, and because of the number of men who had headed abroad with the armed forces or imperial administration.
In many middle-class families, the lack of men became a significant issue, because daughters were traditionally provided for by their fathers until their husbands ‘took over’. If they did not end up marrying and their parents died, they then became the responsibility of their elder brothers – leading in some cases to family tensions.
Yet this demographic shift also coincided with a high point in the social movement of women’s education and independence, which had been under way since the mid-19th century. For the first time, large numbers of women who had received a good or moderate education became more determined to live away from their families and earn their own keep. This blend of factors led to a continuing female advance, and new questions arose regarding women’s roles in the family, the institution of marriage, and the workplace.
The New Woman phenomenon
The idea of the New Woman developed slowly, but became widespread in the 1890s due to the expansion of urban employment opportunities for women caused by the new technologies of typewriting and telephony and the print industry, which needed writers and illustrators. The labour market was quick to recognise that women could do the same office jobs as men, but be paid less. These were young, middle-class women, often with some education. Some worked in accountancy and the law, though they were not permitted to take professional qualifications.
Thus the ‘New Woman’ was born. With her bicycle, cigarette, necktie, and dark jacket that hid the grime of public transport and office life, she looked and behaved markedly differently to women of previous decades.
Not everyone was enamoured of the New Woman, however. The term itself had been popularised by Maria Louise Ramé, an English novelist and French wine merchant’s daughter who went by the name of Ouida. She wrote scathingly of the archetype and her view of its proponents’ “fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weaning estimate of her own value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous”. Another commentator, meanwhile, referred to “a somewhat aggressive air of independence which finds birth in the length of her stride”.
In some cases, the New Woman was almost seen as another form of humanity. The journalist Eliza Lynn Linton characterised her as masculine not just in behaviour, but physique: “The bass voice, flat chest, and lean hips of a woman who has physically failed in her rightful development.”
The newspaper editor Frederick Greenwood also decided to publish his views on the subject, writing in an article entitled ‘Women – Wives or Mothers?’ that the redundant female birth-rate threatened “more revolutions than all the forces of the anarchists in active combination”. Greenwood chose to share his thoughts under the pseudonym ‘A Woman’ – a gender misappropriation partly driven by devilment, and partly to give the piece a sense of authenticity for his readers.
Indeed, while women were taking on postures and pursuits previously regarded as masculine, men were travelling in the other direction. Like Greenwood, the author Arnold Bennett wrote for the magazine Woman (of which he was assistant editor) under the names ‘Gwendolen’ and ‘Barbara’, and reviewed books in Home and Hearth under the name ‘Sarah Volatile’.
William Sharp or Fiona Macleod? Or both?
The Scottish author made a name writing as a woman, but this was no mere pseudonym
William Sharp (1855–1905) was a late Victorian author and mystic who wrote under his own name and as his female alter-ego, Fiona Macleod. Born in Paisley, Scotland, Sharp moved to London in his early twenties to pursue a career as a poet and art critic, before moving into magazine publishing. In 1892, he edited a oneoff periodical called The Pagan Review, calling for the widespread adoption of neo-paganism, which he believed would abolish inequality between men and women. The author’s interest in gender fluidity would become more apparent by 1893, however, when he began writing as the Highlander Fiona Macleod, whose lyrical novels contributed to the birth of Britain’s Celtic Revival movement. Inspired by tales from Scottish folklore, Sharp’s work as Macleod was not only better reviewed than his previous output, but more commercially successful, too. In fact, so devoted was Sharp to his alter ego that he would maintain a voluminous correspondence with publishers and fellow authors as Macleod, without revealing his true identity. Fiona Macleod was not merely a writer’s pseudonym, however. Sharp maintained that she had a separate existence, and as such, she was even given her own entry in Who’s Who. “I am tempted to believe I am half a woman,” Sharp wrote in a letter to his friend Catherine Ann Janvier in 1895. Sharp’s wife, Elizabeth, accepted her husband’s dual nature, calling him Wilfion. After his death, she wrote a biography split into two parts: ‘William Sharp’ and ‘Fiona Macleod’.
Aestheticism and the decadent movement
At around the same time, the advance of aestheticism – an artistic movement prioritising beauty above function – was giving men the opportunity of a ‘feminine’ creative outlet that drove them to create ‘the house beautiful’. As the character Gwendolen Fairfax declares in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest, “the home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man”. Wilde had himself come to fame as editor of The Woman’s World and an as aesthete.
As the 1880s turned into the 1890s, however, aestheticism morphed into a new movement: the decadents, who revelled in the artificial to a degree the average Victorian considered abhorrent. The decadents drew inspiration from ancient Rome and from France, which was considered morally suspect by respectable people. While the movement’s theories of art were the preserve of elites in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and the university towns, their influence was widespread on fashion, advertisements and home décor.
A ‘New Man’ who came to prominence around this time was the poet, essayist and critic Richard Le Gallienne, the son of a Birkenhead brewery manager. He moved to London, changed his name (he added the ‘Le’ to imply a French connection) and took to sporting velvet knee breeches and long hair. Yet he was also evidence that the decadent man was not necessarily homosexual. In fact, he was undeniably what was called a ‘ladies’ man’, taking full advantage of his attractiveness to women and the sexual freedom that New Women allowed themselves.
In 1895, Le Gallienne declared that gender was a matter of custom and personal choice, and nothing more. Writing in his essay The Arbitrary Classification of Sex, he explained: “There is no such thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly, distinguished or commonplace… The essentials of ‘manliness’ and ‘womanliness’ belong to man and woman alike – the externals are purely artistic considerations, and subject to the vagaries of fashion.”
It was a kind of thinking that upended conventional certainties. “I was bewildered, it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes,” wrote the novelist Henry James in a story for quarterly journal The Yellow Book in 1894. Set within Britain’s hedonistic literary scene, the narrator of the tale, Neil Paraday, is forced to ask whether a fellow author named ‘Miss Forbes’ is a gentleman, upon which he is informed, “it wouldn’t be ‘Miss’ – there’s a wife!”. Dora Forbes, it transpires, is a man with a big red moustache. “In the age we live in, one gets lost amongst the genders and the pronouns,” laments Paraday.
Such lifestyle changes went beyond literary circles, however. In March 1894, the month before the launch of The Yellow Book, the rigid, sanctimonious William Gladstone retired as Britain’s prime minister. He was replaced by Lord Rosebery, whose effortless style both inspired and irritated. Rosebery was a typical example of why respectable Victorians condemned the aristocracy as idle and decadent, with the Tory Lord Curzon criticising what he saw as Rosebery’s “feminine sensitiveness to criticism”.
There had also, in recent years, been numerous scandals touching the ruling class: Prince Albert Victor had been rumoured to visit gay brothels, and there were countless stories about the Prince of Wales’s dissolute lifestyle. Rosebery remained reticent about his private life, but he was widely rumoured to be homosexual – with commentators noting his preference for the company of “smart young men”. One such man was the 26-year-old Viscount Drumlanrig, son of boxing pioneer Lord Queensberry. Enraged by the duo’s close relationship, he followed Rosebery on holiday to Germany and had to be restrained from engaging the then foreign secretary in a fist fight.
Oscar Wilde and the downfall of the decadents
Famously, Queensberry later turned his wrath on Wilde because of his relationship with another of his sons, Lord Alfred Douglas. According to Queensberry, Wilde was a “damned cur and coward of the Rosebery type”. The story of Wilde’s downfall has been much told: he was involved in three scandalous 1895 trials before being convicted of homosexual offences and sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol.
Notwithstanding sporadic gestures of sympathy, Wilde’s trials crushed the nascent decadent movement in Britain. While there may have been feelings for him from many New Women, the debacle consigned male behaviour regarded as ‘effeminate’ to a cultural underworld.
If the 19th century had seen gains for women and men in a blurring of gender identities, the dawn of the 20th century would see a reassertion of ‘maleness’ in the exercise of that most traditionally masculine pursuit: war. In 1899, shortly after the Wilde trials and the backlash against the decadents, the Second Boer War began. It was a shock to the complacency of empire, and was the harbinger of a decline in the influence of the artistic imagination.
The traditional gender roles that had sustained the British empire – with clearly defined soldiers, housewives and mothers – may have been under attack, but now they fought back. As a 1905 book entitled The Decline and Fall of the British Empire admonished, “the emancipated Englishwoman of the age used her freedom for selfish rather than national ends”.
The Boer War hero Robert Baden Powell was similarly critical, noting that the Roman empire had “[fallen] at last, chiefly because the young Romans gave up soldiering and manliness altogether”. Through the creation of his Scouting Movement, he was going to make sure that the British empire didn’t follow a similar path.
- Listen | Joseph Bristow explores the court case against Oscar Wilde for “gross indecency”, and the dangers of living in a society where homosexuality was illegal
Indeed, from 1899 on, Britain entered a resolutely masculine phase in which the national effort was focused on trying to avoid, recovering from, or preparing for three major conflicts. In the world wars, women took on men’s roles in industry – but after those conflicts, they were expected to return to the domestic sphere. By and large they did, comforted by the peace of domesticity and the desire for family life as a counterpoint to the horrors of conflict.
In the 1920s, some women took advantage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act and went into professions such as law or accountancy – but these were women in a man’s world, and there was no repetition of the erosion of gender stereotypes that had been apparent in the 1890s. It was in the post-1945 period that people born during and after the Second World War again started challenging strict gender classifications.
The era of peace, prosperity and renewal in the west led to a questioning of values in every area, with an explosion of new expressions in politics, music and the arts. Sixty years after the New Man and New Woman, gender again became more mutable, with men wearing their hair long and women wearing trouser suits and jeans. In the 1960s, drag and gender changing became acceptable once more, at first for comedians and then in music where performers wore make up and sometimes, like Mick Jagger in 1969, dresses. Soon unisex fashions became a familiar sight – as they still are today.
This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>From Oscar Wilde to David Irving: 9 landmark libel & defamation cases through historyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/libel-defamation-history-cases-oscar-wilde-david-irving/2022-07-29T11:15:48.000ZThe origins of the law of libel go back to Anglo-Saxon times, though in the Middle Ages it was dealt with by canon law in church courts rather than before the king’s justices. Under the 1275 Statute of Westminster, however, slandering the king or the nobility (‘scandalum magnatum’) became an offence to be pursued under Common Law before the king’s courts. Until the 16th century, little distinction was drawn between spoken or written statements, but the rapid spread of printing made it important to separate the spoken word, which might easily be misheard or misreported, from the written word, which was permanent and unmistakable.
Libel became a civil law offence in the 16th century, and the reign of James I (1603–25) saw a steep rise in the number of cases, many brought by the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke. Libel actions were of three types: false allegations of crime; of professional incompetence; or of carrying an infectious disease, especially sexual disease – a category that was often targeted at women.
Libel actions could also be used by those in authority to silence criticism, especially as English law placed the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff – as it still does. It is presumed that the defamatory statement is true, so the burden of proof is placed on the defendant to prove it is not. Apart from parliamentary privilege, which protected MPs from prosecution for defamatory statements they made in the Commons, the only sure defence against a libel accusation was to prove the truth of the statement complained of, which was a notoriously difficult thing to do. And in James I’s time, even that would not necessarily prevent a conviction. The 1843 Libel Act allowed the courts to take the offer of an apology or the absence of malicious intent into account, but the scales were still heavily weighted against defendants.
By the 20th century, London was becoming the ‘libel tourism’ capital of the world, favoured by the rich because bringing a case there carried a high probability of winning – plus the likelihood of substantial damages.
In recent years, parliament has sought both to tighten up the libel laws and to strengthen the position of defendants. The Defamation Act of 2013 clarified that mere opinion could not be held libellous, while also clamping down on libel tourism and requiring plaintiffs, including businesses, to demonstrate serious reputational harm or financial loss. The 2013 Act also substituted trial-by-judge for trial-by-jury and considerably extended the scope of privilege against liability for libel to include academic papers, website owners, and reports on the proceedings of foreign governments.
Nevertheless, the burden of proof remains on the defendant. Many journalists are concerned that English libel law constitutes a serious threat to press freedom, either by direct action or by lawsuits brought by the rich and powerful which have little chance of winning but can still intimidate defendants or drain them of money and resources.
Let’s look at how the law has worked in practice, with nine landmark cases…
R. v John Wilkes (1763–64)
John Wilkes was a radical journalist and MP who had gleefully got under the skin of King George III and his ministers with his written attacks and satires. In 1763, however, he seemed to have gone too far when Issue 45 of his newspaper, the North Briton, attacked the peace terms negotiated at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), which were announced in the King’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament.
George III issued a writ against Wilkes for seditious libel, using a general warrant to enforce it, which meant everyone involved in producing and distributing the newspaper was arrested. Wilkes successfully claimed parliamentary privilege against arrest for libel and challenged the constitutional propriety of General Warrants; he won his case. However, his enemies at court had been preparing a second line of attack: they used his authorship of an undoubtedly obscene poem, Essay on Woman, to pursue him on the same charge – and this time, Wilkes fled to France. When asked by a French acquaintance just how far the liberty of the press extended in England, he is supposed to have replied that that was what he was trying to find out.
In 1768, unable to meet his French creditors and keen to clear his name, Wilkes returned to England and was returned to parliament as MP for Middlesex. He also submitted to the judgement of the High Court, which sentenced him to two years in prison. The Commons expelled him and declared his defeated opponent, Colonel Henry Luttrell, to have been elected. This was only after a long battle of wills with the Middlesex electorate, during which Wilkes was returned three times, despite being in prison!
Wilkes then turned his attention to the City of London, where he became an Alderman and even Lord Mayor. He soon grew out of his radicalism and became a pillar of the establishment. His case highlighted some of the most blatant attempts of the crown and of ministers to use the libel laws to stifle parliamentary opposition.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler v John Ruskin (1878)
When does art criticism cross over into personal abuse? That was the question raised by the libel action brought in 1878 by the British-based American artist James McNeill Whistler against the celebrated art critic and writer John Ruskin, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Ruskin was a firm believer that art had a duty to contribute to the moral health of the people.
In his magazine, Fors Clavigera, Ruskin reviewed an exhibition at London’s Grosvenor Gallery which displayed work which had not been accepted at the Royal Academy: he singled out his friend Edward Burne-Jones for high praise but strongly condemned Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, an impressionistic image of a falling firework over the Thames at night. Ruskin objected not only to what he saw as a lack of form in the painting, but to its high asking price, commenting: “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler sued.
It has been suggested that Whistler’s motivation may have been the publicity the trial was bound to attract as much as his outraged feelings. If so, he certainly achieved his aim: press interest in the case, which only lasted two days, was intense. Ruskin was already in declining health so declared himself too ill to attend, and Burne-Jones spoke for him in court – reluctantly it should be said, since he hadn’t wanted to be drawn into the dispute. Whistler, clearly enjoying himself, was on top form, entertaining the court with his witty repartee: when asked how he could justify asking two hundred guineas for work knocked off in a couple of days, Whistler gave the famous reply that he asked it not for two days’ work but for the knowledge of a lifetime.
Yet if Whistler gained the publicity he craved, it did him little good: the court awarded him a farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages, leaving him financially ruined: he was declared bankrupt the following year. Ruskin too was brought down by the case, resigning his Oxford Chair shortly after the trial and sinking into the mental collapse that blighted his final years. He died on 20 January 1900.
- Read more | A beginner's guide to art history
Oscar Wilde v the Marquess of Queensberry (1895)
It is telling that Oscar Wilde had to remind the court hearing his 1895 libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry that he was the prosecutor in the case, because his action quickly passed out of his control, forcing him, not his opponent, Queensberry, to defend himself.
The Marquess of Queensberry, a pugnacious character best known for drawing up the rules of boxing, was incensed by the intense relationship that had developed between Wilde and his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. Queensberry suspected, rightly, an active homosexual affair, which was then a criminal offence. Continually frustrated in his attempts to confront Wilde, who was at the height of his literary fame, Queensberry finally set a trap by leaving a card with the hall porter at Wilde’s club apparently addressed, as far as his difficult handwriting can be deciphered, to “Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite (sic)”. The sensible course for Wilde, and one urged by his friends, would have been to shrug it off, but the fact that the porter had seen it technically constituted publication and, enthusiastically egged on by Lord Alfred, who relished the prospect of seeing his detested father in court, Wilde sued for libel.
Queensberry engaged Edward Carson, a contemporary of Wilde’s at Trinity College, Dublin, to defend him; Wilde commented that Carson would doubtless pursue him “with the added bitterness of an old friend”. Wilde assured his own barrister, Edward Clarke QC, that there was no truth in the allegation of homosexuality and repeated his denial in court; however, Carson was not only able to infer homosexual themes in Wilde’s works, such as The Portrait of Dorian Grey (1890), but he quoted overtly homoerotic passages from Wilde’s correspondence with Lord Alfred Douglas.
Wilde’s final downfall came when Carson asked if he had kissed one of the young men with whom Wilde admitted consorting: “Oh dear no,” replied Wilde, “he was, unfortunately, extremely ugly. I pitied him for it.” Carson latched tenaciously onto Wilde’s reply, which appeared to show that Wilde would indeed have kissed the man had he been better-looking. Queensberry’s defence of justification was upheld. Wilde, already living well beyond his means, could not afford to flee to France, as even Queensberry expected him to do, and he was accordingly arrested for “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour. He served most of his sentence in Reading Gaol (1895–97), an experience which came close to destroying him.
- Read more | Oscar Wilde's tragic end
Dr Wladislaw Dering v Leon Uris (1964)
Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus, about the creation of the state of Israel, gave rise to the first Holocaust-related libel cases in the British courts. An American of Jewish Polish-Russian extraction, Uris had researched his novel and in a footnote he named four doctors at Auschwitz who had carried out experiments on inmates in the camp. These operations included sterilisation and the removal of ovaries, which was often carried out without anaesthetic. One of the doctors, Dr Wladislaw Dering, sued for libel.
Dering, who held the OBE for services to medicine, was of Polish origin and had himself been an inmate at Auschwitz. After the war he had settled in Britain and had worked for a time in the protectorate of British Somaliland, but in 1948 the Polish government had sought his extradition on charges of war crimes. The Home Office had deemed there was a prima facie case for him to answer; it was also pointed out in the House of Commons that he had been listed as a war criminal by the United Nations on three separate occasions and that he was also sought by the governments of France and Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, decided the evidence was inclusive and Dering was released.
If this legal success gave Dering the confidence to sue Uris 16 years later, he was badly mistaken. His case was that Uris’s claims were heavily overstated and that, while he had conducted operations, he had never done so without anaesthetic. Uris’s legal team called evidence from Auschwitz survivors who had been operated on by Dering, as well as a list of operations written in part in Dering’s handwriting.
Particularly powerful testimony came from a French doctor Adelaide Auval, who not only confirmed that such medical experiments had taken place but stated that she had refused to conduct them and had received no punishment as a consequence. This demolished Dering’s defence that he had only acted in fear of being shot if he refused. After a trial lasting 19 days and conducted in six languages, the jury decided that, technically, Dering had indeed been libelled; however, they awarded him a mere halfpenny’s damages, making it clear they believed Uris’s claims; the judge also directed that Dering pay Uris’s costs and refused him permission to appeal.
Dering’s reputation collapsed and he died within a year; Uris went on to turn the trial into a novel, QBVII, which in 1974 was made into a TV series starring Anthony Hopkins as a fictionalised version of Dering.
Sonia Sutcliffe v Private Eye (1989)
The magazine Private Eye was a product of the satire boom of the 1960s: it was launched in 1961 by a group of public-school friends and was soon taken over by Peter Cook. Its style retained the homemade look and schoolboy humour with which it had started. It combined irreverent wit – especially in its distinctive covers, which inserted speech bubbles onto photographs of prominent figures – with serious investigative journalism, which occasionally landed the magazine in court. For example, it had a long-running feud with the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who in 1986 won £55,000 in libel damages after the Eye accused him of soliciting honours for cash.
Three years later, the magazine’s editor, Ian Hislop, faced a much more serious libel case brought by Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, who had been convicted in 1981 of the murder of 13 women in the north of England. The Eye had criticised Sonia Sutcliffe at the time for seeking to profit from her husband’s notoriety by negotiating a lucrative press deal. She sued in 1989, getting her case in before a six-year statute of limitations on libel cases came into force. She won £600,000 in damages, which was £100,000 more than the previous record. “If that’s justice,” Hislop commented outside the court, “then I’m a banana”.
The case came close to bankrupting the magazine and Hislop had to launch the “bananaballs” fundraiser, which eventually raised £102,000 to finance an appeal. The fact that Sutcliffe had received substantially more than the payouts awarded to the families of her husband’s victims did much to turn public opinion against her. The News of the World, which had made similar claims about Sutcliffe and, like the Eye, had refused to settle out of court, revealed evidence that she had indeed been negotiating with the press and thereby profiting, in effect, from her husband’s crimes.
Private Eye's appeal went ahead and the damages were reduced to £60,000; the magazine distributed the excess money from its appeal among the families of Sutcliffe’s victims. The case inevitably attracted a lot of publicity and helped to highlight some of the absurdities of the libel laws that provided a key point in the movement for their reform. This culminated in the 2013 Defamation Act.
Lord Aldington v Nigel Watts and Count Nikolai Tolstoy (1989)
Historians, get your facts right! This was very much the message of the libel action brought in 1989 by Lord Aldington, a former Brigadier and Conservative Party deputy chairman, against the historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy.
Tolstoy had made his name with Victims of Yalta (1977), which told the then-little-known story of how anti-Stalin Russian Cossacks (a semi-nomadic people from southern Russia and Ukraine who had fought alongside the Germans in the Second World War and been taken prisoner by the western allies) were forcibly repatriated by the British and Americans under the terms of the Yalta agreement, in the full knowledge that they were likely to be shot.
Tolstoy’s 1986 book The Minister and the Massacres recounted a similar episode, this time of anti-Communist Croat and Slovene troops who, similarly, had fought alongside the Germans and who, at the end of the war, were handed over to equally certain death at the hands of the communist partisans led by Josip Broz (“Tito”). Reviews criticised Tolstoy for allowing his own sympathy for the Yugoslavs to cloud his historical judgement and for seeking, on insufficient grounds, to pin responsibility for the killings on two British figures: the future prime minister Harold Macmillan, who was then a British minister to the Mediterranean region, and Brigadier Toby Low, later Lord Aldington.
The case came to a head when Nigel Watts, a property developer who was pursuing an unrelated claim against Aldington, invited Tolstoy to help write an attack on Aldington's character and wartime record for a pamphlet which he then distributed as widely as possible. It was this that persuaded an outraged Aldington to sue first Watts and then Tolstoy.
The case against Watts was clear-cut and he agreed to an out-of-court settlement. Tolstoy, however, was determined to defend his book in court, even though his publishers had agreed to withdraw it. It proved a costly decision; the court found against Tolstoy and awarded Aldington £1.5 million in damages, which, together with £500,000 in costs, made it the largest libel damages ever awarded in a British court.
Tolstoy declared himself bankrupt in 1990, though Aldington noted sourly that he continued his lavish lifestyle in a Jacobean farmhouse and kept his children at private school. In 1995, Tolstoy took the damages to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that such a heavy penalty amounted to a denial of his right of free speech. The ECHR agreed, and in 1998 Aldington finally agreed to accept £100,000 in settlement, nine years after his court victory.
Ironically, in 2000, the year Aldington died, Tolstoy inherited £1.5 million, the very sum Aldington had originally been awarded, from his stepfather, the novelist Patrick O’Brien.
Although it seems clear that Tolstoy’s work was heavily one-sided and that he was chasing a non-existent British conspiracy, and that therefore Aldington was justified in his legal action, the case highlighted the way in which English libel law could act as an infringement of human rights and again underlined the urgent need for reform.
David Irving v Penguin Books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt (1996)
This celebrated libel action was turned into a successful feature film, Denial (2016), starring Rachel Weisz and Timothy Spall.
David Irving had built a reputation as a historical writer specialising in the Second World War and specifically on the role of leading Nazis: his 1977 book Hitler’s War had attracted very favourable reviews. However, Irving’s clear sympathy for the wartime Nazis, coupled with his vocal support for neo-Nazi groups in post-war Germany, led him into increasingly extreme claims, including denying that Adolf Hitler had known about the Holocaust. He even described Hitler as the best friend the Jews ever had, and claimed that there had been no extermination of prisoners at Auschwitz.
Irving was notoriously litigious, and many writers and publishers were intimidated into withdrawing their claims against him; however, when in 1996 he sued Penguin Books and the American Professor Deborah Lipstadt for her claim that he was a Holocaust-denier, they decided to fight. The case finally came to trial in January 2000.
Lipstadt retained Anthony Julius – a Jewish lawyer and academic who specialised in combating antisemitism – as her solicitor. In effect they turned the tables on Irving by putting the accuracy of his books at the centre of their case, using a team of researchers headed by Richard Evans, then Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, to go through Irving’s footnotes and trace them to their sources. What they found was that Irving systematically mis-rendered, mistranslated or otherwise slanted the archival record so as to favour the Nazi perspective. His voluminous private diary, which was subpoenaed for the case, revealed chilling evidence of his obsessive hatred for Jews and his white supremacist views.
The judge found for the defendants, describing Irving as a racist, a holocaust denier and a systematic falsifier of the historical record, and awarded the defendants costs amounting to £150,000 as an interim sum. In 2001 Irving’s appeal failed and the following year he was declared bankrupt.
- Read more about the Irving v Lipstadt case
In February 2006, Irving was sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court for various speeches he had made in which he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, though in December that year his sentence was reduced to the 13 months he had already served in prison. He was released and deported to the UK.
- Read more | Confronting Holocaust denial: “History is more of a battleground now than ever” says David Baddiel
- Listen | Richard J Evans answers key questions about the Third Reich
McDonald’s v Helen Steel and David Morris (1997)
When, in 1986, Helen Steel and David Morris distributed a cheaply produced leaflet in the Strand attacking the morality and business ethics of the fast-food chain McDonald’s, they unwittingly triggered a veritable ‘David and Goliath’ battle in the courts and the longest-running libel case in British history.
McDonald’s was fiercely defensive of its reputation and had used the threat of legal action to cow many critics with much greater resources than Steel, a part-time bar worker, and Morris, an unemployed postman, who were members of a small campaigning group called London Greenpeace. When McDonald’s sued the group for libel in 1990, Steel and Morris decided to fight, even though, without legal aid (which is not available for libel cases), they could not afford counsel and would have to represent themselves. However, they received plenty of pro bono legal advice for what the press, inevitably, labelled the “McLibel” case.
When the case finally came to court in 1995, Steel and Morris mounted an impressive legal defence, cross-examining McDonald’s executives about the company’s food and hygiene standards, its impact on the environment, and its terms of employment and corporate practices. As the case dragged on, McDonald’s offered to settle the case if Steel and Morris would stop issuing their leaflets and keep their criticisms of the corporation to private conversations with friends: the pair replied that they would be happy to comply, if McDonald’s in turn would cease their advertising and only recommend their restaurants privately to friends.
In 1997, after 313 days in court, the judge gave his verdict, finding largely (but not wholly) for McDonald’s and awarding the corporation £60,000 in damages, plus costs. The judge found that Steel and Morris had been right in their claims that the corporation exploited their workers, inflicted needless cruelty on animals, and issued misleading advertising.
Faced with a huge bill which they could not hope to pay, Steel and Morris lodged an appeal which was heard in 1999. The Appeal Court largely upheld their case, reducing the award of damages by £20,000, but did not agree with their argument that multinationals should not be allowed to sue for libel over fair criticism of their operations. The Times commented that the case had “achieved what many lawyers thought impossible: to lower further the reputation of our law of defamation in the minds of all right-thinking people”.
In 2005, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the denial of legal aid in a case against such a wealthy corporation had amounted to a denial of Steel and Morris’s rights both to a fair trial and to free expression. The ECHR commented that in a democratic society, campaigning groups like London Greenpeace must be able to operate and to disseminate information on matters of public interest, such as health and the environment, without fear of being crushed by wealthy, self-interested corporations.
The case inspired a documentary film by Franny Armstrong and Ken Loach. It was also an important factor in the framing of the 2013 Defamation Act, which brought in the threshold of “serious harm” to a company’s reputation before it can sue for libel. Had it been in force in the 1990s, the McLibel case could never have been brought.
British Chiropractic Association v Simon Singh (2008)
How far can the defence of ‘fair comment’ go in a libel case? In 2008, the Guardian published a piece by its science writer, Simon Singh, criticising some of the bolder claims made for chiropractic – namely that it could treat various childhood conditions, including ear infections, colic, and asthma – and denouncing the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for maintaining a respectable face while in fact, he claimed it “happily promotes bogus treatments”. The BCA sued for libel and, in a preliminary hearing, the High Court judge Mr Justice Eady dismissed Singh’s claim that he was offering his opinion as fair comment, saying that he was in fact asserting as an established fact that the BCA was acting dishonestly and that therefore the defence of fair comment was not open to him.
Singh took the ruling to the Court of Appeal. In a unanimous judgement, the Court of Appeal decided that Eady had been wrong: Singh had clearly demonstrated that the BCA had made the claims he said they had and had shown that these claims could not be sustained by scientific evidence. He was therefore entitled to his opinion that the BCA’s claims were bogus. The BCA dropped the case, though Singh’s victory had cost him some £200,000 in legal fees.
The Singh case had a much wider significance. Like the McLibel case (above) it informed the framing of the 2013 Defamation Act, making it much harder for institutions to use libel to defend themselves from proper scientific investigation of their practices and claims. Speaking in the Court of Appeal, Lord Judge pointed out that the law of libel could conflict with the right of free speech and that it might be better to change the defence of “fair comment” to “honest opinion”, as is the case in some other countries, as a way of protecting free enquiry and expression from legal penalty. The recommendation was included in the 2013 Act.
]]>Oscar Wilde's tragic endhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/oscar-wilde-tragic-end-decline-prison-death/2022-06-08T15:25:00.000ZNo crowds gathered in May 1897 to see Oscar Wilde’s release from prison. Although Wilde had once been the most famous man in London, celebrated as much for his witticisms and dandyism as his writing, his release took place with little fanfare. It was all in sharp contrast to the scandal caused by the infamous trials that led to the poet and playwright’s imprisonment; court cases that revealed Wilde’s homosexuality to the wider world.
The lack of reporters was a matter of design. On 18 May 1897, Wilde, who spent most of his two-year sentence in Reading Gaol, was quietly transferred to Pentonville. On his release the next day, Wilde was met by More Adey, his friend and editor, and Stewart Headlam, an Anglican vicar who, even though he had never personally met Wilde, had put up bail money on Wilde’s behalf. Once at Headlam’s home, Wilde put on a fresh set of clothes and basked in his freedom. Soon, he was excitedly discussing the many books he had asked people to buy for him, including works by John Keats, Alexandre Dumas and Dante. That evening, Wilde sailed to France and, never to return to Britain, an impoverished existence in exile.
- Read more about literary greats from history
It was a bitter conclusion to a life that had so often featured glittering success. Born to Anglo-Irish parents in Dublin in 1854, the youthful Wilde won scholarships both to Trinity College Dublin and to Oxford’s Magdalen College, where he studied classics. In 1882, Wilde gave a lecture tour of North America. Scheduled to last four months, his talks were such a hit that he was away for close to a year. From the eerie philosophical novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) to The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), a farce considered to be the greatest of his stage plays, his writing displayed his enormous range.
Wilde of heart
In 1884, Wilde married Constance Lloyd and they had two sons. But soon after his wife’s second pregnancy, Wilde began a short affair with 17-year-old Robert Ross. It was likely Wilde’s first same-sex relationship. The two would remain friends for the rest of Wilde’s life.
Another affair had far more lasting consequences for Wilde. In 1891, he became a friend and lover of Lord Alfred Douglas, a young man 16 years his junior and known as ‘Bosie’. Unlike Wilde, who managed to keep his homosexuality mostly hidden – except for themes within his work – Douglas was far less discreet and frittered away large amounts of money on young men. Douglas was the son of a Scottish peer, the Marquess of Queensberry, who strongly disapproved both of Bosie’s lifestyle and of his relationship with Wilde.
In 1895, Queensberry visited Wilde’s favourite London club, the Albemarle. In order to provoke Wilde, he left his calling card, which said: “For Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite [sic].” Queensberry was publicly accusing Wilde of homosexuality –a serious charge. Leaving aside the prevailing attitudes of the era, homosexual acts between men in public or private were illegal, and until 1861, could have been punishable by death.
Acting against the advice of his friends who believed a court case would ruin him, Wilde brought a libel lawsuit against Queensberry. Wilde assured his lawyer that the allegations of homosexuality against him were untrue, and Douglas, who had a difficult relationship with his father, was confident Wilde would win. This confidence was misplaced. Queensberry’s lawyers painted Wilde as a predator and said they could produce several male prostitutes who would testify that Wilde had paid them for sex.
Queensberry won the case, which ultimately bankrupted Wilde because he became liable for Queensberry’s expenses. Douglas fled to Europe, but Wilde stayed in Britain. A warrant was issued for his arrest. In April 1895, a first trial for ‘gross indecency’ saw the jury unable to come to a verdict. Following a retrial with a less lenient judge, Wilde was found guilty. Onlookers shouted “shame” at him while he was taken down. On 25 May he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour – the maximum sentence that could be given. ‘Gross indecency’ was used to prosecute homosexual acts when sodomy could not be conclusively proven. The judge described his punishment as “totally inadequate” given the seriousness of his “crime”. The damage to Wilde’s reputation, at least in his own lifetime, was irreparable.
Read more about the libel case here, plus 8 other notable defamation cases in history
Life as Prisoner C33
Wilde was imprisoned, initially at Pentonville, before being moved to Wandsworth and finally Reading Gaol. When being transferred between prisons, he was recognised and had abuse hurled at him. While being forced to wait in the rain on once such occasion, he is said to have remarked: “If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn’t deserve to have any.” While incarcerated, he had to walk for hours on a treadmill and pick oakum – an arduous task that involved untwisting old strands of rope. For someone of Wilde’s talents, the lack of reading material may have come as a greater hardship. Literature was initially restricted to the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress, until RB Haldane sourced books for Wilde while he was investigating prison conditions. Wilde’s incarceration took its toll on his health, too, as he suffered from dysentery and injured his ear during a fall.
Wilde was at least able to continue to write in prison. Although he was forbidden from penning poetry or prose, letter-writing was permitted – with no restrictions on how long the letter could be. Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter to Douglas, which became known as De Profundis (‘From the Depths’), in which he discussed both their relationship and his own spiritual development. Wilde’s mother Jane died in 1896. Her request to visit her son in prison before she died was refused, but Wilde later claimed to have seen her apparition in his cell at around the same time as she passed.
During his time in prison, Wilde underwent a spiritual renewal and intended to convert to Roman Catholicism. On the day of his release, he sent a message to a Jesuit house asking to complete a six-month retreat with them, but this was refused. Realising it would be too difficult now to stay in Britain, he caught a ferry to Dieppe. While he was imprisoned, Constance had taken parental rights away from Wilde. His two sons never saw their father again and their surnames were changed to distance them from the scandal.
Wilde briefly resumed his relationship with Douglas in Naples, but he spent his final years almost penniless in France living between the homes of friends and cheap hotels. He spent much of his time in bars and, when he was recognised on the street, endured public humiliation and abuse. His health never truly recovered from his time in prison, and he claimed to have lost his love of writing. The only thing of note that he completed during this time was The Ballad of Reading Gaol – the experiences of a fellow inmate on death row as well as a condemnation of the Victorian penal system. The poem was initially credited to C33 after Wilde’s cell number.
He wrote many letters to British newspapers condemning British prisons: “The cruelty that is practised by day and night on children in English prisons is incredible, except to those who have witnessed it and are aware of the brutality of the system.”
On 30 November 1900, Wilde died in Paris at the age of just 46. His friend Robert Ross and a priest were at his side. He was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church before his death. Wilde’s final illness and death have been attributed to syphilis, but it’s more likely that a reoccurring ear infection – possibly caused by the injury he suffered in prison – eventually led to meningoencephalitis.
In 2017, after the passing of the Turing Law – named after the gay codebreaker and computer pioneer Alan Turing – Wilde was among more than 50,000 men pardoned for crimes of homosexuality that, thankfully, no longer exist.
This article first appeared in the May 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]>7 facts you (probably) didn’t know about Oscar Wildehttps://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/oscar-wilde-facts-quotes-married-life-biography-plays-trials/2020-02-06T12:05:10.000ZThe final three years of Oscar Wilde's life were spent in exile in France and Italy, suffering abuse and humiliation, before he died impoverished in a Paris hotel. Here, we bring you seven surprising facts about Oscar Wilde…
He was a proud Irishman
Oscar Wilde was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde in Dublin, Ireland, in 1854. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a respected eye and ear doctor who revolutionised the treatment of ear infections (and also gained an unfortunate reputation for womanising; before his marriage he was the father of three children by two different women out of wedlock). Oscar’s mother was Jane Elgee, an Anglo-Irish revolutionary poet who wrote under the pen name Speranza.
Growing up, Wilde was influenced by both his mother’s Irish nationalist politics and his father’s philanthropic tendencies. He was schooled at their family home in Merrion Square before going on to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen and later attending Trinity College, Dublin, where he was introduced to the Greek literature that would greatly influence his later works and beliefs.
Wilde’s Anglo-Irish background is often forgotten – perhaps because of his quintessentially ‘British’ writings – though he himself was proud of his Irish heritage. When an 1892 production of his provocative play Salomé was banned from the London stage, ostensibly due to its portrayal of biblical figures, Wilde is known to have remarked on the small-mindedness of the English censors, saying: "I am not English; I'm Irish which is quite another thing."
He believed in ‘art for art’s sake’
While at Trinity, and later at the University of Oxford’s Magdalen College (which he attended between 1874 to 1878), Wilde was known for his support of aestheticism – an intellectual movement which centred on the idea that art should not exist for any other motive other than beauty. Drawing on the work of 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, aesthetes baulked against the Victorian idea that art could be a tool for social education and moral enlightenment. They believed that any morality or utility that a work might bring to an audience was irrelevant.
- Rupert Everett on Oscar Wilde’s life in exile
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During his time in Oxford, Wilde fully embraced ‘aesthetic flair’: growing his hair long; dressing in flamboyant fashions and assuming exaggerated affectations. He famously once declared, when entertaining friends in his Oxford rooms: “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!”
When aestheticism was satirised in Patience (1881), a popular comic opera by creative duo Gilbert and Sullivan, Wilde was called upon by opportunistic businessman Richard D'Oyly Carte to give a series of lectures defining and defending the movement. Wilde delivered lectures across North America throughout 1882, to huge success.
Wilde became an icon of the aestheticism movement and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), is regarded as a great example of aesthetic theory and the interplay between art and morality.
He wrote children’s stories
Oscar Wilde is most famous for his acclaimed society plays – including Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); A Woman of No Importance (1893); and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Using sharp and witty comedy to frame a more serious commentary of Britain’s class hierarchy and human nature, Wilde’s plays were hugely popular when they premiered in 1890s London. Wilde became the toast of society, known for his flamboyant manner and frequent socialising at fashionable and exclusive venues such as the Café Royal.
However, it is often forgotten that Wilde also wrote children’s stories. The Happy Prince and Other Tales is a collection of short fairy tales published in 1888. The best-known story in the collection is that of a gilded statue which, befriended by a migrating swallow, attempts to help the poor and miserable of its town.
Wilde’s work is best remembered for being full of wry observances and prolific wit. Though there are many examples of witticisms incorrectly attributed to the playwright, among his more famous quotes are: “When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is”; “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much”; and “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”.
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He was in love with Bram Stoker’s wife
Wilde is remembered for his relationships with men [he fell from public regard after his infamous trial and conviction for ‘gross indecency’ and subsequent imprisonment between 1895 and 1897], but he also had several notable relationships with women.
During his youth in Dublin, Wilde had been infatuated with the beautiful and witty Florence Balcombe. Eleanor Fitzsimons writes in Wilde's Women (2017) how Wilde gushed to a friend about Balcombe: “I am just going out to bring an exquisitely pretty girl to afternoon service in the Cathedral. She is just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money. I will show you her photograph when I see you next.”
To Wilde’s disappointment and despite their courtship, Balcombe instead chose to marry fellow Irish author Bram Stoker, who would later gain fame as the creator of Dracula. Fitzsimons notes that although Wilde was crushed, he went on to propose marriage to two further women before he met Constance Lloyd, the woman who would become his wife.
Wilde was introduced to Lloyd, the daughter of an Irish barrister, in 1881. They married in 1884 and had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Many of their letters demonstrate a deep affection: "As long as I live you shall be my lover," Lloyd wrote in answer to Wilde’s proposal in 1883.
Around the time of the birth of the couple’s second child in 1886, Wilde met 17-year-old Robbie Ross, a Canadian journalist and art critic who was openly homosexual. Shortly after their meeting, Ross moved into Wilde’s family home and, according to many sources, the two began an affair.
From that point on, Wilde became more open in his favour of the company and attentions of young men and embraced the hidden side of London’s nightlife, regularly arranging rendezvous with young male 'renters'. Frequent instances of public affection scandalised London society, one occurring in Kettner’s restaurant in Soho when Wilde kissed a waiter.
Wilde’s accusation of libel led to his own trial
In 1891, Wilde embarked on a tempestuous affair with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, a handsome and poetic 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate. Douglas was Wilde’s beloved, talented muse but was also a petulant burden who was often reckless with both Wilde’s affections and money. The couple argued and reconciled frequently.
In one letter in mid-1894, Wilde wrote to Bosie: “I can’t live without you. You are so dear, so wonderful. I think of you all day long, and miss your grace, your boyish beauty, the bright sword-play of your wit, the delicate fancy of your genius, so surprising always in its sudden swallow-flights towards north and south, towards sun and moon — and, above all, yourself.”
Suspecting a relationship between his son and the playwright, Bosie’s father – John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry – began harassing Wilde in an attempt to sever the connection. In February 1895, Queensberry left a calling card at the Albemarle Club in London, where Wilde was a member. The message on the card read: “For Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite [sic]" – though there is still debate about the actual words and meaning, due to Queensberry’s handwriting.
Wilde took exception to the message, believing it a public accusation of the crime of sodomy. Against the advice of many of his friends, including Robbie Ross, Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel.
Queensberry was well known for his pugnacious attitude and outspoken nature: he gathered copious evidence that Wilde had solicited male prostitutes and he coerced witnesses to testify against the writer. Despite deploying his characteristic wit during the trial, Wilde was unable to refute Queensberry’s accusation. In a humiliating reversal, the marquess was acquitted and immediately prepared to bring charges against Wilde, for ‘gross indecency’ and sodomy – charges which criminalised homosexual people and no longer exist in the UK.
A common myth endures that the magistrate delayed Wilde’s arrest warrant in order to allow him time to catch the last ferry from Dover and escape the charges. However, as Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson writes, this is unlikely for a number of reasons, including the fact that there were still four trains from London to Paris which would have left after the time ofhis eventual arrest.
On 6 April 1895, Wilde was arrested and charged, and two hugely public and damaging trials followed, in which Wilde pleaded not guilty.
In a memorable moment from the first trial, which opened on 26 April at the Old Bailey, Wilde was fiercely cross-examined over the meaning of the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name”. The words were from one of Bosie’s poems and thought by the prosecution to be a euphemism for homosexuality. Wilde’s defence of the term drew cheers within the court: “[It] is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.”
After the two trials, Wilde – along with Bosie, who had escaped to safety on the continent before the charges were brought – was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ by a jury on 25 May 1895. Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour, a punishment described as “totally inadequate” by the judge, given the “seriousness” of his “crime”.
Wilde wrote one of his most famous works from his cell in Reading gaol
Wilde was imprisoned first in Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons, before being moved to Reading gaol in November 1895. During his transfer via Clapham Junction station he was recognised on the platform while manacled to a warden – he was subjected to abuse and spat on by his previously adoring public.
Before the 1898 Prison Act, which reformed the aims and methods of incarceration in Britain, the British prison system was designed to subject prisoners to harsh physical labour and silent meditation on their crimes. Wilde’s life in prison was arduous and grim: he spent 23 hours a day in his cell, with hardly any contact with other prisoners, and was required to labour on a treadmill. He became ill with dysentery during his incarceration.
Though Wilde was forbidden from writing plays, prose or poetry while serving his sentence, he was permitted to write letters. He realised that the prison regulations did not specify how long a letter should be and, if a letter were not finished, then the prisoner may be allowed take it with him when he left the prison.
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So, over the final three months of his sentence, Wilde worked on the letter that would be later known as De Profundis (Latin for “from the depths”). He addressed the letter to Douglas, beginning: “Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine.”
The letter contains many references to their relationship and to Wilde’s feelings about Christianity and Jesus Christ.
Wilde never revised De Profundis after his release from Reading gaol in 1897 and it wasn’t published until after his death: first in part by Robbie Ross in 1905; and later in full by Wilde's youngest son, Vyvyan, in 1949.
He died destitute in Paris – but not of syphilis
Upon his release, Wilde was irrevocably marred by his imprisonment; his health was suffering and he was financially ruined. He retired to the continent and assumed the name of Sebastian Melmoth – inspired by Melmoth the Wanderer, a 19th-century Gothic novel by Irish writer Charles Maturin. Wilde lived for the most part impoverished and alone, occasionally joined and supported by former associates, including a short-lived reunion with Bosie in Naples in August 1897.
Though Oscar’s wife, Constance, continued to support him with a financial stipend for some time after his release, she remained in England with their two sons and changed their surname to ‘Holland’ to escape scandal. Wilde remained estranged from his family until his wife’s death in 1898.
With the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) – a scathing indictment of the Victorian penal system first published under Wilde’s prisoner identification number, C3-3 – he wrote little else of literary significance during this time. He told one friend: "I can write, but have lost the joy of writing."
Wilde’s health continued to decline and he suffered public abuse and humiliation, often ridiculed and jeered by those who recognised him.
Though there is a common misconception that Wilde died of syphilis – propagated by British journalist and author Arthur Ransome, who in a 1912 biography claimed syphilis as the cause of Wilde’s death – the playwright died aged 46 on 30 November 1900 after suffering from meningitis. On his deathbed, Wilde is reported to have remarked: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.” The writer died at the shabby Hotel D’Alsace in Paris in the company of a few friends including Robbie Ross and a Catholic priest, who baptised Wilde before his death.
Oscar Wilde left behind a complicated legacy: Merlin Holland has written that, as well as a writer of stature, his grandfather was also "a convict, a homosexual, a bankrupt... and a charismatic figure prepared to stand up for what he believed in".
Wilde was posthumously pardoned for his convictions in 2017, when the UK government’s ‘Turing Law’ (named after the British Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing) exonerated more than 50,000 men who had been convicted of crimes for homosexuality that no longer exist.
Elinor Evans is Deputy Digital Editor of HistoryExtra.com
This article was first published in June 2018
]]>The Happy Prince: Rupert Everett on Oscar Wilde's life in exilehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-happy-prince-rupert-everett-oscar-wilde-life-exile-paris-trial/2018-06-14T14:45:28.000Z“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his only novel, 1890’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The Irish playwright, novelist, poet and critic experienced both good and bad ‘talk’ in his lifetime. Celebrated throughout the late 1800s for his satirical society plays and flamboyant charm, he fell from public regard after his infamous trial and conviction for ‘gross indecency’ and subsequent imprisonment between 1895 and 1897.
After his release from Reading Gaol, Wilde went into exile in France and Italy and, taking the alias Sebastian Melmoth, lived for the most part alone and in poverty. He died of meningitis, in the company of just a few companions at Paris’s Hôtel d'Alsace, in 1900. It’s this period – the final three years of his life – that is the subject of Rupert Everett’s new film, The Happy Prince.
Everett, who has written and directed the film, also stars as Wilde. He has performed in many of Wilde’s works, including two film versions – An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Ernest– and played Wilde in David Hare’s 1998 play The Judas Kiss. He first encountered the Irish writer as a child, when his mother read him The Happy Prince, Wilde’s children’s story from which the film takes its name.
Though Wilde’s life has been addressed in three other films, Everett explains: “I’ve always found his period in exile to be the most moving side of his life. The image of Wilde in Paris at the end of the 19th century is one of the great defining images between the 19th and the 20th century. It’s full of fantasy and sadness, tragedy and humour”.
On Wilde’s life in exile: “Wilde was recognised, and everyone started shouting and spitting at him”
In The Happy Prince, Everett’s Wilde is haunted both by his former success and humiliation: while one flashback scene shows him addressing an adoring theatre audience, another shows a jeering public accosting him as he is transferred through Clapham Junction train station during his imprisonment.
“The Clapham Junction incident actually happened,” says Everett, “when he was being transferred from Wandsworth to Reading; it actually happened twice. The events in the film are true: he was manacled to a warden, and the warden read the newspaper while Wilde was recognised, and everyone started shouting and spitting at him.”
Another scene shows Wilde and his companions intimidated and chased by a group of young men who shout homophobic insults. “Such things happened to Oscar all the time in exile,” explains Everett. “He was constantly being told to move out of restaurants; people would call the head waiter and ask to have him removed.”
On his relationships: “Wilde’s true love was not a histrionic love affair”
Many will know of Wilde’s relationship with Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas. It was Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who attempted to end his son’s relationship with Wilde by publicly accusing Wilde as a “posing somdomite” in 1895 (though the exact wording of Queensberry’s message is still disputed). The message prompted Wilde to accuse Queensberry of criminal libel and was the catalyst for a chain of legal events that led to Wilde’s later conviction.
In The Happy Prince, Wilde and Bosie – the latter played by Colin Morgan – are briefly reunited in Naples, before their affair disintegrates. Although their tempestuous relationship is a key part of Wilde’s life (and the film), Everett found that deeper interest lay in another of Wilde’s companions: his friend and lover Robbie Ross (played by Edwin Thomas).
“I was interested in putting across [the idea] that Wilde’s historical so-called ‘great love’ wasn’t really that between Wilde and Bosie,” says Everett. “Whereas real love, for Wilde, was sitting there all the time: it was Robbie Ross, who loved Oscar unconditionally; Oscar just never noticed.
“It’s a touchingly human thing, to not be able to see what’s at the end of your nose. I found that Oscar really loved Robbie, too: they always say that the first sexual experience he had with a man was with Robbie Ross in a public loo, and I sort of believe it. Oscar completely relied on him by the end and wanted Robbie to be with him when he died. They’re buried together, in fact. For me, an important part of the story was to try and explain that Wilde’s true love was not a histrionic love affair.”
It was Ross who arranged for Catholic priest to baptise Wilde on his deathbed in Paris in 1900. “Robbie was a Catholic,” explains Everett, “and Oscar was always fascinated by Catholicism. If you read De Profundis [Wilde’s posthumously published letter to Douglas, written from Reading Gaol], all the sections about Christ are fascinating and beautiful.
“In fact, when Oscar came out of prison, he wanted to go into a Jesuit retreat, though they turned him down. But it was always in his head to become a Catholic, although he had never got around to it. When Robbie found Oscar on his deathbed, he immediately called for the priest for Wilde’s conversion.”
On Wilde’s fame: “His fall was brought around by his own vanity and ego and snobbery”
“One of the things that, for me, is very appealing or very familiar, is the notion of celebrities who get to a point where they think that the whole universe is built around them,” says Everett. “I think that was the problem for Wilde: at one point, he was the most famous man in London. Even though it’s small fry compared to our kind of fame now, he was hugely famous by the standards of the time: he was the life and soul of every party; he was known to royalty; he had three consecutive hits in the West End; he was the toast of the Café Royal; he was a huge star.
“He became blind to the rest of the world and thought that it revolved around him. His fall was brought around by his own vanity and ego and snobbery. That’s something that I find particularly touching and moving about him, because that’s what we’re all like, really – we just don’t do it so graphically.”
This blindness is also evident, Everett says, when it comes to Wilde’s wife, Constance (played by Emily Watson). Following his trial, she lived estranged from her husband with their two sons, until her death in 1898.
“He never understood all through his life, right until the end, how horrible he had been to Constance. Looking at it now, you can’t figure out how someone could be so blind. That’s the most extraordinary thing. He actually put himself in the position as her victim, after a while. It’s a fascinating relationship: she adored him and she was very good to him.
“He was definitely in love with her at the beginning; but after the first child, my feeling is that he started treating her very badly. He certainly didn’t fancy her anymore. It was around the time of their second child’s birth that he met Robbie Ross. It was after this time that Constance’s life got very difficult. The scandal for her was absolutely horrendous and she died in a very tragic way.”
Wilde’s place in the LGBTQ movement: “The tragedy or scandal of Oscar Wilde is one of those punctuation points in the history of gay liberation”
For Everett, Wilde’s trial, imprisonment and subsequent exile stand at the dawn of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning and queer) movement.
“It’s so interesting that, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, many of the great debates of the 20th century were happening: modernism; suffrage; war; gay liberation. The tragedy or scandal of Oscar Wilde is really one of those punctuation points, I think it became a debate because of him.
“So the gay liberation movement, I think, starts from 1900. I think he’s a very important figure for us and he’s certainly someone that is worth knowing about. We pay too little heed to history, in my opinion, and we need it in order to put things into perspective.”
The Happy Prince is released in the UK on Friday 15 June 2018.
Rupert Everett was talking to Elinor Evans, Deputy Digital Editor of HistoryExtra.com
]]>The Sexual Offences Act: a gay revolution?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/a-gay-revolution/2017-08-13T10:49:17.000ZArthur Strange Kattendyke David Archibald Gore, the 8th Earl of Arran, had two main obsessions: “To stop people buggering badgers and badgering buggers.” He failed to protect the badgers – his attempt in the House of Lords to pass legislation against badger-baiting got nowhere (“There are not many badgers in the House of Lords,” he allegedly said) – but he succeeded, to some degree, in protecting the ‘buggers’.
Arran was the champion in the Lords of a private member’s bill sponsored in the Commons by Leo Abse, the colourful Labour MP for Pontypool. This became the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 – 50 years ago this summer. The act decriminalised sex between two – and only two – consenting males (lesbian sex was never criminalised in the UK as male legislators couldn’t imagine how sex between women was possible), so long as they were over the age of 21 and the sex was in private. It did not apply to the armed services and to the merchant navy, where sex between men remained illegal. Nor did it cover Scotland and Northern Ireland, which had to wait until 1980 and 1982 respectively for similar legislation.
Sodomy (or buggery) used to be a hanging offence in Britain. This was modified by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, which replaced capital punishment with minimum sentences of 10 years’ imprisonment. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 added to the statute book a two-year maximum penalty for “gross indecency” between men (all other forms of sexual behaviour) in public or in private. The third in the trinity of statutes routinely used to control gay sex was the Vagrancy Act of 1898, designed to fight “persistent importuning and soliciting” by female prostitutes – but the police preferred to use it against men flirting with men instead.
Natural variations
These were the laws. But between the late 19th and the mid-20th centuries, understandings of human sexuality began to shift dramatically. The new science of sexology, exemplified by Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey, reformulated same-sex desires, identities and practices less as sins or crimes than as genetic or psychological conditions, or as natural, harmless variations.
By 1954, the claims that the law wasn’t fit for purpose had reached such a crescendo that Winston Churchill’s Conservative government commissioned a Home Office committee, led by Sir John Wolfenden, the vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, to investigate. The Wolfenden Committee canvassed the views of more than 200 experts and organisations – everyone from the Lord Chief Justice to the British Medical Association and the Church of England to a small handful of self-identifying homosexuals. And, after examining the evidence, the Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended that consenting sex between men over the age of 21 in private be decriminalised.
The higher-brow newspapers applauded but the popular press was appalled. “If the law were to tolerate homosexual acts, a great barrier against depravity would be swept aside,” railed the Daily Mail. The threat was existential: “Great nations have fallen and empires decayed because [moral] corruption became socially acceptable.”
Faced with this kind of backlash, and since surveys in the 1950s indicated that most people still found homosexuality “disgusting”, neither the Conservative government nor the Labour opposition was prepared to champion the changes that Wolfenden requested. As the home secretary, Rab Butler, put it in the Commons, so many people considered homosexuality to be “a great social evil” that “education and time” would be needed to persuade them of the case for reform. “The matter now goes into that extensive limbo of reforms that are supported by almost everybody who has seriously studied the subject,” opined The Economist, “and by penological common sense – but are rejected by common emotion. It will be enacted in the end, but past experience suggests that the end may be a decade or so away.”
A permissive climate
The Economist was correct. It took 10 years of hard lobbying by the Homosexual Law Reform Society (founded in 1958), pressure from the most liberal-minded MPs, and support from a progressive home secretary, Roy Jenkins, in the more permissive climate of the 1960s, before parliament adopted the Wolfenden principles in the 1967 act.
In the debates in both houses there were still strong voices of opposition. In the Commons, for example, Peter Mahon, Labour MP for Preston South, shared his “absolute revulsion” for the bill. “It will be a bad bill through time to eternity because homosexual acts are a perversion of a natural function.” Changing the law would be “a move toward perdition and an act of moral cowardice”. And, lest anyone be in any doubt, he declared: “I am against the bill lock, stock and barrel, root and branch, hook, line and sinker, warts and all.” Sir Charles Taylor, Conservative MP for Eastbourne, chipped in: “This is another occasion where the government are completely out of step with the people, who do not believe in buggery.”
One of the main concerns of the bill’s opponents was that, in seeming to give a parliamentary seal of approval to this ‘social evil’, they would encourage its spread. To counter this accusation, speaker after speaker on the reforming side reaffirmed their abhorrence of homosexual practices, highlighted the limited nature of the legislation, and voiced their belief that the act would encourage homosexuals to crawl out of their dark corners into the light of day to seek help for their affliction.
The act would be “an important and civilising measure”, thought Roy Jenkins, but a vote in favour was not “a vote of confidence or congratulation to homosexuality. Those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt and shame. The crucial question… is, should we add to those disadvantages the full rigour of the criminal law?” Lord Arran warned newly liberated homosexuals against ostentatious flaunting: “Homosexuals must continue to remember that while there may be nothing bad in being a homosexual, there is certainly nothing good. Lest the opponents of the bill think that a new freedom, a new privileged class, has been created, let me remind them that no amount of legislation will prevent homosexuals from being the subject of dislike or derision, or at best of pity.” Antony Grey, secretary of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, who was present to hear this “frightful stuff”, “almost puked”. He wasn’t alone.
Given the negative language even of the proponents of the measure, many scholars and activists have downplayed its significance, refusing to treat it as a great, progressive triumph. Arran disagreed, claiming that, because of the passage of the act, “perhaps a million human beings will be able to live in greater peace”.
So which interpretation is the most accurate? There’s little doubt that Arran’s assessment was unduly optimistic: the act did not amount to much for gay men, at least directly. In the early 1960s, the figures showed that 1,500 to 2,000 men were found guilty each year of homosexual offences (buggery, attempted buggery and gross indecency). One calculation reckoned that only about 100 of these were for the type of private, consensual offences that had now been decriminalised. Sex with teenagers and young adults, sex in public (even in bathhouses or saunas), importuning for sex and male prostitution all remained illegal. In fact, convictions increased in the years after the 1967 act.
In an article in The Guardian a few weeks after the act’s passage, the writer Geoffrey Moorhouse gave some insight into how ordinary gay men felt. He interviewed John and Eric who had been sharing a council flat and living “what they would call normal lives” for 20 years. They claimed the act “hasn’t made a ha’porth of difference to them”.
A man named Neville, by contrast, lived alone. He felt that the act had lifted “some small sense of shame”, but it hadn’t made it easier for him to find a partner. The London clubs that homosexuals frequented were “too florid” for his taste. And he was still fearful of the consequences of being outed or of inadvertently outing himself at work.
Florid meeting places
The Albany Trust, a counselling charity that complemented the Homosexual Law Reform Society, expected its casebooks to remain full of similar instances: “Men living in isolation in bedsitters, fearing their tendencies, always being on guard against others finding out, wondering whether they would lose their jobs, gradually shedding friends and not making new ones.” Reformers wanted further legislation to equalise the age of consent and to put gay and straight relationships on an equal footing. This would allow meeting places to be established “which are not florid but where homosexuals can behave naturally.” But Neville was not convinced that this would accomplish anything. As Eric put it, the crucial task was to “remove the stigma from being homosexual”.
A vibrant scene
Did the Sexual Offences Act help to do this? It is tempting to think so because of what came next: an explosion of gay activism with the founding of the Gay Liberation Front in London in 1970; the rise of a vibrant gay commercial scene from the 1970s; the development of a renewed militancy in the late 1980s, with groups such as Stonewall and Outrage!, as a response to the Aids crisis and the Thatcher government’s introduction of Section 28 (see timeline above); the raft of gay civil rights legislation under the Blair government, including an equal age of consent and civil partnerships; and full legislative equality with the introduction of gay marriage in 2013 under David Cameron’s coalition government. Attitudes have been revolutionised, making the talk of ‘evil’, ‘shame’ and ‘moral corruption’ sound positively antediluvian.
There is no doubt that the decades of discussion about homosexuality culminating in the Wolfenden Report and the 1967 act played a part in all this and gave at least some gay men a psychological boost. But it was just as much gays and lesbians themselves, drawing inspiration from the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969 (see timeline on p65) and the radiation of gay liberationist energy, who seized the initiative and metaphorically unfurled the rainbow flag. Thanks to their combined efforts the cautious and limited toleration of 1967 became the much greater acceptance of today.
In the Lords debate at the time of the act, Lord Auckland was aghast at a report he had read in the News of the World of a “very nasty happening”: a “homosexual wedding” in a continental country. “I only hope that if this bill becomes law,” he wrote, “the most vigilant eye will be kept on practices of this kind. I do not think these things could happen in this country, but it is possible.” Well, here we are, half a century on. What was nearly inconceivable in 1967 is now the law of the land.
Brian Lewis is professor of history at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His latest book is Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Gay times: the long battle for equality
1885: ‘Gross indecency’ is criminalised
The Labouchère Amendment, or section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, was proposed by a radical MP, Henry Labouchère (above), and passed with little discussion. It made “gross indecency” illegal in public or in private and imposed a maximum penalty of two years’ hard labour. It was another tool in the armoury of law enforcers and made it easier to prosecute homosexual behaviour.
1895: Oscar Wilde faces hard labour
The playwright was the most famous victim of the Labouchère Amendment. After three trials in 1895 (the first a libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry), Oscar Wilde was found guilty of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol.
His name, face and mannerisms became important components of an emerging public sense of the male homosexual.
1928: A pro-lesbian novel goes on trial
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a novel advocating the acceptance of homosexuals, was banned for obscenity in 1928. Hall was known as ‘John’ to her friends and dressed in a masculine way. The publicity during the trial increased the visibility of lesbians and helped cement a public image of the ‘mannish’ lesbian in particular.
June 1954: Alan Turing dies
Alan Turing, codebreaker and pioneering computer scientist (above), was prosecuted under the Labouchère Amendment in 1952. To avoid prison he opted for hormonal treatment to reduce his libido. When he died shortly afterwards, in 1954, the coroner recorded a verdict of suicide. Turing received a posthumous pardon in 2013. The ‘Alan Turing law’, passed earlier this year, grants automatic pardons to men convicted of homosexual acts that are no longer offences.
March 1954: An English aristocrat goes to jail
In 1954, landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and the Daily Mail journalist Peter Wildeblood were tried and imprisoned for consensual and private homosexual offences on the Beaulieu estate. The trial generated considerable publicity and helped bring about the Wolfenden Committee enquiry later in the year.
1957: Wolfenden recommends partial decriminalisation
The Wolfenden Report of 1957 recommended stiffer penalties for female street prostitution as well as the partial decriminalisation of homosexual sex. It adopted a strict public-private division – the ‘vices’ in question could only take place in private – and its recommendations would be enshrined in law in 1967.
1969: Gay New Yorkers fight back
The police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City in 1969 (above) had a big impact in Britain. American gay bars were routinely raided, but this time the patrons fought back, rioting ensued and a legend was born. The Gay Liberation Front was founded shortly afterwards, mimicked within the year by a similar organisation in London. ‘Gay Lib’ indicated that sexual minorities were now going to demand their rights and not just politely lobby for them.
1977: Whitehouse takes Gay News to court
Mary Whitehouse, a schoolteacher who set up the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, represented a backlash against the ‘permissive society’. In 1977 she resurrected the archaic blasphemy laws to successfully prosecute Gay News for publishing a poem by James Kirkup about a Roman centurion at the foot of the cross fantasising about having sex with Christ.
1978: The rainbow flag makes its debut
The symbol of LGBTQ pride was designed by the San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker. The most popular version bears six colours: red (symbolising life), orange (healing), yellow (sunlight), green (nature), blue (harmony/peace) and purple/violet (spirit).
1988: Section 28 sparks a furore
Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 was the Thatcher government’s attempt to prevent local authorities from promoting homosexuality or state schools from teaching that homosexuality was acceptable “as a pretended family relationship”. It sparked huge protests (as at Gay Pride, 1988, right) and was repealed in Scotland in 2000 and in the rest of the UK in 2003.
2013: Same-sex marriage is legalised
The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, in some ways the culmination of the Wolfendenian logic of allowing same-sex behaviour in private, was passed in 2013 in England and Wales and similar legislation was passed in Scotland in 2014. Same-sex marriage is still not permitted in Northern Ireland.
]]>Touring London with Shakespeare, Dickens and Oscar Wilde: 7 must-see literary landmarkshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/touring-london-with-shakespeare-dickens-and-oscar-wilde-7-must-see-literary-landmarks/2016-10-18T09:54:59.000Z
Hatchards, Piccadilly
Hatchards is the oldest bookshop in London. It was founded by John Hatchard in 1797 and has been at 187 Piccadilly since 1801. It’s where the royals have shopped for their books from Queen Charlotte onwards – today Prince Charles, Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II all have accounts there.
Hatchards has also welcomed more academic visitors. Lord Byron lived just across the road for much of his time in London. Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, favoured Hatchards as his bookshop of choice and also bought green carnations (his preferred flower for a buttonhole) from the nearby Royal Arcade. Poignantly, Wilde’s wife, Constance, would later order her copies of The Ballad of Reading Gaol – a poem inspired by Wilde’s time as a prisoner between 1895 –97 for gross indecency following his affair with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas – from the shop.
Playwright Noel Coward was another Hatchards customer. Once, when he was a teenager and needed to stock up on Christmas presents, he stole a suitcase from Fortnum & Mason, and, heading next door to Hatchards, proceeded to fill it with books. When he was collared, red-handed, by a shop assistant on another occasion he simply said: “Really! Look how badly this store is run. I could have made off with a dozen books and no one would have noticed”.
Kettner’s, Romilly Street, Soho
One of Oscar Wilde’s favourite London restaurants was Kettner’s in Soho. Opened in 1867 by Auguste Kettner, chef to Napoleon III, the eatery soon gained a reputation for its luxurious, adventurous menu – and, in equal measure, its glamorous clientele. Oscar Wilde scandalised the regulars by kissing one of the waiters and often dined there with his lover, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas.
Wilde also entertained other less well-heeled friends – something that was made much of at his infamous trial at Reading Gaol. The prosecutor there sneered at him for offering “mere” grooms and valets “the best of Kettner’s wines”. Wilde replied, stoutly, “I don’t care two-pence what they were, I liked them”. And as for the champagne: “What gentleman would stint his guests?”
It wasn’t only Wilde who enjoyed Kettner’s for his flirtations; by the following decade the restaurant had become notorious as a London hotspot for high-society flings. In the 1870s the future Edward VII, for example, favoured Kettner’s as his meeting place with his mistress, the actress Lillie Langtry. The couple liked the place so much, in fact – and made such good use of its private rooms upstairs – that the prince had a secret tunnel built between the restaurant and the nearby Palace Theatre where Langtry performed.
At the time of writing, Kettner’s is closed for business. It won’t be forever, though; in 2016 the restaurant was bought by Soho House & Co, the group responsible for the Dean Street Townhouse and Pizza East. The building is currently undergoing renovations and will reopen in 2018 as the Kettner’s Townhouse, with a look that “pays homage” to its “former grandeur”.
Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey houses the remains of many notable London authors. There, alongside numerous monuments and memorials to writers buried elsewhere, you can find the remains of John Gay (1685–1732); Henry James (1843–1916); Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936); Geoffrey Chaucer (c1340–1400); Charles Dickens (1812–70) – even though he wanted to be buried in Rochester; Edmund Spenser (1552–99); John Dryden (1631–1700); Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92); Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) – his body was buried in the Abbey, but his heart was taken in a biscuit tin to the church of St Michael’s Stinsford in Dorset; Samuel Johnson (1709–84) and Ben Jonson (1572–1637). The latter is buried upright because he told the Dean at the time: ‘”Sir, six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me: two feet by two feet will do for all I want”.
If, like us, you’re slightly aghast at the lack of women in this list, you should head to the East Cloister of the abbey, where you’ll find the remains of Aphra Behn. A 17th-century playwright – also spy, traveller, jail-bird and a great deal of other exciting things – Behn has gone down in British history as the first woman to earn a living from writing. Best known for her 1688 play Oroonoko, one of the first anti-slavery works in the English language, Behn’s burial plaque also bears a touching and timely reminder of what awaits us all: “Here lies Proof that Wit can never be Defence enough against Mortality”.
48 Doughty Street
Charles Dickens called London his “magic lantern” and found it hard to write if he spent too long away. His frequent method of composition was to step out into the city as he began to think of a story, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon”. In the first weeks of writing Barnaby Rudge, for instance, he visited “the most wretched and distressful streets” to find scenes that would inspire him to write movingly about beggars and grinding poverty, and also about the excitement of walking at night – one of his favourite pastimes.
Dickens lived at various locations all over the capital during his life. One of his most famous houses is number 48 Doughty Street, today a museum dedicated to the great writer, with a collection of manuscripts, paintings and pieces of Dickens’s own furniture.
Opposite the house there’s another blue plaque: ‘Sydney Smith 1771–1843 Author and Wit lived here’. It’s piquant to imagine how Smith must have felt as he looked across the road, knowing that his neighbour was so easily eclipsing him. It was at Doughty Street that ‘the inimitable’ Dickens finished his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, and wrote Oliver Twist; Nicholas Nickleby and the opening of Barnaby Rudge. He also – when he wasn’t writing – enjoyed holding numerous dinner parties for increasingly famous friends like the essayist Leigh Hunt and biographer John Forster.
The Fitzroy Tavern, Charlotte Street
In the 1930s, the Fitzroy Tavern was one of the great literary pubs of London. It was so well attended and well thought of by the various up-and-coming arty types who drank at its bar, that the surrounding area (across from Soho and to the north of Shaftesbury Avenue) became known as ‘Fitzrovia’. “The Fitzroy is like the Clapham Junction of the world,” wrote the bohemian painter Augustus John, “everyone goes in and comes out at some point or other”.
It’s at the Fitzroy that Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas liked to write poems on beermats, handing them out to the prettiest women in the bar. It’s here, too, that poet Aleister Crowley invented the Kubla Khan No 2: a potent mix of gin, vermouth and laudanum. And most nights throughout the 1940s, Nina Hamnett – Welsh writer and recent returnee from Paris – could be found propping up the counter with a tin. For a small contribution she would offer anecdotes about her time on the continent, including nights out with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and stints as a model for the likes of Picasso and Modigliani. The latter, she would tell her audience, especially liked her breasts – and she would demonstrate why, pulling off her top and saying: “You feel them. They’re as good as new”.
The Fitzroy had another, less literary, regular too: the hangman Albert Pierrepoint, who would sing lullabies to the landlord’s baby daughter, Sally Fiber.
The Globe
William Shakespeare spent most of his time in Southwark on the South Bank of the Thames, and many of his most famous plays were performed in the nearby Globe theatre. Sadly, in June 1613, during a performance of Shakespeare’s last play, Henry VIII, a cannon was fired and a stray spark landed on the theatre’s thatched roof. The Globe burned to the ground – though, amazingly, none of the 3,000-strong audience was injured (except one man whose trousers caught fire; he was successfully doused with tankards of beer). The theatre was rebuilt – with a tiled roof – and remained in business until 1642, when the Puritans finally got their way and closed all theatres in the city.
The Globe was later turned into tenement flats and eventually disappeared. Its remaining foundations are buried, though you can see them marked out by coloured stones on today’s Park Street. Nearby, on New Globe Walk, you can also find a recreation of the famous theatre, which opened for performances in 1997. It is a faithful reconstruction of the Globe as Shakespeare knew it, initiated by the actor and director Sam Wanamaker (1919–93) and based on academic ideas about the original building.
The Serpentine
The Romantic poet Percy Shelley (1792–1822) loved to head down to the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park to skim pebbles and float paper boats – a hobby he’d enjoyed since childhood. But his pleasure was ruined late in 1816 when, in the grey dawn of 10 December, a pensioner from the Chelsea hospital saw something floating in the cold waters of the lake. When the old man got close he realised to his horror that it was a young woman. Worse still, she was heavily pregnant.
It was quickly discovered that this was Harriet Shelley (1795–1816), the wife of the poet Percy. Her pregnancy is something of a mystery because she hadn’t seen her famous husband for almost two years and the father was unknown. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Harriet herself hadn’t been seen since 9 November 1816, and that her body looked as if she had already been dead for several days.
What is clear, at least, is that Harriet was desperately unhappy. She left a suicide note for Shelley, stating: “When you read this letter. I shall be no more an inhabitant of this miserable world. Do not regret the loss of one who could never be anything but a source of vexation & misery to you all belonging to me . . . My dear Bysshe... if you had never left me I might have lived but as it is, I freely forgive you & may you enjoy that happiness which you have deprived me of . . . so shall my spirit and rest & forgiveness. God bless you all is the last prayer of the unfortunate Harriet S—”.
Shelley married the writer and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin less than two weeks after Harriet’s body was discovered.
Gordon Square
The famous collection of friends and talented writers known as the Bloomsbury Group started in 1905 with Thursday Evening salons at 46 Gordon Square, the home of two sisters known to history as Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. These were attended by the Cambridge friends of their brother Thoby Stephen (1880–1906), including Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), later Virginia’s husband and a publisher; Lytton Strachey (1880–1932); Clive Bell (1881–1964), Vanessa’s husband and art critic; David Garnett (1892–1981); painter Duncan Grant (1885–1978); the hugely influential economist and author John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946); and critic and painter Roger Fry (1866–1934). EM Forster (1879–1970), author of Howards End and A Passage to India, was also a distinguished regular.
Vanessa Bell and her husband, Clive, continued to live in 46 Gordon Square until 1917. Quentin Bell (1910–96), Vanessa’s son, recalled in later life how mortified he was that other people had “normal, sober” front doors, and theirs – in Gordon Square – was painted a “startling vermilion”. His parents’ open marriage hopefully caused him less embarrassment, since it was generally gently accepted by their bohemian neighbours. More frowned upon was John Maynard Keynes, who moved into the Gordon Square house in 1917. Lytton Strachey complained that Keynes was a snob and forever bringing “dukes and prime ministers” into Bloomsbury – which simply was not on.
Eloise Millar and Sam Jordison are the authors of Literary London (Michael O’Mara Books, 2016.)
]]>Are these the most overrated people in history?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-the-most-overrated-people-in-history/2013-01-05T13:11:28.000ZSpartacus (died 71 BC)
Chosen by Peter Jones
From Private Eye’s Dave Spart and the numerous Spartak soccer teams, through movies to Khachaturian’s opera ballet Spartacus, the slave who in 73 BC masterminded a break-out from a gladiatorial school in Capua has justifiably been celebrated as a hero of the oppressed.
Like Hannibal, a superb general and leader of men, defeating Roman army after army, Spartacus guided his raggle-taggle collection of slaves to the very borders of Gaul to disperse into freedom. But no. They turned back into Italy. Fatal error.
Spartacus, a Thracian, had served in the Roman army. He should have known that Romans never gave up. The worse they were beaten, the harder they always came back – as Hannibal also, too late, had found out. In 71 BC Spartacus’s army was trapped and annihilated, the survivors crucified along the Appian Way. All that – for nothing.
Peter Jones is the author of Vote for Caesar (Orion, 2009)
Matilda (1102-67)
Chosen by Anna Whitelock
Matilda was the daughter of Henry I and the mother of Henry II of England, who many claim to have been the first queen regnant of England. She wasn’t. Though named to succeed her father she failed to overcome obstacles to female succession in the 12th century and so never became a reigning queen. Her cousin Stephen won the throne instead.
Matilda did secure the accession of her son, Henry, and did show how much could, and could not, be achieved by a female heir to the throne in the 12th century. Lady of the English, yes, but not queen of England.
Anna Whitelock is author of Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (Bloomsbury, 2009)
Henry V (1387-1422)
Chosen by Tom Holland
Thanks to William Shakespeare, Henry V enjoys a greater aura of heroism than any other British monarch. The reality, almost by definition, is a good deal less dramatic. Henry V was as disastrous a king as any who has sat on the throne of England. His decision to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels, and renew a war that had appeared ended, was sordid and opportunistic. Agincourt itself, a victory won by a combination of French incompetence and English technological prowess, was a triumph snatched from the jaws of the disaster into which Henry had almost led his army. His subsequent campaigns brought wolves to the outskirts of Paris, and blowback to England.
For a century and a half after his death, the mirage of winning a second Agincourt continued to tantalise a succession of English kings – with unfailingly disastrous consequences. England, and France as well, could have done without the touch of Harry.
Tom Holland is author of The Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire (Doubleday, 2011)
Edward IV (1442-83)
Chosen by Nigel Saul
Long praised for his reassertion of order after Henry VI’s chaotic rule and – unsurprisingly – for his success in restoring royal finances, Edward IV actually achieved very little. His reign provides a classic case of the triumph of style over substance.
It is true that his court was magnificent, and he cut a fine figure as a ruler. Moreover, he knew how to build, as his magnificent remodelling of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, shows. But think of his legacy. Abroad, when he had the chance to emulate the successes in France of his predecessor Edward III, he backed off, choosing instead to take a pension from the French king. At home, by his ill-judged marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, he divided the nobility, sowing the seeds for his brother’s usurpation and ultimately for the overthrow of the house of York.
Edward IV’s failings were those of Charles II two centuries later: laziness, superficiality and self-indulgence. Like him, he was simply a merry monarch determined never to go on his travels again.
Nigel Saul is the author of For Honour and Fame: Chivalry in England, 1066–1500 (The Bodley Head, 2011)
Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-87)
Chosen by Tracy Borman
Mary, Queen of Scots is commonly viewed as one of the most tragic heroines in history. Ousted queen, ill-treated wife and long-term prisoner of Elizabeth I, she has been hailed as a Catholic martyr.
Poor Mary? Rubbish! She was a pampered princess, whose privileged upbringing at the French court gave her no idea of what was needed to rule effectively. Contrast this with her great rival, Elizabeth, who was raised in the school of hard knocks, which included having her mother executed and enduring numerous brushes with the Tower herself. Little wonder that Elizabeth ruled with the head, not the heart.
By contrast, statecraft always took second place for Mary. An appalling judge of character, she married the preening Lord Darnley and then complained when he turned out to be a bad lot. She promptly married the chief suspect in his murder, Lord Bothwell. By then, most of the Scots were fed up with her, so they kicked her out and she threw herself on the mercy of her cousin Elizabeth. Bad move. Elizabeth wasted no time in placing her rival under house arrest. Mary languished in prison until she was silly enough to involve herself in a conspiracy to overthrow the English queen. She had effectively signed her own death warrant.
Tracy Borman is the author of Matilda: Queen of the Conqueror (Jonathan Cape, 2011)
John Locke (1632-1704)
Chosen by Justin Champion
Locke was lucky. Like many of his more interesting contemporaries, he was well connected and wrote and thought a good deal. But his good fortune was to have left a well-preserved archive. Volumes of letters, numerous drafts of his works, commonplace books and other notebooks, as well as a number of bestselling works on philosophy, political theory and religion have meant that subsequent historians of ideas have confected a massive ‘Locke industry’. He sells more books globally now than he ever did.
Locke’s versions of the origins of government, the nature of knowledge, and the grounds for religious toleration have come to dominate accounts of 18th‑century ideas, arguably out of all proportion to the understanding of his contemporaries. His arguments about the nature of political obligation have distorted modern accounts of liberty; his defence of tolerance – essentially a theological position – is regarded as the best defence of liberty of thought (despite it being fundamentally a Christian argument). The hegemony of the legacy of Lockean liberalism has warped our understanding of the 17th and 18th centuries: arguably it has also defined the shape of the political discourse of the modern world.
Without Locke, more time and energy, and hopefully veneration, might have been devoted to his contemporaries – the worlds of the Ranters and Levellers, of the Republican traditions of John Milton, James Harrington and later Benedict Spinoza. For many historians, Locke has been a safe pair of hands, uncontaminated by radical commitments. A nice chap, but definitely overrated.
Justin Champion is professor of the history of early modern ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
Chosen by Saul David
Napoleon, emperor of France from 1804 to 1814 and again, briefly, during the Hundred Days of 1815, is considered the finest military commander of his era, and one of the greatest of all time. Does he deserve to be ranked alongside Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus? Was he a better general than, say, Suvorov or the Duke of Wellington? Not in my opinion.
Few of those generals lost a major engagement. Napoleon, on the other hand, was bested in at least three – Caldiero, Aspern-Essling and Waterloo – and even some of his greatest victories, like Austerlitz and Marengo, were close-run affairs, won more by luck than judgement. But the greatest stain on his record was the Russian campaign of 1812 when he was undone not by the enemy commanders – though Borodino, where he lost 35,000 men, was as close as any ‘victory’ comes to being pyrrhic – but by General Winter and a failure of logistics. He marched in with 400,000 men and left with fewer than 10,000 effectives. Enough said.
Saul David is the author of All The King’s Men: The British Soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo (Viking, 2012)
William Wilberforce (1759-1833)
Chosen by Edward Vallance
William Wilberforce has been the subject of popular biographies and Hollywood blockbusters (2007’s Amazing Grace). Doubtless Wilberforce was the most prominent and influential British advocate of the abolition of the slave trade. However, many of the recent depictions and commemorations of his life obscure the less appealing aspects of his character. Wilberforce was a social and moral conservative who supported Christian missionary activity in India in order to combat the “ignorance and degradation” of Hinduism and who opposed significant democratic reform of the British political system at the same time as he campaigned tirelessly for the emancipation of slaves.
In respect of these beliefs, Wilberforce was like many men of his class who engaged in philanthropic activity at the same time as preaching up socio-economic inequality as divinely ordained. This doesn’t make Wilberforce a historically insignificant figure but it does make him less than a saint.
Edward Vallance is the author of A Radical History of Britain (Abacus, 2010)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Chosen by Andrew Roberts
I’ve never been able to fathom the secular deity accorded to Oscar Wilde. So many of his gags seem simply to be mere inversions of popular saws of the day. His decision to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, when Queensberry had accurately accused him of sodomy, was a disgracefully dishonest thing to do; yet Wilde is always held up as a monument to Truth.
His essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism is naive and even ludicrous. Doubtless he was wonderfully funny company, and some of his books and plays are sublime, but he doesn’t strike me as the admirable, almost saint-like figure that his supporters promote.
Andrew Roberts is the author of The Storm of War (Penguin, 2010)
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Chosen by Patricia Fara
Showing great forethought for anniversary organisers of the future, Charles Darwin wrote his most famous book when he was exactly 50 years old. On the Origin of Species (1859) is expertly argued, beautifully written and packed with convincing, meticulous evidence. But… Darwin did not invent evolution, his opponents were not all religious bigots insisting that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, he avoided mentioning how life might have been created in the first place, and he did not include human beings in his scheme.
A sloppy collector, Darwin tossed unlabelled finches from neighbouring islands into the same bag to be sorted out later by somebody else; and while he was dithering about whether to publish, a young naturalist working in Malaysia came up with natural selection independently. The world, wrote Darwin, resembles “one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice” – but that eloquent evocation of the ruthless competition for survival was written not by Charles Darwin, but by his grandfather Erasmus.
Patricia Fara is the author of Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP, 2010)
Lord Baden-Powell (1857-1941)
Chosen by Denis Judd
Baden-Powell became internationally famous on two counts: one was as the charismatic commanding officer at the siege of Mafeking during the Boer War; the other was as the founder of the worldwide scouting movement.
Yet, from the beginning of his fame, his reputation has been attacked and subject to much criticism. He has long been accused of being conceited, cranky and too opinionated. He was also a tireless self-publicist, something laconically noted by The Times correspondent covering the siege of Mafeking. A controversy still rages as to whether he caused the deaths of many Africans there by denying them adequate rations and driving them out of the town to fend for themselves. He later played down the African contribution to Mafeking’s defence, even falsely claiming: “At the first shots they ran away.”
As founder of the Boy Scouts he seemed unduly concerned with the ‘sin’ of masturbation. Finally, he was initially an admirer of fascism, describing Mein Kampf as “a wonderful book”. All in all, a very mixed record indeed.
Denis Judd’s Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present has recently been republished by IB Tauris
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Chosen by Christopher Lee
My father called Churchill the Greatest Englishman. Certainly he was a very British Bulldog war leader. But what else? As Asquith’s president of the board of trade, apart from Labour Exchanges he created little. As home secretary he was over zealous in using the military. In the Admiralty, his Dardanelles campaign demonstrated hopeless judgement. When secretary for war and air, he was all for intervening in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. Thank goodness Lloyd George said no.
As colonial secretary he cared little for the consequences of his ambitions in the carving up of Mesopotamia. Baldwin made him chancellor. Five budgets and returning to the Gold Standard demonstrated little economic scholarship. His opposition to Indian independence did no service to the people of the subcontinent. In 1951, he was too ill to fulfil his obligations as prime minister. He was not big enough to say so.
If it had not been for the fact that he led Britain to victory in the Second World War, we would have scant memory of Churchill. My late father would cuff me for saying so, but Churchill’s reputation is overrated. He changed nothing.
Christopher Lee is editor of the abridged edition of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (Skyhorse, 2011)
Malcolm X (1925-1965)
Chosen by Amanda Foreman
Malcolm X is often considered more ‘real’ than his peaceful counterpart, Martin Luther King, and certainly his equal in the civil rights movement. But the truth is, Malcolm X was a brilliant public speaker who squandered his influence by championing the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black separatist movement that was accused of espousing a creed full of bigotry and violence. The NOI was conspicuously absent at the famous March on Washington organised by King in 1963. A year later, an increasingly disillusioned Malcolm X renounced the NOI, and in 1965 began preaching a new message of hope for social change and integration. This infuriated his former colleagues; he was shot and killed while addressing an audience in Manhattan.
Though a fascinating and tragic figure, Malcolm X should not be credited with the great changes achieved by Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall or Medgar Evers, and does not deserve to be placed among their ranks.
Amanda Foreman is the author of A World on Fire (Allen Lane, 2010)
This article was first published in the January 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
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