The Fall of the House of Wilde (20 page)

William was not prepared to give up the tortured intimacy that had become a ritualised element of their relationship. On Christmas Eve 1862, he sends Mary a gift: ‘Will this do? I got it Irish and Saxon on purpose. I did not write a letter of sympathy or advice. The one would be mistaken – the other misunderstood. I am sick – low. A friend is dying – a child very unwell, but I feel as I say. God bless you.' And he enclosed money. Mary called to Merrion Square and flung the money and some of his letters, without envelopes, into the hall for servants, Jane and the children to see.

In March 1863, William invited Mary to join his gathering for the Masonic Ball. Mary declined, so William offered her money to buy a ticket for herself. He urged Mary to accept, hoping to catch some fugitive moment with her. ‘Would not a kiss disgust you? I should like to see you dressed.' Mary's tantrums and testiness – her ‘mad fits', he called them – might have deterred a man less prone to martyrdom or modest enough to realise her iron will to destroy allowed no exceptions. The nineteen-year-old who had once looked to William as a substitute for fatherly love was now determined to destroy him, and, it appears, William could see it coming. ‘Yes, dear, you'll injure me, as you did before, and have that satisfaction.'

These letters leave a lot of questions unanswered. Even so, there is enough evidence to see how their sadomasochistic relationship, full of rage, passion and destruction, is an uncanny foreshadowing, as we shall see, of Oscar's with Lord Alfred Douglas.

Though the trial was for libel, the attention was focused on William's relationship with Mary. Jane appeared in the witness box in widow's black. The defence tried to get the court to sympathise with Jane's position. After all, in this drama of love, hatred and vengeance, she was supposed to be the victim. The defendant was asked, ‘What was the wife of a man about whom all this was published, what was she to think, gentlemen?' But Jane made a point of displaying an air of lofty indifference – she would have hated to be the object of pity. Never would she let herself look small in the eyes of the public, least of all at the hands of Mary Travers. In tales of passion, the betrayed wife typically elicits the spectator's sympathy. But Jane rebuffed the gallery's sympathy.

Butt took advantage of her stance. He turned the occasion when Mary had taken laudanum in William's presence to Jane's disadvantage. Butt led Jane to state that the subject was irrelevant to her: ‘The matter is one in which Lady Wilde takes no interest. My God! Gentlemen, if we were going home, and saw one of those wretched, miserable beings that walk our streets with a phial of laudanum in her hand . . . there is not a man in that box that could not say “Here is my sister – shall I not endeavour to save her” . . . But a woman – a mother – writes back to this girl who told her she took laudanum in her husband's study . . . writes that the matter is one in which she takes no interest.'
⁷
Butt made Jane stand out as an unwomanly being, and wheedled details from Mary that made clear Jane knew of the affair with her husband, and yet condoned it. Jane affected indifference, as though the whole saga was unworthy of her attention. Then Butt tore apart her letter to Robert Travers to argue its callousness and its indecorum in dealing with such a delicate issue. ‘She addresses this gentleman, and begins with an insult, not to the woman whom her husband rendered miserable, but to the woman's heart-stricken father . . . I think I know the manner in which a woman of right feeling should have written . . . If the letter had been written in that way, I should have advised that this action should never have been taken.' He dwelt upon the immorality of Jane's choice of book to translate,
The First Temptation
. ‘Would you like your daughter to read three volumes in which the most solemn and sacred mysteries of religion . . .' But the chief justice silenced Butt – saying the book was irrelevant to the case. Butt overstepped the line knowing well his error would influence the audience. He was holding up the behaviour of the Wildes as fatal to family life.

Jane remained steely throughout. The
Freeman's Journal
wrote of her, ‘all through the trying ordeal of her examination, she displayed great self-possession'. William did not appear in court – thus saving himself the embarrassment of having his intimacies aired. However, Butt made sport of this, called it unmanly and ‘cowardly'. ‘Shall I call it – I must do – a cowardly plea by which he shelters himself behind his wife . . . it was not the part of a man.' The laughter of the court said it all. Butt continued, as reported by
Saunders's News-letter
on 17 December 1864:

Don't be led away, for remember this, for nearly ten years she had been the worshipper of Dr Wilde. At nineteen years of age he had attracted her as a superior being. He had insinuated himself into a knowledge of her wants, her domestic grievances, and the poverty of her home, alienated her from her mother, and taught her to be dissatisfied with the teaching of her clergyman. Our great Irish poet has described in one of his Eastern romances the prophet ‘wearing over his face a veil to cover the brilliancy of his countenance which shone like Moses'. He leads the young girl into a secret place, and then raises the veil, and she was his slave, from that hour. Ah! There was something like this when the girl looked up to him like to a father, to whom she had been sent by Doctor Stokes, who had written to her of the tributes of adulation that foreign countries paid to him . . . here was a moral chloroform that stupefied her faculties, surprised her senses in the terrible scene, left her senseless and prostrate at the feet of her destroyer.

Butt deftly transformed the image of Mary from a vindictive histrionic into a victim of ‘loveless, soulless, joyless lust'. ‘Will you condemn her,' he asked, ‘while the man who asks you by your oaths to believe she is perjured, shrinks from coming in here and pledging his oath to that to which he asks twelve Irish gentlemen to pledge theirs?' Clearly, to make Mary into William's ‘slave' was to misrepresent her character and the substance of the relationship as evidenced in William's letters.

Butt pandered to the audience's respect for propriety, for manly men and womanly women, and for everything connected with religious morality. His summary had all the elevation of a moral homily delivered from the pulpit. Jane and William did not stand a chance against Butt's invective, designed to bring social conventions home victorious. This civic evangelist received a round of applause. Many had come for entertainment and Butt had given them that and more.

The chief justice said it was astonishing that Mary had never reported the alleged rape, and continued ‘receiving letters from him [William], receiving dresses from him and going to the Masonic Ball'. A jury might conclude, he said, ‘that if intercourse existed at all it was with her consent, or certainly not against her consent . . . and that the whole thing is a fabrication'. He said it was incredible Mary had forgotten the day on which the supposed abuse took place. ‘You, a woman representing yourself as a virgin violated, can not tell the day on which it happened, is that your story?' ‘It is,' was Mary's reply.

The chief justice began his summary by remarking on the correspondence between Wilde and Travers, describing it as ‘of a very extraordinary character to have taken place between a married man and a girl of her attractions'. He said that he and his advisers would decide upon the relevance to the case of the purported incident in the consulting room. But he did affirm that had the purported rape been the subject of a criminal prosecution, it would have been dismissed on Travers's failure to report the incident, and upon the evidence of Wilde's letters showing her receiving favours and dresses, and accompanying him to Masonic balls.
⁸
Exonerating neither William nor Mary, the chief justice effectively acknowledged adultery and ruled out rape.

The jury deliberated for several hours and ruled in Mary Travers's favour – the letter Jane had written to Robert Travers was libellous. The court set damages at a derisory farthing, thus acquitting Wilde of injury to her character. However court costs fell on the Wildes. These amounted to £2,000 – the same amount they would have had to pay had they settled out of court.

The
Irish Times
caught the spirit of the case when it announced the end of ‘a suit that shook society in Dublin like a thunderclap'.
⁹
Much of the press broadcast their support of the Wildes. The medical fraternity rallied behind William. The Irish correspondent of the
Lancet
devoted an editorial on 24 December 1864 to absolving Dr Wilde and to expressing admiration for his character and professional qualities. On William's evasion of the witness box, he said: ‘Sir Wm. Wilde has to congratulate himself that he has passed through an ordeal supported by the sympathies of the entire mass of his professional brethren in this city; that he has been acquitted of a charge as disgraceful as it was unexpected, even without having to stoop to the painful necessity of contradicting it upon oath in the witness-box . . .' William's arch-enemy of old, Arthur Jacob, took the opportunity to use the
Dublin Medical Press
to carry out his own public prosecution, insisting that he had a duty to the profession to raise the issue of Sir William's character and conscience, given he had failed to stand and clear it himself. Jacob found himself a Judas, isolated from the medical fraternity.

On 20 December 1864,
The Times
saw fit to allocate a leading article to a case that had excited ‘extraordinary interest in Dublin'. The paper referred to both ladies concerned as ‘distinguished for their literary attainments', recounted some of the scandalous details, found the conclusion astonishing, and sympathised with Jane: ‘To English eyes Lady Wilde's lot will appear to be the hardest, for she had been subjected to annoyances which it was almost impossible to endure . . . still some of the expressions in her letter were indefensible.'
The Times
pardoned neither Sir William Wilde nor Miss Travers. ‘The general conclusion, in short, to be drawn from her [Travers's] evidence . . . is that Sir William, having originally been introduced to her in his professional capacity, had taken a great interest in her affairs, had wished to befriend her, and had gradually placed himself on terms of intimacy which were afterwards abused. She then retaliated as best she could in the manner which induced Lady Wilde to interfere.'
The Times
justified Mary's conduct as the product of a broken home, and thought a farthing in damages was risible, given the offence the plaintiff had suffered. The case gave
The Times
an opportunity to sneer at the Irish. ‘Irishmen are impetuous and demonstrative . . . Englishmen will probably wonder how so much interest could have been excited [by the case] or so much professional energy employed.' Only Butt came out unscathed, with
The Times
fulsome in its praise for his lucid repartee.

Butt was an ambitious man who was using the occasion to varnish his career, as Edward Carson, known to Oscar from Trinity, would also do at his trial at the Old Bailey. The irony is that Butt used his remarkable lucidity to condemn the morals of both Jane and William while himself having as many illegitimate children as William.

The case made a public impression by virtue of its implausibility. It was an absurdity based on a muddle of fact and fiction, where no one appeared in a favourable light. It thus generated acres of newsprint. ‘Vulgar' and ‘vindictive' was the judgement of the
Caledonian Mercury
on 22 December 1864: ‘The unhappy girl, though the daughter of a respectable man, has done herself irreparable damage by her vulgar and vindictive attack upon an eminent medical man and his not less eminent and respected partner in life – the “Speranza” of other days.' The London
Evening Standard
called Mary's conduct ‘scandalous, unwomanly, vulgar and degrading'. Six months later, in June 1865,
Saunders's News-letter
took up the topic in a leader and declared it impossible to believe the infamous story Mary concocted about Sir W. Wilde. A rejoinder came from Mary, who pressed charges against the
News-letter
, this time with different results. Though she had Butt defending her, Mary lost the case, and disappeared into anonymity thereafter. She never did make it to Australia, and died at the age of eighty-three in a retirement home in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1919.

15

Times are Changing

Sir William's first biographer, T. G. Wilson, claimed that the Travers trial altered him much for the worse, and he described a conglomeration of effects that bespeak self-neglect, loss of zest and mental deterioration. ‘Miss Travers,' Wilson wrote, ‘in her spite, had dealt Wilde a terrible blow; one from which he never really recovered. At the time of the trial he was not quite fifty, and still in the full power and pride of his intellect. From that day forward he seems to have degenerated. His originality disappeared. He lost interest in his profession, became dirtier, uglier, more abrupt and intolerant of others. He was not the same physically upright, energetic man he had been. He appears to have burnt himself out, to have shrunk, mentally and physically. Temporary flashes of the old fire only served to heighten the contrast.'
¹
Wilson produces little evidence to support his claim. He is right in saying William spent less time practising medicine. But this was a gradual move, begun before the trial, when he bought the plot of land to build Moytura in 1862. Also, William had brought his illegitimate son, Henry Wilson, now fully qualified, into the practice. He had bequeathed his hospital, St Mark's, to the city. And though he continued to be involved as a board member, he was no longer responsible for running it. These arrangements allowed him to spend more time in Connemara.