Franny Moyle (3 page)

To have Arthur press a worrying note into her hands the minute she was through the door must have brought home to her how isolated from events she had allowed herself to become. Her decision to steal herself away that February may not have been the wisest one, all things considered, not least because the life of the golden and celebrated Mr and Mrs Oscar Wilde had, in fact, been going noticeably awry over the course of the previous year.

Oscar had always been ridiculed. He had often suffered worse than ridicule from those envious of his talent. But in the last year Constance knew all too well that there had been terrible accusations levelled against her husband, worse than anything any critic or detractor had attempted before. Cocooned away in Babbacombe, she must have hoped that such accusations had died down, that the swell of her husband's recent success and public popularity had washed away the voices of those who had been trying to harm him. But now she must have sensed, in that hurried pencil note, a warning of imminent scandal.

On stage at the Haymarket the popular actress Julia Neilson, playing Lady Chiltern, was reminding her audience that ‘We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything'. Talking to the man she has considered up to that point her ideal husband, Lady Chiltern begs him: ‘Oh! don't kill my love for you, don't kill that … I know that there are men with horrible secrets in their lives – men who have done some shameful things, and who in some critical moment have to pay for it … Don't tell me you are such as they!' With Oscar's note in her hands, Constance must have wondered whether her husband's play was about to prove some form of sickening rehearsal for their own impending drama.
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1

The sins of the parents …

I
F YOU HAPPENED
to dine at the Café Royal or the Savoy in the early 1890s, you might well have glimpsed the great Oscar holding court. A cigarette and wine glass in hand, enthroned in a corner, with a group of acolytes in attendance, he was the embodiment of blatant decadence. And many who witnessed this bacchanalian version of the man wondered how he and his political, campaigning but nonetheless far more temperate wife had ever determined to marry. But Oscar and Constance were far more similar than has been generally acknowledged. The key to their compatibility was rooted in their own personal histories. On both of them the influence of Ireland, the scars of scandal and the impression of a domineering mother had made their mark. Their connection was Oscar's home town of Dublin, from where Constance's mother, Ada, also hailed.

Adelaide Barbara Atkinson, to give her her full name, was the daughter of Dublin's Captain John Atkinson, once with the 6th Rifles and subsequently Receiver-General of the Post Office there,
¹
who with his wife, Mary, had brought up their family in an elegant Georgian town house, 1 Ely Place. Mary's brother Charles Hare, the first Baron Hemphill, Sergeant and QC, lived close by at 65 Merrion Square, where his neighbours included Oscar's parents, Sir William and Lady Wilde.

Ada Atkinson was a selfish and difficult woman, who when she was just nineteen married her cousin Horace Lloyd, an English barrister eight years her senior. Lloyd was the son of the eminent QC and one-time Radical MP John Horatio Lloyd. In choosing a husband from this branch of the family, Ada was marrying into
a considerable fortune and perpetuating an already impressive lineage.
²

The entrepreneurial Lloyds had grown rich on the back of the industrial revolution. John Horatio Lloyd was the son of the attorney John Lloyd, who played a leading part in suppressing the Luddite riots in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Educated at Stockport Grammar, John Horatio went to Oxford and took a double first in Classics before being called to the bar and being elected Liberal MP for Stockport. He became an exceptionally wealthy man indeed, not least because his legal practice had become the favoured counsel for the fast-developing railway companies, but also because he invented a type of investment bond on which the development of the railway system became particularly dependent: the Lloyd's Bond.

Ada and Horace initially lived in 3 Harewood Square in Marylebone, close to Regent's Park and north of the busy Marylebone Road. On Wednesday 12 November 1856 the
Morning Chronicle
announced that ‘On the 10th inst at 3 Harewood Square the wife of Horace Lloyd Esq., barrister at law' was delivered of ‘a son and heir'. This was Otho Lloyd. Two years later the same column announced his sister Constance's arrival into the world, and the family was complete.

The birth of two children in quick succession did not, alas, signify domestic bliss in Harewood Square. Horace Lloyd's sense of his marital obligations quickly waned. As his professional success grew, so did his appetite for the pleasures of various gentlemen's clubs and his ambitions to rise to a position of prominence within the strange business of Freemasonry. Part of the Prince of Wales's social set, he developed the reputation for being a stop-out who could ‘have taken on any expert in one of the three games, chess and billiards and whist, and beaten him in two out of three'.
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If a guiding paternal hand was absent in Harewood Square, so was maternal warmth. Ada also failed to show much interest in her offspring. Otho Lloyd would later suggest that he and Constance were brought up ‘against the will and determination of two most selfish and egotistical natures'.
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The one thing Ada Lloyd did do, however, was introduce her children to Dublin. Resentful and lonely, Ada's marital unhappiness prompted regular visits to her mother, ‘Mama Mary', in Dublin's Ely Place. After Captain John Atkinson died in 1862, these trips became yet more frequent.

And so the young Constance and Otho found themselves often leaving the modern villas of West End London to spend time in the calmer, quainter Georgian environs of Dublin's Ely Place and Merrion Square. Here they had their cousin Stanhope Hemphill to play with as well as their youthful aunt Ellena, born in 1853. The Atkinsons, Hemphills and Wildes all moved within the same tightly knit Dublin community, and it is highly likely that the young Lloyd children would have encountered or heard tell of Sir William and Lady Wilde in Merrion Square, and of their two sons, Willie and Oscar.

Constance was not an entirely healthy child. Her brother described her as ‘somewhat bilious'. Nevertheless she survived bouts of the standard juvenile maladies of the era, chickenpox and measles, and by the age of ten, by which time her father had become a QC, she found herself living with her family in the grand surroundings of London's Sussex Gardens.

The upwardly mobile Lloyds lived first at 9 Sussex Gardens and then, in line with Horace's burgeoning practice, they moved to an even larger villa at no. 42, where they enjoyed five servants: two housemaids, a cook, a kitchen maid and a butler. As the level of domestic help suggests, Sussex Gardens, just off Hyde Park, was an area associated with the well-to-do. It was also close to grandpa John Horatio, who lived in another huge and imposing villa at 100 Lancaster Gate.

Here Constance enjoyed a thorough education. Otho Lloyd remembered his sister as being able to play the piano well, able to paint in oils, a fine needlewoman and well read.
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She also spoke French and could read Dante in the original Italian. The censuses of both 1871 and 1881 describe her as being a scholar. Although she was almost certainly tutored by a governess with her brother when they
were small, when her brother was sent away to Clifton School in Bristol she clearly attended one of the few schools for girls that had been founded in London since the mid-century.

By the 1870s there were a number of colleges open to young women who wanted to continue their education, cherry-picking the courses and classes that appealed. The academic standards the mature attendees of the colleges were expected to meet were in fact very high. Young women, although unable to hold a degree, could, via these schools, study under the tutelage of university staff for examinations that were marked by the University of London.

Constance took one such course and university examination in English literature, specializing in the work of Shelley.
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The intensity of the study required to pass the examination is suggested by Constance's complaint that the course ‘ought to have been stretched over a year at least', although, practical as ever, Constance added that she was not going to bother ‘worrying over it'. ‘I intend to take it very quietly,' she told Otho, relaying that ‘I shall not do any singing next week' in order ‘to get what time I can for reading'. This strategy clearly proved successful, since Constance also noted that her tutor, a Mr Collins, was barely able to make a single comment on her Shelley essay, it was so good.

But regardless of their education, their impressive address and financial comfort, the emotional home life of the Lloyd children never stabilized. Horace Lloyd's weaknesses were not limited to billiards and cards: he also had a soft spot for women. Years later Constance witnessed a scene at her grandfather's house when a woman presented her son at Lancaster Gate and a ‘row' ensued. Later Otho saw a young man at Oxford who caused him concern. Although Constance's correspondence regarding this is not explicit, the implication is that Otho felt sure he had spotted his illegitimate half-brother, the product of one of Horace's unwise dalliances.

[Y]our letter distressed me very much for it seems so very probable, and yet I thought the boy was only about 16 or 17, also I thought she could not have afforded to send him to the University. After all if she can, surely they [
sic
] is less fear of any ‘rumpus' since they could
only make an exposure in order to get money. Try and see him and see if you can trace any likeness – I tried a short while ago to find out something more about him, but grandpapa evidently thought I would tell Mama or someone about it so he said it was not a subject for me to talk about and shut me up completely, but he has heard nothing of them since they made the row at Lancaster Gate.
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The Lloyd family was particularly prone to the odd sexual deviation. It was not just Horace who had succumbed. John Horatio had also been at the heart of a sex scandal, of sorts. In the 1830s, when, as a politician, he had been assisting Lord Brougham in piloting through the House of Commons the first Criminal Law Amendment Act, a piece of legislation that would abolish capital punishment for certain offences, John Horatio was working until the small hours of the morning on a regular basis. His hard graft was not unnoticed, and he had, according to Otho, secured the promise of being appointed Solicitor-General in due course. But late nights and early starts wreaked havoc with John Horatio's well-being. ‘His health gave way under the strain,' Otho explained, and then he did a very odd thing indeed. He ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens … he ran naked in the sight of some nurse maids'.
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Not surprisingly, John Horatio's career took a tumble. He lost the opportunity of becoming Solicitor-General and was forced to retire from political and legal work for four years, during which time he went abroad to Athens and became a director of the Ionian Bank.

Oscar's own background held similar, greater, scandals. Oscar's father, Sir William Wilde, was a self-made man. The son of a doctor, he became a highly esteemed and pioneering eye and ear surgeon, as well as a recognized scholar and statistician who had written widely not only on medical issues but also on archaeology and folklore. His decision as a young man to set up a free clinic to treat Dublin's poor had provided him with the publicity and experience to become Ireland's leading specialist in his field and had subsequently delivered him his fortune and title. But when Oscar's father married his mother, the fiery poet and Irish nationalist Jane Elgee, known as Speranza, he already had at least three illegitimate children in tow.
One, who went under the name of Henry Wilson, became a doctor and practised with his father. Sir William's two illegitimate daughters Emily and Mary Wilde were brought up by relatives. But it was not his premarital aberrations that were considered Sir William's scandal. Rather, it was an incident that happened during his marriage.

In the very year that Oscar was born, 1854, Sir William began an affair with Mary Josephine Travers, the nineteen-year-old daughter of one of his medical colleagues, Dr Robert Travers. Although they may have known each other socially, Miss Travers was also a patient of Wilde's. Their relationship was a long and relatively open one and resulted in another illegitimate child.
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But after almost a decade, when Wilde ended the relationship, to his horror Miss Travers suggested that their affair had begun with a rape, carried out while, as his patient, she was anaesthetized. Although Travers did not attempt a court action based on her accusation, she began a letter-writing campaign, sending letters to Merrion Square as well as to local newspapers.

Travers's campaign heightened when, shortly after Wilde's knighthood, she published a scurrilous pamphlet, a cautionary tale about a girl raped by her doctor, barely concealing her own and Wilde's identities as Florence Boyle Price and Dr Quilp respectively. The whole of Dublin was scandalized, not least because Travers's coup was to publish the pamphlet under Speranza's name. Speranza wrote to Dr Travers, accusing his daughter of orchestrating the campaign ‘in which she makes it appear that she has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde'. Wilde's wife also alleged that Travers was attempting to extort money and referred to ‘wages of disgrace'.
¹⁰

In an event that Oscar would have been wise to have remembered when he faced his own weirdly similar trials, Travers now saw her opportunity to ruin her former lover by dragging the business into court and thus into the public arena and press. She sued Speranza for libel and in giving evidence revealed every detail of her affair with Wilde. Everything was reported. It became a national sensation.