Carson ruined Oscar? It’s Wilde speculation
The playwright’s grandson interviewed
THE grandson of disgraced Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, whose life was said to have been “ruined” after a bitter courtroom clash with Unionist leader and lawyer Sir Edward Carson, has stumbled on a million-to-one discovery about his ancestor’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
And it was all thanks to the team behind the TV show Give My Head Peace and a Belfast priest who narrowly escaped death in a shooting in South Africa 14 years ago.
The remarkable find came as the normally comedic team from Belfast were preparing a very different type of documentary with Merlin Holland about the links between his grandfather and Carson often dubbed “the father of Northern Ireland”.
Producer Damon Quinn revealed that the programme’s director was alerted to a previously unseen church record about Wilde in Paris by his brother who is a priest.
Quinn, who had dreamt for 30 years of making a film about the two towering Dubliners Carson and Wilde, said the director Jim Creagh was talking about the project to his brother Fr Kieran Creagh, a Passionist Order priest who was shot and wounded by robbers at a hospice in South Africa in 2007.
Quinn said: “Suddenly Fr Kieran told Jim he knew of a detailed entry in a church register in Paris about the conversion carried out as the playwright lay dying in a hotel in November 1900 by Fr Cuthbert Dunne.
“When we spoke to Merlin Holland he was amazed. He didn’t know about the entry and we went to the church to film him seeing it for the first time.”
And again the “small world” connections with Northern Ireland kicked in because the priest who greeted Holland in the Paris church, St Joseph’s, was Fr Aidan Troy who for many years was the high profile cleric at the Holy Cross church in Belfast’s
Ardoyne area. “You just couldn’t have made it up,” laughed Quinn while Holland said that surveying Fr Dunne’s handwritten notes about the conversion was “unbearably moving” but it wasn’t the only thing that surprised him after agreeing to collaborate with the Hole in the Wall gang on a film about his grandfather and Carson.
Holland, who has written extensively about Wilde, said he was astonished that there were so many parallels between the two “privileged” Protestant men who were born into affluent families in the same year in the same part of Dublin.
They were students together at Trinity College before embarking on divergent career paths, one in the literary world, the other as a barrister and as a Unionist politician.
It was in 1895 that the two men came face to face again at the Old
Bailey in London during a court case which has become one of the most infamous trials in British history and where the gay Wilde was no equal to Carson’s skills as a lawyer.
Quinn’s film, however, quickly nailed the myth that Carson was the prosecutor of Wilde during his notorious trial for sodomy whereas his “demolition” of him actually came in an entirely separate case.
During that earlier trial Carson had been acting as a defence lawyer for a London nobleman, the Marquess of Queensberry, who was being sued by Wilde for criminal libel.
The case was launched after Queensberry, the father of one of Wilde’s male lovers — Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas — left him a calling card with the words: “To Oscar Wilde posing as Sodomite”.
Despite their similar backgrounds the barrister showed
Wilde no favours when he went into the witness box and so devastating was his unrelenting and fiercesome cross-examination that Wilde, who’d been educated at the former Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, soon withdrew from the case on the advice of his own lawyers.
In the new one-hour documentary, “Edward Carson and the Fall of Oscar Wilde”, Holland, whose father Vyvyan had been the product of Wilde’s early marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, said he bore no animosity towards Carson for his ancestor’s demise.
He added: “I take a rather controversial view in all this, that Carson was a brilliant lawyer and he was doing his job. His cross-examination of Oscar is still used today as a model by teachers of advocacy for their young legal pupils.”
Holland conceded, however, that the court case had for a time effectively destroyed his own family, who had discouraged him from taking an interest in his grandfather’s life and career because he grew up in an era when homosexuality was not only criminal but also very much frowned upon.
Holland said his interest started many years later after the literary world began to look at Wilde’s work in a “more modern light”. And his fascination, he admitted “hasn’t let me go ever since”.
During the research for the documentary, Holland’s voyage of discovery took him to Dublin, London, Paris and to Stormont to see Carson’s statue and to St Anne’s Cathedral where the Unionist leader is buried.
And along the way he spoke to writer and former politician Gyles Brandreth; actors Rupert Everett and Simon Callow together with historian Professor
Alvin Jackson who told him how Carson had assumed a saint-like status within the Unionist community during the Home Rule crisis.
Holland saw black and white archive footage of the huge Carson funeral in Belfast in 1935 which he said contrasted starkly with “what happened to poor old Oscar” 35 years earlier when he was given a “discreet” funeral in Paris attended by only 56 people.
In Oxford where Wilde studied at Magdalen College Holland is filmed saying that it was there that his grandfather decided to become “outrageous and to tweak the nose of the British establishment”.
Simon Callow, who studied at Queen’s University in Belfast, explained that the Old Bailey showdown had its beginnings in Wilde falling hopelessly in love with ‘Bosie’ Douglas who’d had “an enormous sexual appetite” and who was a “world expert on the rent boys of London”.
It was said that Lord Queensberry’s fury was intensified by the fact that another son was believed to have been having a homosexual affair with the then Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Roseberry.
Holland said Queensberry went to the opening of Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest in London armed with a bunch of rotting vegetables but was turned away and then left his “sodomite” card at Wilde’s club, a document that Holland was filmed studying in the safe room of the National Archives in London.
On seeing the card an angry Wilde decided to take legal action and Queensberry was arrested.
Holland said he would have loved to have asked Wilde why he took the case where he was exposed early on by Carson as having told a lie about his age and where he made a disparaging remark about a man whom he said was too ugly for him to kiss.
After that comment the libel case fell asunder and Wilde was tried for sodomy and gross indecency and sentenced to two years hard labour in Reading prison.
Holland, who in 2014 co-authored a play based on a handwritten transcript of the libel case which turned up in a plastic bag 100 years after the trial was over, asked himself the question in the documentary if Carson deserves his reputation as the man who destroyed Wilde.
His answer? “Absolutely not.”
‘I take a rather controversial view in all of this, that Carson was a brilliant lawyer; he was doing his job’