Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Douglas wrote the line about the love that dare not speak its name, was the reason Oscar Wilde went to prison, and spent the next fifty years litigating. He was the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry, the man who codified boxing, and met Wilde at Oxford in 1891. The relationship was public enough to enrage his father, whose card at Wilde's club accusing him of posing as a sodomite provoked the libel suit; Douglas pressed Wilde to bring it, and his own letters and the rent-boy circle he had introduced Wilde to supplied the defence with its evidence. He was abroad throughout the trials. De Profundis, the long letter Wilde wrote him from prison, is an indictment he did not read for years and never accepted. Afterwards he married, converted to Catholicism, repudiated homosexuality entirely, and became a serial litigant - he sued and was sued repeatedly, and served six months in 1924 for criminally libelling Churchill. He was a real poet of the 1890s whose sonnets are still anthologised, and he is remembered almost entirely for the other thing. The line about the love that dare not speak its name comes from his poem Two Loves, and Wilde was asked to explain it in the witness box. He sued Arthur Ransome in 1913 over a book quoting De Profundis and lost when the full letter was read in court. His 1929 autobiography and his later Oscar Wilde: A Summing-Up contradict each other and both are unreliable. He was reconciled in old age with Wilde s son Vyvyan Holland and with Robert Ross s memory only partially. He spent his last years poor in Sussex and died of heart failure at seventy-four.

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