When I reached Fleet Street I was astonished to hear that there had been a row that same afternoon in Piccadilly between Lord Douglas of Hawick and his father, the Marquis of Queensberry.  Lord Queensberry, it appears, had been writing disgusting letters about the Wilde case to Lord Douglas’s wife.  Meeting him in Piccadilly Percy Douglas stopped him and asked him to cease writing obscene letters to his wife.  The Marquis said he would not and the father and son came to blows.  Queensberry it seems was exasperated by the fact that Douglas of Hawick was one of those who had gone bail for Oscar Wilde.  One of the telegrams which the Marquis of Queensberry had sent to Lady Douglas I must put in just to show the insane nature of the man who could exult in a trial which was damning the reputation of his own son.  The letter was manifestly written after the result of the Taylor trial: 

     Must congratulate on verdict, cannot on Percy’s appearance. 
     Looks like a dug up corpse.  Fear too much madness of
     kissing.  Taylor guilty.  Wilde’s turn to-morrow.

     QUEENSBERRY.

In examination before the magistrate, Mr. Hannay, it was stated that Lord Queensberry had been sending similar letters to Lady Douglas “full of the most disgusting charges against Lord Douglas, his wife, and Lord Queensberry’s divorced wife and her family.”  But Mr. Hannay thought all this provocation was of no importance and bound over both father and son to keep the peace—­an indefensible decision, a decision only to be explained by the sympathy everywhere shown to Queensberry because of his victory over Wilde, otherwise surely any honest magistrate would have condemned the father who sent obscene letters to his son’s wife—­a lady above reproach.  These vile letters and the magistrate’s bias, seemed to me to add the final touch of the grotesque to the horrible vileness of the trial.  It was all worthy of the seventh circle of Dante, but Dante had never imagined such a father and such judges!

* * * * *

Next morning Oscar Wilde was again put in the dock.  The evidence of the Queensberry trial was read and therewith the case was closed for the Crown.

Sir Edward Clarke rose and submitted that there was no case to go to the jury on the general counts.  After a long legal argument for and against, Mr. Justice Wills said that he would reserve the question for the Court of Appeal.  The view he took was that “the evidence was of the slenderest kind”; but he thought the responsibility must be left with the jury.  To this judge “the slenderest kind” of evidence was worthful so long as it told against the accused.