Lord Alfred Douglas - Libel Actions

Libel Actions

Douglas started his "litigious and libellous career" by obtaining an apology and fifty guineas each from the Oxford and Cambridge university magazines Isis and Cambridge for defamatory references to him in an article on Wilde.

He was a plaintiff and defendant in several trials for civil or criminal libel. In 1913 he accused Arthur Ransome of libelling him in his book Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study. He saw this trial as a weapon against his enemy Ross, not understanding that Ross would not be called to give evidence. In a similar way he had not appreciated the fact that his father's character would not be an issue when he urged Wilde to sue back in 1895. The court found in Ransome's favour. Ransome did, however, remove the offending passages from the 2nd edition of his book.

In the most noted case, brought by the Crown on Winston Churchill's behalf in 1923, Douglas was found guilty of libelling Churchill and was sentenced to six months in prison. Churchill had been accused as cabinet minister, of falsifying an official report on the naval Battle of Jutland in 1916 when, although suffering losses, the Royal Navy drove the German battle fleet off the high seas. Churchill was said to have reported that the British navy had in fact, been defeated; the motive was supposed to be that when this news was flashed, the prices of British securities would tumble on the world's stock exchanges, allowing a group of named Jewish financiers to snap them up cheaply. Churchill's reward was said to be a houseful of furniture, valued at £40,000. The allegations were made by Lord Alfred Douglas in a journal called Plain English and later at a public meeting in London. A false report of a crushing British naval defeat had indeed been planted in the New York press by German interests but, by this time (following the failure of his Dardanelles campaign), Churchill was not connected in any way with the Admiralty. As the attorney-general stated in court, on Churchill's behalf, there was no plot, no phoney communiqué, no stock market raid and no present of fine furniture.

In 1924, while in prison, Douglas, in an ironic echo of Wilde's composition of De Profundis (Latin for "From the Depths") during his incarceration, wrote his last major poetic work, In Excelsis (literally, "In the highest"), which contains 17 cantos. Since the prison authorities would not allow Douglas to take the manuscript with him when he was released, he had to rewrite the entire work from memory. Douglas maintained that his health never recovered from his harsh prison ordeal, which included sleeping on a plank bed without a mattress.