Titans of History

It was a terrible mistake. Under cross-examination Wilde was as flippantly witty as ever, playing to his new audience, the occupants of the court’s public gallery. But even his eloquent defense of immorality in his work could not cancel out details of his dalliances. The establishment could not tolerate such revelations. Wilde lost the case and was immediately tried and sentenced to two years’ hard labor for gross indecency. Cries of “Shame” filled the galleries. Queensberry called the bailiffs in to repossess Wilde’s house in lieu of costs. His son, who had fled to the Continent to escape indictment, publicly bemoaned his suffering, at a safe distance.

While Wilde was serving out his time in Reading Jail, a fellow inmate, Trooper Charles Thomas Wooldridge, convicted of murdering his wife by cutting her throat with a razor, was hanged. It was to “C.T.W.” that Wilde dedicated his last great work, the elegiac Ballad of Reading Gaol, written in exile in France after his release in 1897. The poem had to be published under a pseudonym, “C.3.3” (his prison number), due to the notoriety of his own name. Intermingling light and shade, the poem expresses a longing for innocence, beauty and redemption even in the mire of despair, and at the same time calls for forgiveness and understanding.

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by.

The poem concludes:

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

While in prison Wilde wrote De Profundis, a bitterly brilliant 50,000-word letter to Bosie, a testament to his destruction by his great love. He never recovered, physically or psychologically, from his incarceration. Ostracized by society, unable to see his beloved sons, he spent his final years wandering the Continent. His wit was undiminished to the last: “I am dying, as I live,” he declared, “beyond my means.” Shortly before his death, as he lay in a dreary room in Paris, he is said to have murmured, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

WILHELM II

1859–1941

Ruthlessness and weakness will start the most terrifying war of the world, whose purpose is to destroy Germany. Because there can no longer be any doubts, England, France and Russia have conspired them selves together to fight an annihilation war against us.

The last emperor of Germany—known to the British simply as the Kaiser—was an inconsistent, bombastic, tactless, preposterous, perhaps even mentally deranged, absolutist monarch who managed to use the empire’s constitution to gain control of German military and foreign policy yet who ultimately proved unable to govern or sustain his own power. However, for twenty years, Wilhelm II was the vociferous and dynamic ruler of the most modern and powerful country in Europe and his personality dominated international affairs. He came to symbolize the brutal militaristic expansionism of the rising new German empire but his unbalanced personality represented its dangerous insecurity, its inferiority complex and political flaws. He certainly contributed to the growing instability of Europe and the acceleration of the arms race with Britain. He must take much blame, along with the German military-bureaucratic elite, for the humanitarian catastrophe of the First World War—though it is simplistic to place the entire weight of guilt on his shoulders.

Son of the liberal Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia and his wife the English princess Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria, Wilhelm’s left arm was damaged at birth and remained shorter than the other throughout his life, often causing him embarrassment and discomfort. As he grew up, he worshipped the swagger, machismo and discipline of the Prussian military caste, becoming a self-conscious parody of the Prussian officer with his waxed mustache, shining boots, batons, ever more flamboyant aquiline helmets and self-designed dandyish uniforms. Despite, or perhaps because of his damaged arm, his frail figure and health, his white feminine skin and camp taste for uniforms, his embrace of Prussian militarism was obsessional.