page_title: Lord Alfred Douglas
section_title: Early life and background
hierarchical_section_title: Lord Alfred Douglas / Early life and background
context_page_description: Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas was a British poet and journalist best known as the lover of Oscar Wilde.
  While studying at Oxford, he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, which carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, with whom he started a close but stormy relationship. Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry, disapproved strongly of the affair, and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some of his intimate notes were discovered, and he was subsequently jailed. On his release, Wilde briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they were separated by the time Wilde died in 1900.
  Douglas married Olive Custance in 1902, and they had a son, Raymond. Converting to Roman Catholicism in 1911, he openly repudiated Wilde’s homosexuality, and in a High-Catholic magazine, Plain English, he expressed views that were openly anti-Semitic, though he rejected the policies of Nazi Germany. He was also jailed for libeling Winston Churchill over claims of wartime misconduct.
  Douglas wrote several books of verse, some of it classified in the homoerotic Uranian genre.
context_section_description: Douglas was born at Ham Hill House in Powick, Worcestershire, the third son of John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry and his first wife, Sibyl Montgomery.
  He was his mother's favourite child; she called him Bosie (a derivative of "boysie", as in boy), a nickname which stuck for the rest of his life. His mother successfully sued for divorce in 1887 on the grounds of his father's adultery. The Marquess married Ethel Weeden in 1893 but the marriage was annulled the following year.
  Douglas was educated at Wixenford School, Winchester College (1884–88) and Magdalen College, Oxford (1889–93), which he left without obtaining a degree. At Oxford, he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp (1892–3), an activity that intensified the constant conflict between him and his father. Their relationship had always been a strained one and, during the Queensberry-Wilde feud, Douglas sided with Wilde, even encouraging Wilde to prosecute the Marquess for libel. In 1893, Douglas had a brief affair with George Ives.
  In 1858 his grandfather, Archibald Douglas, 8th Marquess of Queensberry, died in what was reported as a shooting accident, but was widely believed to have been suicide. In 1862, his widowed grandmother, Lady Queensberry, converted to Roman Catholicism and took her children to live in Paris.One of his uncles, Lord James Douglas, was deeply attached to his twin sister "Florrie" (Lady Florence Douglas) and was heartbroken when she married a baronet, Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie. In 1885, Lord James tried to abduct a young girl, and after that became ever more manic; in 1888, he made a disastrous marriage. Separated from Florrie, James drank himself into a deep depression, and in 1891 committed suicide by cutting his throat. Another of his uncles, Lord Francis Douglas (1847–1865) had died in a climbing accident on the Matterhorn. His uncle Lord Archibald Edward Douglas (1850–1938), on the other hand, became a clergyman. Alfred Douglas's aunt, Lord James's twin Lady Florence Dixie (1855–1905), was an author, war correspondent for the Morning Post during the First Boer War, and a feminist. In 1890, she published a novel, Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900, in which women's suffrage is achieved after a woman posing as a man named Hector D'Estrange is elected to the House of Commons. The character D'Estrange is clearly based on Oscar Wilde.
caption: The 9th Marquess of Queensberry
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