In Excelsis by Lord Alfred Douglas — Free Audiobook

1 00 - Preface 6:44

Preface of in Excelsis. In Excelsis by Lord Alfred Douglas. This sonnet sequence was written in Wormwood Scrubbs Prison, Began on February 5th, and finished on Good Friday, April 18th, 1924. To Alfred Rose. Preface. On December 13th, 1923, I was sentenced by Mr. Justice Avery at the Old Bailey to six months' imprisonment in the 2nd Division, for libeling Mr. Winston Churchill. It may be interesting to record the fact That this prosecution constituted the seventh attempt to get me locked up, which I have had to face during the last ten years. Six previous attempts to put me into the place where, according to a gentle advocate, I refer to my sweet enemy, Sir Patrick Hastings, I so properly belong, all failed in their object.

The seventh attempt succeeded. Which surely goes to show that there is nothing like perseverance. I had looked, at my trial at the Old Bailey, to my own evidence in the witness-box, and especially to my cross-examination by the Attorney-General, as the means of vindicating myself to the public. My counsel and friend, Mr. Cecil Hayes, put me to a series of questions which were designed to give me the opportunity of explaining to the jury how I came to publish the libel, and what evidence I had at the time when it was first given publicity in Plain English. All these questions were objected to by counsel for the prosecution, and disallowed by the judge. The same tactics were adopted in my cross-examination.

I had looked forward to a ding-dong fight with the Attorney General, Sir Douglas Hogg, who was the counsel I had so effectively disposed of a year before in my action against the evening news, when I got a verdict and a thousand pounds damages. And I expected my cross-examination to last several hours. Instead of this, Sir Douglas Hogg asked me exactly three questions, and then sat down. Thus I was effectually muzzled and debarred from making my case public. I said at the time what I thought about the way I had been trapped, and there is no point in saying more now. The whole question will be judged by posterity when the time comes for it to be judged. I think that it is advisable that I should take this opportunity of clearing up a misconception which is almost universal in the public mind about the second division to which I was sentenced.

Prisoners sent to the second division are treated in exactly the same way as those sent to hard labour, with this solitary difference, that they are not deprived of their mattresses for the first fortnight of their imprisonment, as is the case with those undergoing hard labour. In every other respect, their treatment is the same. They occupy the same cells, do the same labour, keep the same hours, and get the same food. The only privileges attaching to the second division are those whereby a prisoner is allowed to receive more visits, and to write and receive more letters. One a month is the allowance in each case. The worst part about prison, materially speaking, is the food. It is so disgusting that a dog would certainly not eat it unless he was starving.

I was quite unable to eat it, and for the first three weeks of my sentence I ate nothing but a few crusts of dry bread, and very nasty bread at that. As a result, of course, I lost weight with great rapidity. Curiously enough, however, I did not feel ill at first. I lived fairly comfortably on my tissues. My health remained good, and I slept nine hours every night, in spite of a plank bed, and a mattress and pillow was hard as nether millstones. It was only after a month that I began to feel weak and ill as the result of undernourishment. I went on the vegetarian diet after the first three weeks, and I was able to eat slightly more of this diet than of the other. But by the middle of the seventh week I had lost more than eighteen pounds, and was on the verge of collapse, and I was then sent to the hospital, where I got comparatively decent food, and where I remained for the remaining three months of my sentence.

Owing to the kindness of my friend, Mr. Alfred Rose, who made a special application on my behalf to the Home Office, I was allowed a school copy-book and a pencil while I was in the hospital. I wrote my poem in this book, and the Home Office, for reasons best known to itself, refused me permission to bring it out with me when I left prison. However, as I, of course, had the seventeen sonnets of which my poem consists in my head, this official outrage put me to no worse inconvenience than that of having to write them out again from memory. The poem speaks for itself, and I need only say that its theology is that of the Catholic mystics, and in particular of St. Thomas Akempis, whose Imitation of Christ I read through several times during my imprisonment.

I am so far from regretting my imprisonment, or from having any ill feelings against those who are responsible for it, that I can truly say that I regard it as the best thing that ever happened to me. This is not to say that I did not suffer a great deal. I did suffer, more especially in a spiritual way, to an extent which I would not have believed to be possible, consistently with remaining alive. But what I think about this is better expressed in the poem than I could explain it in a hundred pages of prose. I think it only right to add that I received the greatest possible kindness from everyone in prison—governor, deputy-governor, R.C., priest, doctor, Officers and, last but not least, fellow prisoners.

Alfred Bruce Douglas.

2 01 - Sonnet I 1:09

3 02 - Sonnet II 1:15

4 03 - Sonnet III 1:22

5 04 - Sonnet IV 1:03

6 05 - Sonnet V 1:00

7 06 - Sonnet VI 1:05

8 07 - Sonnet VII 1:03

9 08 - Sonnet VIII 1:06

10 09 - Sonnet IX 1:06

11 10 - Sonnet X 1:16

12 11 - Sonnet XI 1:16

13 12 - Sonnet XII 1:26

14 13 - Sonnet XIII 1:04

15 14 - Sonnet XIV 1:05

16 15 - Sonnet XV 1:24

17 16 - Sonnet XVI 1:18

18 17 - Epilogue 1:13

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