tears a man ever shed, that I had brought such a creature into the world, and unwittingly committed such a crime.... You must be demented." Douglas's eldest brother Francis Viscount Drumlanrig died in a suspicious hunting accident in October 1894, as rumours circulated that he had been having a homosexual relationship with the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, and that the cause of death was suicide. The Marquess of Queensberry thus embarked on a campaign to save his other son and began a public persecution of Wilde. Wilde had been openly flamboyant and his actions made the public suspicious even before the trial. The Marquess and a bodyguard confronted the playwright in his own home; later, Queensberry planned to throw rotten vegetables at Wilde on the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest, but forewarned of this, Wilde was able to deny him access to the theatre. Queensberry then publicly insulted Wilde by leaving at the latter's club a visiting card on which he had written, "For Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite ". The wording is in dispute – the handwriting is unclear – although Hyde reports it as this. According to Merlin Holland, Wilde's grandson, it is more likely "Posing somdomite", while Queensberry himself claimed it to be "Posing as somdomite". Holland suggests that this wording ("posing [as] ...") would have been easier to defend in court. 1895 trials In response to the card and with Douglas's avid support, but against the advice of friends such as Robbie Ross, Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw, Wilde had Queensberry arrested and charged with criminal libel in a private prosecution, as sodomy was then a criminal offence. According to the libel laws of the time, since his authorship of the charge of sodomy was not in question, Queensberry could avoid conviction by demonstrating in court not only that the charge he had made was factually true, but that there was also some public interest in having made the charge public. Edward Carson, Queensberry's lawyer, accordingly portrayed Wilde as a vicious older man who habitually preyed upon naive young boys and with extravagant gifts and promises of a glamorous lifestyle seduced them into a life of homosexuality. Several highly suggestive erotic letters that Wilde had written to Douglas were introduced as evidence; Wilde claimed they were works of art. Wilde was questioned closely on the homoerotic themes in The Picture of