When Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison for homosexuality in 1895, his lover, poet and journalist Lord Alfred Douglas, wrote a letter to Queen Victoria petitioning for Wilde’s release. “Will you not save this man who even if he be guilty has already been punished more a thousand times more cruelly than he deserves[?]” he asked. Wilde served his full sentence and died in 1900, with his final years spent in exile.
Douglas’ impassioned plea is set to go on display at the National Archives “Love Letters” exhibition this month, alongside dozens of other emotive pieces of correspondence that span the last 500 years of heartache and passion. Among them is one of the most high-risk love letters ever penned, by Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, to courtier Thomas Culpeper in 1541, which was later used to prove the pair were having a treasonous affair. Both were executed by the king soon after. “I never longed so much for a thing as I do to see you and to speak to you,” Howard wrote to Culpeper, despite the danger. “Yours as long as life endures, Katheryn.”
