At Oxford University he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship.

On converting to Catholicism in 1911, he repudiated homosexuality, and in a Catholic magazine, Plain English, expressed openly antisemitic views, but rejected the policies of Nazi Germany.

[9] 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.

[11][12] In 1894, the Robert Hichens novel The Green Carnation was published, a roman à clef depicting satirically Douglas's dependent relationship on Wilde.

This led to a hiatus in the relationship and a row between the two, with angry messages being exchanged and even the involvement of the publisher John Lane and the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley when they themselves objected to the poor standard of Douglas's work.

Beardsley complained to Robbie Ross: "For one week the numbers of telegraph and messenger boys who came to the door was simply scandalous".

Douglas also gave his old clothes to male prostitutes, but failed to remove from the pockets incriminating letters exchanged between him and Wilde, which were then used for blackmail.

Alfred sent his father a postcard stating "I detest you" and making it clear that he would take Wilde's side in a fight between him and the Marquess, "with a loaded revolver".

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.

Edward Carson, Queensberry's lawyer, portrayed Wilde as a vicious older man who preyed upon naive young boys and with extravagant gifts and promises of a glamorous lifestyle seduced them into a life of homosexuality.

Without a conviction, the libel law of the time left Wilde liable to pay Queensberry's considerable legal costs, leaving him bankrupt.

While in prison, Wilde wrote Douglas a long and critical letter titled De Profundis, describing how he felt about him.

When Douglas eventually gained funds from his late father's estate, he refused to grant Wilde a permanent allowance, although he gave him occasional sums.

Douglas served as chief mourner, but there was reportedly a graveside altercation between him and Robbie Ross that developed into a feud and foreshadowed the later litigation between the two former lovers of Wilde.

Billing had accused Allan, who was performing Wilde's play Salome, of being part of a deliberate homosexual conspiracy to undermine the war effort.

He had written a poem calling Margot Asquith one "bound with Lesbian fillets", while her husband Prime Minister Herbert gave Ross money.

In 1920 Douglas founded a right-wing, Catholic, and deeply antisemitic weekly magazine called Plain English,[23] in which he collaborated with Harold Sherwood Spencer and initially Thomas William Hodgson Crosland.

[24][25] From August 1920 (issue No 8) Plain English began publishing a long series of articles called "The Jewish Peril" by Major-General Count Cherep-Spiridovitch, whose title was taken from the fore-title of George Shanks's version of a fraudulent work, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Douglas challenged the Jewish Guardian, published by the League of British Jews, to take him to court, suggesting they refrained from doing so because they were "well aware of the absolute truth of the allegations which we have made.

Other regular targets of the magazine included David Lloyd George, Alfred Viscount Northcliffe, H. G. Wells, Frank Harris, and Sinn Féin.

From 25 December 1920 it began publishing notorious articles alleging that a "powerful individual in the Admiralty" had alerted the Germans at the Battle of Jutland that the British had broken their code, and that Winston Churchill had falsified a report in return for a large sum of money from Ernest Cassel, who thereby profited.

Its first issue contained a letter from a correspondent in Germany praising "Herr Hittler" (so spelt) and "The German White Labour Party".

In 1920 he adhered to the idea of "the Jewish Peril", but noted, "Christian Charity forbids us to join in wholesale and indiscriminate abuse and vilification of an entire race.

A false report of a crushing British naval defeat had indeed been planted in the New York press by German interests, but by this time (after the failure of his Dardanelles Campaign) Churchill was unconnected with the Admiralty.

As the attorney general noted in court on Churchill's behalf, there was "no plot, no phoney communiqué, no stock market raid and no present of fine furniture".

[38][39] In 1924, while in prison, Douglas echoed Wilde's composition of De Profundis (From the Depths) during his incarceration and wrote his last major poetic work, In Excelsis (In the Highest) in 17 cantos.

One of Douglas's final public appearances was a well-received lecture to the Royal Society of Literature on 2 September 1943 on The Principles of Poetry, published in an edition of 1,000 copies.

[45] Douglas's only child, Raymond, was diagnosed in 1927, at the age of 24, with schizoaffective disorder and entered St Andrew's Hospital, a mental institution.

The main love of her life, Natalie Clifford Barney, also had an affair with Wilde's niece Dorothy and even, in 1901, with Douglas's future wife Olive Custance, the year before the couple married.

In 1999, The University of Oxford established the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize for "...the best sonnet or other poem written in English and in strict rhyming metre.