In a series of violent letters, he attacked his son for dropping out of Oxford and pursuing a homosexual affair. The Marquess’s oldest son, Francis, Viscount Drumlanrig, was rumoured to have committed suicide following an apparent relationship with Lord Rosebery, the future Prime Minister. ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.’ So read the calling card – spelling mistake and all – that Queensberry left with the Club’s hall porter. The exact wording has been lost to history (and the illegibility of the Marquess’s scrawl): Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, is an advocate for ‘posing somdomite’, while biographer H. Montgomery Hyde thinks the card read ‘posing as a somdomite’. Either way, Wilde sued for libel, with the fervid support of Bosie, but much to the despair of his friend, George Bernard Shaw.