Liberal MP who drafted the Labouchère Amendment criminalising all sexual activity between men
In 1885 he added a last-minute amendment to an unrelated bill outlawing “gross indecency” between men; ten years later it was used to convict Wilde.
A British politician, journalist and theatre owner from a wealthy Huguenot banking family. After a spell as a diplomat he sat in Parliament in 1865–68 and made his name through a stake in the Daily News and the weekly Truth, founded in 1876. Returning in 1880 as Liberal MP for Northampton, he became a leading Radical. His 1885 amendment criminalised all sexual activity between men, and he regretted that Wilde’s two-year sentence was so short. He was hostile to women’s suffrage and to Jews. He left politics in 1906, retired to Florence and died there in 1912.
Also known as: Henry Du Pré Labouchère · Henry Labouchere
Activities and affiliations
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1865–1906
Legislature and state representation
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1880–1906
United Kingdom state institutionsMember of ParliamentMain
Legislature and state representation
Related historical events
- 1885–1941.11.06Sexual Reform Movements in Europe and the Reaction of the 1930s (1885–1941)Liberal MPAdded the 1885 amendment punishing “gross indecency” between men.
- 1885.08.07–1938.07.19Sexual Reform in Britain: From the Wilde Trials to The Well of Loneliness (1885–1938)Liberal MPMoved the 1885 amendment punishing “gross indecency” between men, which became section 11 of the Act.
The Radical who wrote the amendment
He attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, but lost his degree amid gambling and a charge of cheating in an examination. A junior diplomat in Washington, Munich, St Petersburg, Constantinople and elsewhere between 1854 and 1864, he was dismissed for an impudent letter and was elected a Liberal MP in 1865. His dispatches from the Siege of Paris in 1870–71 restored the circulation of the Daily News, and his own weekly Truth, founded in 1876, was often sued for libel. He used Truth to ridicule the suffrage movement, and he was a virulent antisemite who attacked “Hebrew barons”.
In 1880 he and the atheist Charles Bradlaugh won the two seats for Northampton, and he called himself sardonically “the Christian member for Northampton”. In 1885 he added a last-minute amendment to a bill that had nothing to do with homosexuality, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill raising the age of consent to sixteen. Sodomy was already a crime, but this “gross indecency” clause criminalised any sexual activity between men. When Wilde received the maximum two years’ hard labour under it ten years later, Labouchère regretted that the sentence was so short and would have preferred the seven years he had originally proposed.
He tried to bind the Radicals and the Irish Nationalists together, but the split over Home Rule in 1886 wrecked the plan. Queen Victoria’s hostility kept him out of office, and his opposition to the Boer War cost him popularity. Passed over again by the Liberal government of 1905, he left Parliament the next year, retired to Florence and died there in 1912.