with favours in purple and green. About 40,000 demonstrators marched in the
golden sunshine, including Keir Hardie, who walked with his brother amongst
the ILP contingent, his wife and daughter following in a brougham. Although
Emmeline, on one of the twenty platforms, was surrounded by a group of rowdy
young men who drowned her words, most of the disturbance – including that
also around the platforms of Christabel and Nellie Martel – was good-
humoured. ‘Never had I imagined that so many people could be gathered
together to share in a political demonstration’, she recollected.^62 Indeed, the
gathering was the largest that had ever been held in the country on the issue of
women’s suffrage and attracted widespread coverage in the press. ‘Woman’s
Sunday’ ran the front page headline in the Daily Chronicle. ‘If the demonstra-
tion proved nothing else’, commented The Timesreporter, ‘it would prove
incontestably that the suffragists have acquired great skill in the art of popular
agitation.’^63 But Asquith was unmoved. A copy of the resolution passed at the
closing of the events, calling upon the government to grant votes to women
without delay, was hastily despatched to him by special messenger. On 23 June
the Prime Minister curtly replied that he had nothing more to add to his
previous statement.^64
Asquith’s response was to prove a critical turning point in the form of action
that the WSPU adopted. As Emmeline noted, the WSPU had now ‘exhausted
argument’ and had to choose between two alternatives. ‘[E]ither we had to give
up our agitation altogether ... or else we must act, and go on acting, until the
selfishness and obstinacy of the Government was broken down, or the
Government themselves destroyed. Until forced to do so, the Government, we
perceived, would never give women the vote.’^65 Some two weeks previous to
the great demonstration, Christabel had warned that if the government still
refused to act after such a public display of support, then the WSPU would be
‘obliged to rely more than ever on militant methods’.^66 Asquith’s provocation
on this and subsequent occasions meant that militancy became a ‘reactive
phenomenon’, each shift in militant tactics being a reasoned response to an
obdurate government.^67 From now on militancy, which had largely involved
heckling of MPs, civil disobedience, and peaceful demonstrations was gradually
broadened to include more violent deeds, initially in the form of ‘undirected
and uncoordinated individual acts’, such as window-breaking.^68
Emmeline called another Women’s Parliament, to be held in Caxton Hall on
the afternoon of 30 June, and wrote a letter to Asquith, telling him that a depu-
tation would wait upon him at half-past four that afternoon. Also, in defiance
of regulations, she sought mass support by inviting the public to join the mili-
tants in a huge demonstration to be held that evening in the hallowed ground
of Parliament Square. The Commissioner of Police immediately issued a procla-
mation warning the public not to assemble, although he insisted that the
approaches to the Houses of Parliament must be kept open. Carrying a women’s
suffrage resolution in her hand, Emmeline set forth at the appointed time with
twelve other women, including Emmeline Pethick Lawrence. When they
AUTOCRAT OF THE WSPU?