Robert Cecil appeared on behalf of Evelina while Emmeline, again, presented
her own case. The magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen, ruled that although he
recognised the right of petition, he considered that a Member of Parliament
could not be compelled to receive those who wished to petition him. In deliv-
ering this judgment, he also expressed himself willing to state a case, if it were
desired, for a higher court, as he felt that the issue that had been raised involved
an exceedingly important point of constitutional law. He agreed to do this on
the undertaking that Emmeline would make no further attempt to send a depu-
tation to parliament until the case was decided, to which she agreed, until the
end of the year. All the eight members of the deputation were released in the
interim. An appeal heard in December 1909 by the Lord Chief Justice, decided
against the two women; in giving judgment, he acknowledged the right of
women to petition the Prime Minister but did not recognise the right of deputa-
tion to him. There was no inherent right to enter the House of Commons, and
the women should have desisted when they received word that Mr. Asquith was
unwilling to receive them.^57 The leadership of the WSPU regarded the judg-
ment as a legal tangle which was bad ‘in the fundamentals of constitutional
liberty’. If Asquith, by a technicality of law could keep the letter of the
Constitution, ‘he is none the less guilty of breaking the spirit of it by his
action’.^58 The determined Emmeline, appalled that the ancient constitutional
right of petition had been destroyed, refused to accept the judgment as final.
‘Far from discouraging or disheartening us, it simply spurred us on to new and
more aggressive forms of militancy.’^59
In between the arrest of Marion Wallace Dunlop in June and the December
ruling, important developments took place in the militant movement that lifted
it, Emmeline claimed, onto ‘a new and more heroic plane’.^60 On 5 July the
imprisoned Marion Wallace Dunlop, on her own initiative, began a hunger
strike in an effort to be granted political offender status and placed in the First
Division; after ninety-one hours of fasting, she was released.^61 The fourteen
women convicted of stone throwing on 12 July were determined to follow her
example. When their request to the Home Secretary to be transferred to the
First Division was turned down, they refused to wear prison clothes or to clean
up their cells; since the weather was unbearably hot, they then broke their cell
windows in order to get some fresh, cool air. Thrust into damp, verminous,
ground floor punishment cells for disobedience, they went on hunger strike, and
were released.^62 Much to the embarrassment of the government, the hunger
strikers recounted their experiences in great detail.
Emmeline was campaigning in Derbyshire while the women were in prison
and fully endorsed Christabel’s support, on behalf of the WSPU leadership, for
their protest. While staying at the Devonshire Hotel, Buxton, before they were
released, she wrote an angry letter to C. P. Scott about a report of the suffrage
prisoners that had appeared in the Manchester Guardian. ‘If you won’t use your
influence to end this unequal struggle at least you might refuse to allow your
paper to be used to misrepresent women who are unable to defend themselves
‘A NEW AND MORE HEROIC PLANE’