It would appear that Lloyd George was advocating a wider measure of giving
a vote to every wife of an elector by virtue of her husband’s qualification, thus
enfranchising about six million women in addition to the one and a half million
who would benefit under the original terms of the Second Conciliation Bill.
The prospect of such a large-scale addition to the electorate, the WSPU leader-
ship believed, would be seen as absurd and only wreck the all-party support for
the Conciliation Bill, a situation about which Lord Lytton was gravely
concerned.^75 He wrote to Asquith, stating his misgivings and asked for another
statement of the government’s intention. On 23 August, Asquith replied, ‘I
have no hesitation in saying that the promises made by, and on behalf of, the
Government, in regard to giving facilities for the “Conciliation Bill”, will be
strictly adhered to, both in letter and in spirit.’^76 Although the WSPU leader-
ship gave a cautious welcome to such reassurances, Lloyd George was privately
undermining Asquith’s statement. On 5 September, when Emmeline was at
Fraserburgh, he wrote to the Master of Elibank, the Liberal Party’s Chief Whip,
complaining that the Second Conciliation Bill would play into the hands of
their enemy since it would add ‘hundreds of thousands of votes throughout the
country to the strength of the Tory Party’, a view upheld by many other Liberal
officials. The Liberal Party should make up its mind, he suggested, ‘that it will
either have an extended franchise which would put the working-men’s wives on
to the register as well as spinsters and widows, or that it will have no female
franchise at all’. It looks to me, he continued, that ‘through sheer drifting, vacil-
lation and something which looks like cowardice’, the Liberals were likely to
find themselves in the position of putting ‘this wretched Conciliation Bill’
through parliament. ‘Say what you will’, he concluded, ‘that spells disaster to
Liberalism; and, unless you take it in hand and take it at once, this catastrophe
is inevitable.’^77
Emmeline was unaware of these private discussions but, like Christabel,
already deeply distrustful of Lloyd George. Her tour in Scotland was not
running easily. While at Skelmorlie, Ayrshire, she informed Una Dugdale that
she had to cancel a meeting in Helensburgh since there was a transport strike.
But even more serious was the financial situation. ‘No money practically came
into the funds last week except of my getting & I find I must make a special
effort to raise funds in Scotland. ... The expense of the car is greater naturally
than the train & we must provide for this as well as for the Union funds.’^78
Where the meetings were successful, representatives of a range of political
opinion usually sat on the platform, as at Lady Cowdray’s At Home, held on
Saturday 9 September at Dunecht House, near Aberdeen, for which over a
thousand invitations had been sent. Lady Betty Balfour, sister of Lady
Constance Lytton, and a Tory, travelled especially from Nairn to chair the
meeting; her presence was seen as evidence of the non-party spirit amongst
suffragists at this time, and as a good omen for the success of the Second
Conciliation Bill. In her speech Emmeline explained how the Conciliation
Committee came into existence not to conciliate women, but to conciliate
THE TRUCE RENEWED