Ministers, and who help to pay your salary too, Sir, are going to have
some voice in the making of the laws which they have to obey.^33Emmeline was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment in the Third Division.
Further unannounced window-smashing on Monday, 4 March, led to
another ninety-six arrests amongst whom were Ethel Smyth and Louisa
(‘Louie’) Garrett Anderson, daughter of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and a
doctor, like her mother. A Union meeting planned for the evening, advertised
in handbills that bore Emmeline’s signature and invited the public to join the
protest in Parliament Square, was reduced by a heavy police presence to a series
of isolated incidences.^34 Determined to strike at the WSPU leadership, the
government ordered Scotland Yard to act. The following day the police
swooped on WSPU headquarters with a warrant for the arrest of the Pethick
Lawrences and Christabel who, together with Emmeline and Mabel Tuke, were
charged with ‘conspiring to incite others to commit malicious damage to prop-
erty’.^35 Only the Pethick Lawrences were found since Christabel now lived in a
flat nearby. Jessie Kenney in a note had warned Christabel about what was
happening while Fred Pethick Lawrence had hastily sent Evelyn Sharp in
person, to tell the tale, as well as to ask Christabel to countersign a cheque
enabling the transfer of WSPU funds into Hertha Ayrton’s bank account.^36
Christabel spent the night in hiding and, fearful of what would happen to the
WSPU if all the leaders were in prison, escaped to Paris where as ‘Amy
Richards’ she attempted single handedly to lead the movement at a distance.
Before she left England, she wrote a letter to the trusted Annie Kenney asking
her to act as her deputy until her mother and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence were
free to assume leadership in England once again. ‘My relief, when I learned of
her flight’, recollected Emmeline, ‘was very great, because I knew that whatever
happened to the Lawrences and myself, the movement would be wisely
directed.’^37 A less welcome aspect of the raid on Clement’s Inn for Emmeline
was that the police, in a determined effort to find evidence of conspiracy, took
away many private keepsakes that she had cherished carefully over the years.
‘They went through every desk, file and cabinet, taking away with them two
cab loads of books and papers, including all my private papers, photographs of
my children in infancy, and letters sent me by my husband long ago. Some of
these I never saw again.’ The police also ‘terrorised’ the printer of Votes for
Womenso that although the paper was printed as usual that week, about a third
of its columns were left blank.^38
These events in early March, especially the scale of the window-smashing
and of Emmeline’s role as leader of the demonstration, received widespread
condemnation in the press. On 2 March,The Timesin its editorial referred to
‘Mrs. Pankhurst and her maenads’ while two days later Mr. Lasenby Liberty,
owner of the fashionable West End store, claimed that, as a victim of the
recent raid, he wanted to ask Mrs. Pankhurst ‘to state the mental process by
which they deem the breaking of the very shrines at which they worship ‘will
THE WOMEN’S REVOLUTION