Annie Kenney, asking her to act as her deputy. ‘I trust you implicitly’, she wrote,
a sentiment that one feels she could not express to her sister.^60 On 27 April,
Sylvia was billed as speaking at a WSPU meeting in Palmer’s Green, London.^61
Emmeline, who probably heard from Sylvia and Christabel different versions
of their meeting, had still not fully recovered her health and was worried about
preparing her defence. Needing more time, Mr. T. H. Healy, KC, applied on her
behalf on 24 April for a postponement of her trial, and was refused. The
following day, while resting in the comfort of her room at the Inns of Court
Hotel, the fifty-three-year-old Emmeline wrote a despairing letter to Elizabeth
Robins:
Yesterday, as you may have seen, the application was refused! I am
making one more effort for I do not feel fit to face the strain involved
in conducting my own defence. I wonder how the Home Sec. would
like to undertake such a piece of work lasting over several days so soon
after coming out of prison added to all the other elements in the situa-
tion. The strain of the past 6 years tells on me more & more, my mind
does not work as quickly as it used to do & it has not yet recovered
from the effect of prison. Even young women tell me that in prison it is
impossible to concentrate on anything & that it takes some time after
one is liberated for this mental paralysis to wear off. I suppose these
people do not realise how brutal they are. All this talk of chivalry
forsooth & yet they, with all the power of the nation at their disposal,
knowing they mean to have me sent back to prison, won’t give me
time (at the most 3 weeks) to get back enough strength to make a good
fight for my liberty! Well it will recoil on their own heads. Slowly but
surely the net of official misrepresentation & repression is breaking &
every new act of injustice helps.^62The same day Emmeline penned a short note to Una Dugdale, complaining of
how the ‘enemy’ insisted on his ‘pound of flesh at the earliest possible moment’,
irrespective of her state of health.^63 Eventually, a third application for post-
ponement of the trial, until 15 May, met with success.
The Old Bailey conspiracy trial began and ended in a blaze of national
publicity as newspapers covered the six-day event in detail. When the charges
were read out, the proceedings opened in characteristic form since the proud
Emmeline, who disliked references to her age, refused to state how old she was.
Acting in her own defence, she cross-examined witnesses and questioned
evidence, and produced her own witnesses, including Ethel Smyth, in order to
support the argument of the defence, as outlined by Fred Pethick Lawrence, that
the conspiracy and incitement in the case were not that of the defendants but of
the government which had ‘deliberately deceived and thwarted the women’s
movement’.^64 During the closing days of the trial, when Emmeline addressed the
court on 21 May, she poignantly stated, ‘I will try to make you understand what
THE WOMEN’S REVOLUTION