prepared a defiant message to be read at the Holland Park Hall meeting. ‘There
is talk of negotiation and compromise. No negotiations for us. A Government
measure giving equal voting rights to women with men is our demand, and we
demand itNow!... Let us fight on, loyal to one another and to our great
cause.’^59 After the applause from her message had died down, it was announced
that the ‘Protest Fund’ had reached £15,350. This sum, together with an income
of £36,896 that the WSPU had attracted during the last year, an increase of
£8,000 upon the previous year, are firm indications that Emmeline and the poli-
cies she upheld for her militants had not cost the Union all public support,^60 a
fact rarely commented upon by the majority of historians. The day following
Emmeline’s rearrest, a young woman of refined appearance attacked with a
butcher’s cleaver Millais’ unfinished portrait of Thomas Carlyle hanging in the
National Gallery. Ironically, Miss Payne did not know that the great historian
was one of Emmeline’s romantic heroes, hisFrench Revolutionhaving been a
source of inspiration since childhood.^61 Severely weakened by two arrests in one
week, Emmeline was released after a couple of days, due to return on 22 July.
Protests about her treatment continued to be made to the Liberal govern-
ment, both on a national and international scale. Some time earlier, in July, in
far away Sydney, Adela had drawn a packed house when she pleaded emotion-
ally for her mother’s release from prison.^62 Despite her now very frail body,
Emmeline’s passionate concern to end the injustices against her sex did not
desert her. She penned a letter to the King, requesting an audience, pointing
out that while militant women were imprisoned and tortured, Ulster militant
men had been invited to a conference on the Irish question to be held at
Buckingham Palace. On 23 July, Lady Isabel Hampden Margesson and Mrs.
Corbett were turned away from the Palace as they tried to deliver the letter.
The following day, while the conference was meeting in an effort to avert Irish
civil war, Lady Barclay and the Hon. Edith Fitzgerald made another unsuc-
cessful attempt to present the petition; since they refused to go away, they were
arrested for obstruction although later discharged.^63 The government tried to
crush The Suffragette, yet again, by arresting its printers and issuing proceedings
against all persons involved in its publication or distribution.
Emmeline did not return to Holloway on 22 July but slipped quietly away to
France, where she had arranged to met Ethel. Nurse Pine had informed the
volatile musician that the leader of the WSPU was ‘lower than ever before’, but
nothing prepared Ethel for the shock when, supported by two of her militants,
‘the ghost of what had been Mrs. Pankhurst’ tottered onto the quay at St.
Malo.^64 Soon afterwards, Christabel joined them. With the two women by her
side who were closest to her heart, Emmeline began to rebuild slowly her
strength, splashing in the sea for the first time in twenty-five years and discov-
ering that she could still swim. She even taught Ethel a trick or so, such as
floating on her back and swimming with her mouth above the water.^65 But the
clouds of the Great War of 1914–18 were approaching fast. Emmeline followed
the crowds on 1 August who gathered in St. Malo to hear the Mayor read
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