Similar scenes have taken place in churches and cathedrals throughout England and Scotland, and in many instances the women have been most barbarously treated by vergers and members of the congregations. In other cases the women not only have been left unmolested, but have been allowed to finish their prayers amid deep and sympathetic silence. Some clergymen have even been brave enough to add a reverent amen to these prayers for women in prison, and it has happened that clergymen have voluntarily offered prayers for us. The Church as a whole, however, has undoubtedly failed to live up to its obligation to demand justice for women, and to protest against the torture of forcible feeding. During the year just closing we sent many deputations to Church authorities, the Bishops, one after another having been visited in this manner. Some of the Bishops, including the reactionary Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to accord the desired interview, and when that happened, the answer of the deputation was to sit on the doorstep of the episcopal residence until surrender followed—as it invariably did.
As Holloway Gaol is within his diocese, the Bishop of London was visited by the W. S. P. U. and the demand was made that the Bishop himself should witness forcible feeding in order to realise the horror of the proceeding. He did visit two of the tortured women, but he did not see them forcibly fed, and when he came out he gave the public an account of his interview with them which was in effect the Government's version of the facts. The W. S. P. U. was naturally indignant, while all the Government's friends hailed the Bishop as a supporter of the policy of torture. Only those who have suffered the pain and agony, not to speak of the moral humiliation of forcible feeding can realise the depths of the iniquity which the Bishop of London was manœuvred by the Government to whitewash. It may be true, as the Bishop comforted himself by saying, that the victims of forcible feeding suffered the more because they struggled under the process. But, as Mary Richardson wrote in the Suffragette, to expect a victim not to struggle was the same as telling her that she would suffer less if she did not jump on getting a cinder in her eye. "The principle," declared Miss Richardson, "is the same. One struggles because the pain is excruciating, and the nerves of the eyes, ears and face are so tortured that it would be impossible not to resist to the uttermost. One struggles, also, because of another reason—a moral reason—for forcible feeding is an immoral assault as well as a painful physical one, and to remain passive under it would give one the feeling of sin; the sin of concurrence. One's whole nature is revolted; resistance is therefore inevitable."
I think it proper here to explain also the policy upon which we embarked in 1914 of taking our cause directly to the King. The reader has perhaps heard of Suffragette "insults" to King George and Queen Mary, and it is but just that he should hear a direct account of how these "insults" are offered. Several isolated attempts had been made to present petitions to the King, once when he was on his way to Westminster to open Parliament, and again on an occasion when he paid a visit to Bristol. On the latter occasion the woman who tried to present the petition was assaulted by one of the King's equerries, who struck her with the flat of his sword.
We finally resolved on the policy of direct petition to the king because we had been forced to abandon all hope of successful petitioning to his Ministers. Tricked and betrayed at every turn by the Liberal Government, we announced that we would not again put even a pretence of confidence in them. We would carry our demand for justice to the throne of the Monarch. Late in December, 1913, while I was in prison for the second time since my return to England, a great gala performance was given at Covent Garden, the opera being the Jeanne d'Arc of Raymond Rôze. The King and Queen and the entire Court were present, and the scene was expected to be one of unusual brilliance. Our women took advantage of the occasion to make one of the most successful demonstrations of the year. A box was secured directly opposite the Royal Box, and this was occupied by three women, beautifully gowned. On entering they had managed, without attracting the slightest attention, to lock and barricade the door, and at the close of the first act, as soon as the orchestra had disappeared, the women stood up, and one of them, with the aid of a megaphone, addressed the King. Calling attention to the impressive scenes on the stage, the speaker told the King that women were to-day fighting, as Joan of Arc fought centuries ago, for human liberty, and that they, like the maid of Orleans, were being tortured and done to death, in the name of the King, in the name of the Church, and with the full knowledge and responsibility of established Government. At this very hour the leader of these fighters in the army of liberty was being held in prison and tortured by the King's authority.
The vast audience was thrown into a panic of excitement and horror, and amid a perfect turmoil of cries and adjurations, the door of the box was finally broken down and the women ejected. As soon as they had left the house others of our women, to the number of forty or more, who had been sitting quietly in an upper gallery, rose to their feet and rained suffrage literature on the heads of the audience below. It was fully three quarters of an hour before the excitement subsided and the singers could go on with the opera.
The sensation caused by this direct address to Royalty inspired us to make a second attempt to arouse the King's conscience, and early in January, as soon as Parliament re-assembled, we announced that I would personally lead a deputation to Buckingham Palace. The plan was welcomed with enthusiasm by our members and a very large number of women volunteered to join the deputation, which was intended to make a protest against three things—the continued disfranchisement of women; the forcible feeding and the cat and mouse torture of those who were fighting against this injustice; and the scandalous manner in which the Government, while coercing and torturing militant women, were allowing perfect freedom to the men opponents of Home Rule in Ireland, men who openly announced that they were about to carry out a policy, not merely of attacking property, but of destroying human life.
I wrote a letter to the King, conveying to him "the respectful and loyal request of the Women's Social and Political Union that Your Majesty will give audience to a deputation of women." The letter went on: "The deputation desire to submit to Your Majesty in person their claim to the Parliamentary vote, which is the only protection against the grievous industrial and social wrongs that women suffer; is the symbol and guarantee of British citizenship; and means the recognition of women's equal dignity and worth, as members of our great Empire.
"The Deputation will further lay before Your Majesty a complaint of the mediæval and barbarous methods of torture whereby Your Majesty's Ministers are seeking to repress women's revolt against the deprivation of citizen rights—a revolt as noble and glorious in its spirit and purpose as any of those past struggles for liberty which are the pride of the British race.
"We have been told by the unthinking—by those who are heedless of the constitutional principles upon which is based our loyal request for an audience of Your Majesty in person—that our conversation should be with Your Majesty's Ministers.