Lady Constance Lytton

by Lyndsey Jenkins

  He says I may tell you in strict confidence, the information only to be used by you for medical purposes, in the interest of Lady Constance. The medical opinion was that there was well marked valvular disease of the heart, evidently of old date, and that she was very much underweight,

  Oddly, though, ‘her general health improved very much whilst she was in prison’, perhaps because of the enforced rest.14 Edith whisked her away to Austria to be near her old music teacher. Fräulein Oser had read Constance’s pamphlet and told her that she was ‘berühmt’ – famous.15

  Back at home, her actions were splitting the family. Gerald’s view, as relayed by Edwin, was that ‘the suffragettes are engineering their cause very badly now […] he had no sympathy with law breaking’ and he suggested that Arthur ‘would probably do the same as Asquith’. Further:

  If women had the great majority they might insist on a position or policy which they would not have the physical strength to eventually enforce … He thinks Con is a saint upon earth and so say all of us, but that she knows little of the world and wants judgment. Don’t repeat this while we all know it.16

  After Edith, Edwin was the most opposed to Constance’s actions. He was patronising and pompous, telling Emily, ‘I had a talk with McKenna [a Cabinet minister] about Suffragettes and told him one or two facts he didn’t know and which he would never have learnt or received if shouted at him through a press-gang-press or a megaphone.’17 Aunt T also made no secret of the fact that she found the campaign boring and Constance’s interest in it baffling.

  Betty and Emily were more sympathetic to Constance’s point of view, though not necessarily to her behaviour, and they were critical of what they saw as her increasing extremism. Betty remembered that Constance ‘shook us all out of a normal conventional attitude, much as Francis of Assisi must have shaken his relations when he gave away the clothes from his back. We were all made to reconsider our fundamentals.’ Emily was still selling Votes for Women on her seaside holidays, though she would soon leave the suffragettes, dismayed by increasing militancy. She told Aunt T that ‘our old Con has gone forever … she has passed out of the lives of her family, except in so far as they can go with her into the new life and interest. I think she has ceased to have any private affection even.’18

  But Victor proved to be her most loyal friend. He could see why the suffragettes had been driven to adopt militant tactics. In his view, the only course of action was to reach an agreement as soon as possible, before anyone was seriously hurt. In June, he spoke at a suffrage meeting to outline his support for militancy: the suffragettes had no other means of getting their complaints heard; constitutional methods of winning the vote had been exhausted; and they were fighting against the ‘indifference and inertia’ of the public as well as the government. It was a serious business for another Lytton to lend his support to the cause, and Victor was fully conscious of what he was committing to. ‘These militant tactics involve – I cannot shut my eyes to the fact – defiance of the law and a species of revolution, and he who advocates or even sanctions revolutionary measures incurs a responsibility which it is impossible to exaggerate.’19 Afterwards, Constance reported back how impressed Christabel and the Pethick-Lawrences had been: ‘All quite overcome and awed at the absolute straightness and clearness of your vision into the whole question, at the difference of your attitude from that of any other “politician” they have come across.’20 His support for the suffragettes inevitably got him into trouble among his peers. Pamela told a story of a house party they had attended at Hatfield with the King; the guests all lined up at the end to wish him farewell, but the King stopped when he reached the Lyttons to give them the full force of his temper because of Victor’s involvement with the suffragettes. She was humiliated, not least because she too hated him being associated with the militants.21

  Meanwhile, Mrs Pankhurst was increasingly agitated over Asquith’s refusal to receive a deputation of suffragettes: she believed it was unconstitutional. The Bill of Rights was quoted at every suffragette meeting. ‘It is the right of the subject to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitions are illegal.’ They were not so brave as to imagine the King might receive them, but they did expect that his Prime Minister should. On 29 June, Mrs Pankhurst led the ‘Bill of Rights’ deputation to the Houses of Parliament; the women were of course turned away once more. In the fracas Mrs Pankhurst slapped a policeman and was arrested. Constance wrote indignantly from Austria to The Times to protest about their coverage of the incident. ‘For some weeks past I have been out of England, and have had the disagreeable but enlightening experience of following the English woman suffrage movement, not, as for the last nine months it has been my privilege, at first hand, but from the position of the average looker on.’ Given the abusive press coverage, she continued, ‘it has been difficult to explain to my Austrian friends that the leaders of this movement are not the feckless hooligans one would suppose from these accounts. The coverage was totally biased, she said: it professed horror at supposed acts of violence by the suffragettes, while totally ignoring both the contempt they received from the government and the brutality they suffered at the hands of the crowds. In her view, it wasn’t surprising that Mrs Pankhurst had hit the policeman. It would save her and, more importantly, the elderly women accompanying her from the pain and indignity of being roughed up by the crowd. ‘In defence of her companions she lifts her hands and strikes. It seems to me an action characteristic of this great leader … though the act required of her was one entirely alien to her own nature … yet she did not shrink from it or hesitate.’22 Constance, like the other suffragettes, believed they had to be prepared to do whatever it took to succeed. Nothing was off-limits.

  This became clearer still in July, when the suffragettes turned to smashing windows on a mass scale and more than a hundred women were arrested, along with fourteen men. This escalation of hostilities partly reflected their growing frustration at government inertia and was partly a new tactic to gain more publicity, but it was also a survival strategy. Like slapping a policeman, breaking a window meant immediate arrest, so that suffragettes could quickly escape from a hostile situation.23

  But the most significant moment of the summer occurred almost by accident. At the end of June, Marion Wallace Dunlop, an artist, managed to gain access to St Stephen’s Hall, the original debating chamber of the House of Commons. She was not armed with stones, but with a stamp and ink, with which she defaced the wall with words from the Bill of Rights, beginning, ‘It is the right of every subject to petition the King.’ She was sentenced to a month in prison and wrote to Gladstone demanding to be treated as a political prisoner. Receiving no reply, she spontaneously decided to go on hunger strike.24

  ‘What are you going to have for dinner?’ she was asked. ‘My determination,’ she replied. In one day, she threw ‘a fried fish, four slices of bread, three bananas and a cup of hot milk’ out of the window.25 The prison authorities panicked and released Marion after ninety-one hours. Fourteen of the window breakers followed her example and they too were released. The suffragettes were jubilant. They had stumbled on a tactic that seemed to render the government powerless. Christabel wrote to C. P. Scott, editor of The Guardian, to say that ‘the new policy of the hunger strike has given us the means of entirely baffling the government. They cannot now imprison us, whatever we may do, for more than a few days, unless, of course, they prefer that we should die in Holloway.’26 It appealed to their sense of theatre and drama but also to their spirituality. Lisa Appignanesi points out that self-denial and even starving has a long association with religion; the more women could control their appetite, the holier they were thought to be.27 The suffragettes themselves were already holding annual self-denial weeks, and donating the proceeds to WSPU funds. But hunger striking took self-denial to unprecedented heights, and was also evidence of their powerlessness and desperation. For the suffragettes, though it was a dreadful experience, with extreme courage
it could be managed. They believed that the struggle itself would be won through endurance, that they could last longer than the government. Hunger striking put this belief to the test. ‘The actual hunger pains last only about twenty-four hours with most prisoners,’ Emmeline Pankhurst later reported matter-of-factly.

  I generally suffer most on the second day. After that there is no very desperate craving for food. Weakness and mental depression take its place. Great disturbances of digestion divert the desire for food to a longing for relief from pain. Often there is intense headache, with fits of dizziness, or slight delirium. Complete exhaustion and a feeling of isolation from earth mark the final stages of the ordeal.28

  When the hunger strikers were released from prison, they were given gold brooches studded with flint stones to acknowledge their exceptional service.29

  The Liberal government was fighting on several fronts at this time. Irish Home Rule was once again causing political headaches and Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ threatened to spark a constitutional crisis. The government could not allow a few rowdy women to get the better of them, especially after the King wrote, via his private secretary, to demand why ‘the existing methods which must obviously exist for dealing with prisoners who refuse nourishment should not be adopted’.30

  On 17 September, Asquith was due to address a meeting in Birmingham and was assailed by a number of suffragettes. Two of them, Mary Leigh and Charlotte Marsh, climbed up on the roof of the building next door and tore off slates to hurl at his car. The police threw stones back and turned hosepipes on them but still they resisted. It took three policemen to finally get them down. Both women were sentenced to four months’ hard labour. As was fast becoming the norm, they immediately went on hunger strike. Mary herself had already been on hunger strike twice and she thought she knew what to expect. She was wrong. After she broke the windows in her cell, she was taken to a punishment room, handcuffed and made to sit in a chair tipped backwards, while a doctor held her mouth open and a wardress spooned milk and brandy in. The next time was far worse: two doctors came in with a tube, two yards long, which was forced up her nose, and liquid tipped in. This continued twice a day, through alternate nostrils, from 22 September to 30 October 1909.31

  When news of Mary’s treatment got out, the suffragettes were appalled. The WSPU took legal action against the Home Secretary, the prison governor and the prison doctor on Mary’s behalf, arguing that force-feeding was an operation and could not be performed without consent. They lost. According to the Lord Chief Justice, a person in prison lost their right to refuse an operation and the prison officers had a duty to prevent Mary from committing suicide. The suffragette tactics had backfired spectacularly. There were now ominous legal grounds for further force-feedings. But not every hunger striker was forcefed. In her exhaustive history of the movement, Sylvia Pankhurst gives Olive Wharry the dubious honour of the longest hunger strike: thirty-two days in all; Freda Graham would go without food and water for fifteen days.32

  Gladstone was uneasy about the decision and consulted with Asquith before giving force-feeding the go-ahead. Force-feeding had long been used on the mentally ill in asylums – as the King clearly knew – but this was something quite different. The women were not mentally ill; they were making a political choice, and the doctors were inexperienced in carrying out the procedure. But the conclusion they reached was that ‘for the present these women must be treated like the prisoners with defective minds who are not amenable to the prison regulations’.33

  A hundred and sixteen doctors wrote to The Times to protest against the ‘unwise and inhumane’ treatment being meted out;34 seventy-nine of these doctors were women. But public opinion was not wholly behind the suffragettes. Some felt they had left the authorities with no choice. Others thought they got what they deserved. Many other doctors wrote to The Times suggesting that force-feeding was essential in order to save lives: in other words, it was humane, not inhumane.35 Keir Hardie asked questions in the House of Commons to a chorus of laughter and jeers. The Times summed up the general mood in an editorial on 29 September:

  Most of us desire something or other which we have not got … but we do not therefore take hatchets and wreck people’s houses, or even shriek hysterically because the whole course of government and society is not altered to give us what we seek. These notoriety-hunters have effectually discredited the movement they think to promote. Public interest in their proceedings is dying, and is being replaced by public disgust.36

  Constance’s friends and acquaintances were horrified by this new turn of events, and by her determination to stick with the suffragettes, even given this new tactic. ‘Con is quite insane,’ Frances told Betty. ‘She asks you to plead against a doubtful “torture” while they are applying a great deal of very real torture to the Asquiths.’37 A family friend, Nellie Cecil, spoke for many when she said,

  I gratefully recognise the immense lift the Pankhursts have given the movement, but I think they are making a bad mistake now … (suppose Margot, or one of her children, or some other innocent person were hurt one day?) … These things I am convinced disgust many who might be won over otherwise.38

  The authorities believed that force-feeding would act as a deterrent as well as a punishment. This was a serious miscalculation: it actually had the opposite effect. Seeing the gaunt bodies of their comrades and hearing their horrific stories galvanised the suffragettes. The outrage they felt at the all-powerful government inflicting such punishment on defenceless women hardened their resolve.39 If the government was so naive as to think ‘the nasal tube or the stomach pump, the steel gag, the punishment cell, handcuffs and the strait jacket would break the spirit of women who were determined to win the enfranchisement of their sex, they were again woefully misled’, declared Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.40 Their beliefs were as strong as any religion and now women were actually being tortured for the faith. Suffragettes submitted to force-feeding as a way to express solidarity with their friends as well as to further the cause. ‘The thought that women were facing death in the cells painted life, for their friends and supporters, in heightened colours,’ wrote Sylvia Pankhurst. ‘Actions seemed right and necessary, which at ordinary times would not have been conceived. The spirit of adventure and sacrifice awoke in quietly mannered people, who hitherto had never stepped from the beaten track of conventional usage.’41

  Constance, perhaps the most quietly mannered of them all, was sickened. In August and September, she made a series of visits around the country, including Birmingham, Liverpool, North Wales and even Scotland42 and, while away, Christabel took her to meet a hunger striker. Constance found the experience intensely moving.

  A beautiful red light lit up the window as we came in; against it was merely the shadow of a girl, sitting in an armchair. She did not look ill in an ordinary way, but young and fresh only so absolutely thin and wasted, it would not have surprised us if life had gone out.

  The girl’s ‘ethereal’ appearance reminded her of Italian paintings which illustrated ‘the look of spiritual strength shining through physical weakness’. Just as before she went to Holloway, Constance believed that direct experience was the only way to truly understand and empathise with her fellow suffragettes. ‘An angel had been in my presence, and I, who agreed with all she did, had left her and many others to go through with this alone.’43 This ‘angel’ is not named in Prisons and Prisoners but the suffragette historian Elizabeth Crawford identifies her as Laura Ainsworth, who, like Mary Leigh, had been arrested in Birmingham for attempting to disrupt Asquith’s meeting.44 Laura seems to have been rather more robust than Constance gave her credit for. By the end of the month she had recovered enough to confront Asquith with a poster of force-feeding and demand of him, ‘Why did you do this to me?’45 She also began (ultimately unsuccessful) criminal proceedings for assault against the government, which brought more publicity to the movement.46

  Burning with outrage, Constance decided to join the ranks of the hung
er strikers, even if it meant being forcefed herself. A train ride with Christabel finally made up her mind. Constance sought Christabel’s advice on a series of papers and letters, and was deeply impressed by ‘the wonderful character, the imperturbable good temper, the brilliant intellect’.47 She was prepared to do anything to impress Christabel and demonstrate her loyalty. She began writing to Arthur Balfour again, trying to broker a meeting between him and Christabel. He was noncommittal, saying that he did not approve of what had been going on lately with the suffragette movement. Constance replied saying that the suffragettes agreed with him ‘if you refer to the action of the Government’, which, of course, he did not.48

  But the time had come for action – or rather, as the suffragettes would have it, deeds not words. The opportunity for Constance’s next move presented itself in Newcastle, where David Lloyd George was due to make a significant speech promoting his People’s Budget and attacking the House of Lords. Constance set out on his trail with a particularly dedicated group of women. They included Emily Wilding Davison, who would later die under the King’s horse; Ellen Pitfield, who went on to become the first suffragette arsonist; Dorothy Pethick, Emmeline’s sister; and Kitty Marion, who would eventually be forcefed 232 times. Yet still Constance felt she was ‘the “hooligan” if there were one among them’.49 One of the women, Jane Brailsford, was married to a prominent journalist, and her husband Henry was present as the women met to plan their upcoming ordeal. ‘It is difficult for anyone without opportunities of personal observation to form a fair estimate of the cool and deliberate courage of these women,’ he later wrote in The Times. ‘For a week beforehand they had thought of all their acts would involve. On the eve of their battle they quietly discussed, without a sign of emotion, all the hideous details of the treatment they were about to receive.’50 Another participant, Winifred Jones, was on her first mission. She was visibly rattled, asking question after question. Would she lose the tortoise-shell combs which held up her beautiful hair? Constance felt that Winifred, barely out of her teens, wasn’t prepared for the ordeal ahead and tried to talk her out of it. She had forgotten that only a few months earlier she had felt the same mix of idealism and naivety. But Winifred was as strong-willed as Constance and determined to play her part.