London - Edward Rutherfurd [556]
A week before, two respectable-looking Edwardian ladies, wearing the large, wide-brimmed hats decorated with feathers that were fashionable and looking as if they had just come from shopping in Piccadilly, waited quietly outside the Prime Minister’s residence at 10, Downing Street. As Mr Asquith emerged, to the delight of The Times journalist and the photographer who had been tipped off, the two women fell into step on each side of him and stayed with him all the way down Whitehall, politely enquiring what he was doing about votes for women, until he was able to escape into the sanctuary of the Houses of Parliament. One of them was identified in the newspaper the next day as Violet.
“You’re lucky you weren’t arrested,” Bull said gently.
Edward Bull had mellowed since he came to Bocton. His sons ran the brewery now and he enjoyed the life of a country squire. He had even discovered in the manorial records that the estate had once belonged to a family called Bull. “Nothing to do with us, of course,” he had cheerfully remarked. He did not even get angry when Violet had announced her sympathy for the suffragettes, though his own attitudes had remained entirely unchanged. “Medical science has discovered that women’s brains are smaller,” he triumphantly informed her. Women should grace the home, he felt – and not only most men, but many women agreed. A women’s organisation against the franchise had been formed. Mrs Ward, a prominent novelist, wrote in a similar vein. Women would be polluted by politics. Chivalry would die. It was a curious feature of late Victorian and Edwardian life that, partly because of a revival of Arthurian knightly literature, and partly because increasing affluence was bringing leisure to larger numbers of women, even middle-class women were imagining themselves to be as delicate and pampered as eighteenth-century ladies of fashion – an idea that would have greatly puzzled their ancestors.
“This is all because I wouldn’t let you go to university,” her father concluded.
“No, papa.” Why could he never take her seriously? “Is it right that a woman can be a mayor, a nurse, a doctor, a teacher – or a good mother for that matter – yet be denied a vote? Why, things were better in the Middle Ages! Did you know that women could join the London guilds then?”
“Don’t be silly, Violet.” Edward knew the City: the idea of any of the livery companies admitting women was absurd. He would have been astonished to know that his own brewery had come to him from Dame Barnikel. He sighed. “In any case, it’s all a waste of time. Not a single political party supports you.”
Unfortunately this was true. There were those for and against in every party, but none of the leaders could decide whether it would be to their own political advantage to add a female vote. Even the most radical were far more interested in enfranchising more working-class men than worrying about women.
“Then we shall go on until they do,” she replied.
“What infuriates me about your campaign is that it sets such a bad example,” he confessed. “Can’t you see that if people like us start publicly agitating, it only encourages the other classes to do the same? And, God knows,” he added, “things are dangerous enough as it is.”
Violet could sympathise with this last assertion. As the old century had departed, and old Queen Victoria with it, the new King Edward VII faced an increasingly uncertain world. A war against the Dutch-speaking Boers in South Africa had been won only with difficulty, and some doubt about its moral purpose. Murmurings against British rule had begun in India. The German Empire, although the Kaiser was King Edward’s nephew, was expanding its colonial and military might in a rather threatening way. Britain’s trade, too, was meeting stiff competition now, so that even staunch free-traders like Bull were beginning to wonder if the huge bloc of the British Empire should protect itself with tariffs after all. The issue of whether to give