The Constitution Violated The Parliamentary Campaign

On 12 March 1875, an actress at Aldershot wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph protesting at the persecution she had suffered from the special police at Aldershot. Although never arrested she was spied upon, hounded from every theatre or music hall where she attempted to perform, accused of being a ‘common prostitute’, and finally threatened with a forcible examination at the Aldershot lock hospital. Mrs Percy, a widow with three children to support, decided to make her protest public, ‘as the means of bringing to the notice of those persons who have thought it their duty to agitate for the repeal of the [Contagious Diseases] Acts’. Eighteen days later, her body was discovered floating in the Basingstoke Canal. She had apparently fulfilled her threat to take her own life rather than submit to an examination that ‘would have completely disgraced me in the eyes of all my acquaintances’. The Percy Case provided invaluable ammunition for the now depressed repeal movement, still scarred by the conflict over Bruce’s Bill and newly crushed in 1874 by the defeat of Gladstone’s Liberal Government at the General Election and their parliamentary representative, Fowler’s, loss of his seat. As Butler noted in her Personal Reminiscences (Volume 4, item 18), 1874 was ‘the year of discouragement’, a time of great defection in the movement (p. 332).