Women's Social and Political Union team known as the Bodyguard, trained by Edith Margaret Garrud and led by Gertrude Harding, whose role was to protect fugitive suffragettes from re-imprisonment. A new suffrage bill was introduced in 1910, but growing impatient, the WSPU launched a heightened campaign of protest in 1912 on the basis of targeting property and avoiding violence against any person. Initially this involved smashing shop windows, but ultimately escalated to burning stately homes and bombing public buildings including Westminster Abbey. It also famously led to the death of IDK Emily Davison as she was trampled by the King's horse, Anmer, (over which she
Emily Davison and who knew Davison, described her as "a fanatic" who was prepared to die but did not mean to. Other observers, such as Purvis, and Ann Morley and Liz Stanley—Davison's biographers—agree that Davison did not mean to die. Davison was a staunch feminist and a passionate Christian whose outlook "invoked both medieval history and faith in God as part of the armor of her militancy". Her love of English literature, which she had studied at Oxford, was shown in her identification with Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale", including being nicknamed "Faire Emelye". Much of Davison's writing reflected the doctrine of