Remembering a hero: Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of her husband.

Col. Hutchinson saith w[ha]t was donne by him was out of noe ill intent, that he hath seene ye ill effects of it, & hath since endea[voured] to bring ye k[ing] back hee hath not advanta[ged] himselfe by these times & throwes himselfe upon ye mercy of ye Parl[iament].

... as to that particular action of the King['s trial], he desir'd them to believe he had that sence of it that befitted an Englishman, a christian, and a Gentleman. (1)

EVEN by the standards of her patriarchalist age, Lucy Hutchinson's insistence on her own wifely submissiveness was strenuous. Widow of the regicide Col. John Hutchinson, Mrs Hutchinson is best known, and to generations of readers, for the Memoirs of her husband, a work that has run to four editions (two in the last thirty years), with multiple printings. (2) She was also a translator, a devotional writer and a poet whose stature is now becoming understood thanks to the researches of David Norbrook. (3) On the strength of the Memoirs, she has been celebrated as acute observer, sometimes trenchant commentator, and--as she certainly consciously presented herself--fervent republican and devout wife. The tensions among wifely devotion, republican politics and literary expression in her work are a frequent subject of comment for modern scholars; and they were a matter of deep concern for Mrs Hutchinson herself. Sophisticated and hard-headed as she was, (4) she repeatedly declared that she owed her all to her husband, even her own sense of who she was and what she looked like: 'she, that was nothing before his inspection gave her a faire figure'. (5) She admitted to a significant act of disobedience, whose meaning we will consider, but she maintained that it was the only occasion in her marriage that she strayed from the path of wifely duty. Scholars have seen her protestations of duty as emblematic of the lot of the married woman writer in seventeenth-century England, and part of the price of claiming agency when such agency was generally denied to women. The more assertive the female writer--and Lucy Hutchinson has been bracketed with Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in her assertiveness--the more assiduous the apologetics. (6) Her protestations are in fact so singular that they invite further inquiry.

Such inquiry must focus on the Restoration, the turning-point of Lucy Hutchinson's life, and the occasion of her confession of undutifulness. Under the new regime her family was to lose its home and her husband his life, though the Colonel did not die on the scaffold, to which, as a regicide, he was eminently liable. Instead, he died in prison, spared a traitor's death by a great deal of lobbying and hard work. Whose was the work? Mrs Hutchinson is emphatic: the work was hers, and that of her royalist relations. Her husband, noble commonwealthsman to the last, was preparing to offer himself up a sacrifice to the cause until she, determined to preserve him, committed an act of wifely disobedience for which he never fully forgave her or himself as he watched former colleagues go to their ugly deaths. In June 1660, she reports, she contacted the Speaker of the Commons in her husband's name, and set her well-placed kin and connections to second the effort--which they did to great effect. Her tale of the woman's role in a man's lapse from virtue curiously paralleled the Creation story she was then putting into verse. (7) The dramatic account of a wife's defiant effort to preserve husband and family, an account that explodes out of a prose history that is often remorseless in its detail, surely explains the hold of Mrs Hutchinson's work on the imaginations of scholars and ordinary readers alike. As one of her modern editors observes, 'Nothing else that she says or does in her long narrative is likely to please them more.' (8)

Weaknesses in Lucy Hutchinson's account were noticed more than a century ago. The great historian C. H. Firth, who himself edited her Memoirs, observed that she 'conceals much of the truth, and misrepresents many of the facts'; and he sharply questioned her story of what happened as the King prepared to come home in May 1660. At that point, those regicides who were then in the Convention House of Commons rose to withdraw, often with some reflection on their behaviour in 1649. Colonel Hutchinson, his wife reports, remained steadfast, declaring piously if vaguely to the Commons, 'as to that particular action of the King, he desir'd them to believe he had that sence of it that befitted an Englishman, a christian, and a Gentleman'. More anxious than her husband that ...