Charles I's Executioners: Civil War, Regicide and the Republic by James Hobson

Author:James Hobson [Hobson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, Stuart Era (1603-1714), Modern, 17th Century
ISBN: 9781526761873
Google: cGkNEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Published: 2020-12-14T06:00:00+00:00

John Hutchinson was similar to Ludlow in many ways. Both came from the higher echelons of the county gentry, both had the same education at about the same time as they were born eighteenth months apart (Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn/Oxford and Inner Temple) and both had fathers who were MPs. Both men renounced their loyalty to Cromwell when he became Lord Protector in December 1653. At this point their life experiences diverged as Ludlow took a more active part in events than Hutchinson.

Our insight into John Hutchinson comes from his wife, Lucy. Her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (written c.1670) is a key source for the whole civil war. It also made her famous. In many general history books she appears in the index more often than her husband. It is a useful source once it is recognised that Lucy was both an unrelenting Puritan and a social snob who had deep reservations about her husband’s allies, contempt for his enemies, and no interest at all in the lower classes. Her memoirs were not meant to be a public defence of her husband, but designed as a document of record for her children and the close family. It was not seen in public until it was published in 1806 by a later descendent, Julius Hutchinson.

Lucy was born in the Tower of London, not as the offspring of a prisoner, but the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, who had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of the Tower three years earlier. Both Sir Allen and his wife, Lucy, wanted their daughter to practise ‘female accomplishments’ and be academically educated. As it turned out, Lucy liked Latin, reading, and theology more than music, dancing and needlework, and she seemed to have managed to get her own way. She seemed quite dour and intellectual. She reported that when an hour was allotted for play and recreation, she smuggled herself away to read more books.³ In later life she became an author, poet and translator in her own right. She had many intellectual achievements, as she said so herself, and she was right.

Lucy was a stern, unrelenting Puritan with a monochrome attitude to Roman Catholicism. She loathed it, and saw conspiracy everywhere. She wrote a brief history of England. This was her version of the Reformation under Henry VIII:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.