HUTCHINSON, John (1615-64), of Owthorpe, and Nottingham, Notts.

Hutchinson’s life would have relatively few claims on the attention of historians were it not for the biography of him left by his adoring and highly literate wife Lucy. She clearly loved and admired him deeply, attributing her own good qualities entirely to his influence.44Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 10, 32-3. The only faults she could detect in him were a tendency to show too much leniency towards his enemies, and ‘the passion of anger’ – which, she insisted, he only ever exhibited with just cause.45Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 4, 7, 9, 14, 134-5. In other words, she was not the most critical observer of her husband’s character. Moreover, an early draft of The Life reveals that she excised or revised material that might be seen as reflecting badly on him.46Add. 25901, passim; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, xxii-xxiii; S. Race, ‘The British Museum ms of the life of Col. Hutchinson’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. xviii. 35-58. The published version of his life is therefore, in part at least, hagiography, and where Lucy’s comments and opinions cannot be corroborated their accuracy is open to question. Even some of the purely factual details she provides of Hutchinson and his family are incorrect – for example, she misdates his birth by a full year.47Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 17. Nevertheless, in the absence of any other detailed commentary on his life, her memoirs are an indispensable source for his character and career.

Hutchinson was raised in the ‘reverence of God’, and from an early age he exhibited some of the hallmarks of the puritan sensibility that were so marked a feature in adulthood. His school years were unhappy and largely unprofitable to him, although while at Lincoln grammar school he was among a group of gentlemen’s sons – which included Francis Thornhagh* – that was trained in ‘military postures and in assaults and defences’ by ‘an old Low-Country soldier’. This ‘sportive militia’ was to stand both Hutchinson and Thornhagh in good stead during the civil war. Hutchinson’s admission to Peterhouse, the most Laudian of the Cambridge colleges, and his association with a ‘tutor and masters ... of Arminian principles’ seems to have stimulated his spiritual development. Lucy conceded that although he had some inkling that the kind of worship favoured at Peterhouse was ‘stretching superstition to idolatry’, he diligently attended services in the college chapel, ‘and was courted much into a more solemn practice of it than he could admit, [and] ... considered not the emptiness and carnality’. Indeed, he enjoyed his time at Peterhouse much more than he did that at Lincoln’s Inn – where he was admitted in 1636 – finding the study of the law, and the London social scene generally, ‘unpleasant and contrary to his genius’. It was not until the late 1630s or early 1640s, after two years of study in his father’s extensive library, that he began to discern ‘the whorish dress and behaviour of that which called itself the Church of England. But this was only a time of dawning, and he by degrees was led up into the brighter sunshine with which it pleased the Lord to enlighten him’.48Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 21-2, 24-7, 34-5.

Hutchinson’s public career effectively began in March 1642, when his friend and kinsman Henry Ireton* procured his addition to the Nottinghamshire commission of the peace.49C231/5, p. 509; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 53. A few weeks later, he was part of a delegation from the county that presented a petition to the king at York, requesting that he reject evil counsel and return to London. The king was ‘grieved and highly offended’ by this petition, and Hutchinson’s royalist cousins the Byrons were ‘extremely troubled’ at his evident alignment with the nascent parliamentarian interest in Nottinghamshire.50A True Relation of Some Remarkeable Passages Concerning [the] Nottingham-Shire Petition (1642), 1-3 (E.143.8); Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 54. According to Lucy, her husband was the leading spirit in preventing Robert Pierrepont, 1st Viscount Newark, from seizing the county’s store of powder at Nottingham for the king – although this claim is not substantiated in other contemporary accounts.51Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 55-6; Oxford DNB, ‘John Hutchinson’. And early in 1643, Hutchinson was commissioned as lieutenant-colonel in the regiment of Nottinghamshire foot commanded by one of the county’s leading parliamentarians, Francis Pierrepont*.52Race, ‘British Museum ms’, 42. He justified his decision to take up arms against the king primarily on the grounds of ‘civil right’; for though he believed that the king’s party posed a threat to ‘the true Protestant religion ... yet he did not think that so clear a ground of the war as the defence of the just English liberties’.53Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 53.

Pierrepont’s apparent reluctance to commit himself militarily put much of the onus of defending Nottingham and taking the fight to the local royalists upon Hutchinson, Ireton and Thornhagh.54Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 75-8, 80; CJ iii. 52a. Hutchinson re-affirmed his fidelity to the parliamentarian cause in June 1643, when he combined with Oliver Cromwell* to secure the arrest of Captain John Hotham*, who was plotting with the queen to betray Hull.55Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 81-2. The following month, the Nottinghamshire county committee (of which Hutchinson was a member) appointed him governor of Nottingham Castle.56Add. 25901, f. 90v; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 83. This appointment, which represented a great honour for a man still in his twenties, was to prove a poisoned chalice. He quickly came into conflict with some of the leading townsmen for his determination to put the defence of the castle before that of the town, and he was forced to imprison some of them when they raised a ‘mutiny’ against him.57Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 84-5, 87. In addition, he had to contend with the machinations of Pierrepont and James Chadwicke*, who apparently had designs of their own on the governorship.58Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 104-5.

In acknowledgement of Hutchinson’s military services, the Commons made him governor of the town as well as the castle in November 1643 (a similar grant was procured from the commander of Parliament’s northern army, Ferdinando 2nd Lord Fairfax*), which Hutchinson assumed gave him authority over any parliamentarian units quartered within his jurisdiction.59CJ iii. 315b; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 106. Moreover, in April 1644 Parliament’s commander-in-chief, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, authorised him to convene a council of war as often as he saw fit in order exercise martial law in Nottingham.60Notts. RO, DD/683/5. Nevertheless, some of the officers of the horse disputed Hutchinson’s command over them when they were in the town, and from this disagreement there developed a bitter feud that for the next two years or more divided the committeemen, the leading townsmen and local parliamentarian officers.61Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 107-8, 111, 112, 116-18, 132-59; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 227-32; P.R. Seddon, ‘Col. Hutchinson and the disputes between the Notts. parliamentarians, 1643-5’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. xcviii. 71-9. Chadwicke, Gilbert Millington*, Charles White* and John Mason* headed a faction that sought to vest military authority in the committee rather than the governor. Ranged against them in support of Hutchinson’s claim to overall command were Thornhagh, Gervase Pigot* and – on the rare occasions he visited Nottingham – Ireton.62Add. 18780, ff. 6r-v; Harl. 166, ff. 144, 203; Bodl. Nalson IV, f. 234; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 227; Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78. Religious tensions among the Nottingham godly apparently exacerbated this conflict. Hutchinson’s enemies were said to have ‘engaged the persecuting priests [orthodox puritan ministers]’ and the Presbyterian grandees at Westminster against him for his willingness to tolerate separatists ‘so long as they liv’d honestly and inoffensively’.63Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 125, 131-2, 140, 153; Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 75. When Hutchinson’s opponents went so far as to accuse him of a design to betray Nottingham to the royalists, Lord Fairfax wrote to the Committee of Both Kingdoms (CBK)*, protesting that he had ‘never heard anything but good of the gentleman both for his discreet carriage and fidelity’, and asking that he not be prejudiced in his place ‘without proof testifying his ill deservings’.64Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 143; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 12.

In November 1644, the CBK drew up proposals in an effort to settle the issues of contention between the disputants.65CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 111-12, 115, 117; Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 76. But Hutchinson’s opponents rejected them and the matter was referred to the Commons, where the parliamentary diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes detected ‘a secret intent’, supported by Oliver St John and other MPs, ‘to bring in Colonel [Francis] Pierrepont in Governor Hutchinson’s stead’.66Harl. 166, ff. 201v, 203v; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 276; CJ iv. 112a, 118b; Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 77. When the dispute was debated in the Commons in April 1645, Gilbert Millington, ‘the chief means of those factious fellows [opposing Hutchinson], spake very bitterly and virulently against the governor and in defence of those of the committee who opposed him and ... discovered so much rancour and passion as his best friends grew ashamed of him’.67Harl. 166, f. 203v; Add. 18780, f. 6; Add. 31116, p. 412. As late as September 1645, Hutchinson and his supporters were lobbying Nottinghamshire’s lord lieutenant, John Holles, 2nd earl of Clare, to help purge ‘those many bad men, now rotten members of this committee [the county committee]’, but apparently to little effect.68Nottingham Univ. Lib. Ne D 3759/19; Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 79. In the end, it was probably the return of peace to the midlands after Naseby that did most to take the heat out of the quarrel.69CJ iv. 112a; Seddon, ‘Hutchinson and the Notts. parliamentarians’, 74-8. Nevertheless, the Nottinghamshire sub-committee of accounts continued to harrass Hutchinson well into 1646 concerning certain goods and provisions in his custody for which he had not accounted – notably, the £130 worth of hangings and furniture that he had sequestered from the house of Sir Gervase Clifton*.70SP28/133, pt. 2, f. 106v; SP28/256, unfol.; SP28/257, unfol.

Relations between Hutchinson and Nottingham’s leading townsmen had improved considerably by November 1645, when the corporation – eager to secure his return in the town’s forthcoming ‘recruiter’ election – voted unanimously to make him a freeman in regard of his ‘faithful and good service’ (in October 1646, the corporation expunged from its records a petition and remonstrance of November 1644, in which Hutchinson had been accused of ‘impious commands and passionate and violent carriage’). However, Francis Pierrepont then wrote to Hutchinson, promising to support his return for Nottinghamshire – in place of the deceased Sir Thomas Hutchinson – if Hutchinson would do the same for him at Nottingham.71Supra, ‘Nottingham’; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 164; Nottingham Borough Recs. v. 230, 239, 244. In the event, Pierrepont was returned for the town at some point in late December 1645 or early 1646 and Hutchinson for the county on 16 March. Among the signatories to the indenture returning Hutchinson were Thornhagh, Francis Pierrepont’s elder brother William Pierrepont* and Peniston Whalley*.72Supra, ‘Nottinghamshire’; C219/43/2/78. Hutchinson did not take his seat at Westminster until after the surrender of Newark in May – in which he acted as one of Parliament’s negotiating team – and his first recorded action in the House was to take the Covenant (27 May).73LJ viii. 303b, 310a; CJ iv. 556a.

Having weathered the factional in-fighting at Nottingham, Hutchinson now found himself accessory to a much greater political quarrel in the form of the ‘very bitter spirit of discord and envy raging’ between the Presbyterians and Independents at Westminster. According to Lucy Hutchinson, he sought to remain aloof from both factions, ‘for he had a strength of judgement able to consider things himself’. However, he clearly found the Presbyterians particularly objectionable, both for their ‘malicious zeal and imposing spirit’ in persecuting the separatists and for their obstruction of what he saw as the public good. Indeed, as Lucy admitted, ‘so long as the [New Model] army only resisted unjust impositions and remained firm to their first pious engagement, Mr Hutchinson adhered to that party which protected them in the Parliament House’ – namely, the Independents.74Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 166, 167.

Hutchinson’s only appointment in the Commons during 1646 was to a committee set up on 10 July on the controversial ordinance for the sale of delinquents’ estates – the proceeds of which were earmarked for paying Parliament’s soldiers and the maintenance of the war in Ireland. This legislation was opposed by the Presbyterian grandees, who were conspicuous by their absence from the committee.75CJ iv. 613a; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), 162. A year later, he was among those MPs (mostly Independents) who fled to the protection of the army following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July 1647; and on 4 August, he signed the ‘engagement’ of the fugitive Members, in which Sir Thomas Fairfax* and his men were eulogised for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom and ... [their] faithfulness to the true interest of the English nation’.76Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 755.

But overall, Hutchinson cut a relatively insignificant figure at Westminster before Pride’s Purge. A prolonged bout of illness, and his duties as governor of Nottingham Castle, resulted in him being named to just three committees between July 1646 and December 1648.77Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 167-8, 170-1, 173; CJ iv. 613a, 643b; v. 205a, 329b, 400b, 650b, 689a; vi. 34a. In fact, he was probably much more active on the Nottinghamshire county committee during the later 1640s than he was in the Commons.78SP28/174, unfol.; SP28/213, unfol.; SP28/241, unfol. At Nottingham he was generally regarded as a Congregationalist or even an Anabaptist, for during the mid-1640s he and his wife became convinced that infant baptism had no foundation in scripture. Nevertheless, both of them continued to attend public church services under the town’s Presbyterian ministry.79Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 169.

By the late 1640s, Hutchinson had ‘great intimacy’ with the Levellers, ‘and so far as they acted according to the just and pious and public spirit which they professed, owned them and protected them as far as he had power’.80Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 179. Like the Levellers, he distrusted Cromwell for his perceived ambition and ‘dissimulations’ and, in the summer of 1648, told him so to his face.81Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 180, 194. Lucy claimed that Cromwell pretended friendship towards Hutchinson, but resented his ‘plain dealing’ with him and on several occasions thwarted his preferment in the army – and certainly Hutchinson’s military career was almost wholly confined to Nottinghamshire.82Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 180, 182-3, 193, 194, 195, 203-4, 211-12. Declared absent at the call of the House on 26 September 1648, he had returned to the Commons by 4 December, when he joined the army’s friends in speaking against a motion that the king’s answers to Parliament’s propositions at the treaty of Newport constituted an acceptable grounds for settlement.83CJ vi. 34a; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 186-7. He argued that if this motion passed

the king, after having been exasperated and vanquished and captived [imprisoned], would be restored to that power which was unconsistent with the liberty of the people, who for all their blood and treasure and misery would reap no fruit but a confirmation of bondage, and that it had been a thousand times better never to have struck one stroke in the quarrel than, after victory, to yield up their righteous cause.84Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 187.

Hutchinson was part of the minority that voted against this motion, on 5 December. Although he retained his seat at Pride’s Purge the following day, Lucy claimed that he ‘infinitely disliked the action of the army’, but thought it better to continue sitting ‘than to give up all in so distempered a time into the hands of the soldiery’.85Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 187, 188. He entered his dissent to the 5 December vote on 21 December – the day after the dissent had been introduced as a test of the Rump’s membership.86CJ vi. 102a. On 6 January 1649, he was appointed to the commission for the trial of the king.87A. and O. i. 1254; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 189. He was one of the most zealous members of the high court of justice, attending 15 meetings of the trial commission and reporting from one of its sub-committees on arrangements for ‘the secure sitting of the court’ and for guarding the king during the trial proceedings. After attending all four sessions of the trial itself, he signed the royal death warrant.88Muddiman, Trial, 76, 202, 203-4, 228. He was ‘very much confirmed in his judgement’ against Charles, insisted Lucy, being convinced that ‘God would require at their hands all the blood and desolation which should ensue by their suffering him to escape when God had brought him into their hands’.89Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 189-90. Edmund Ludlowe II* remembered him as ‘having exceeded most of the members of the high court of justice in zeal for putting the king to death’.90Ludlow, Mems. ii. 217, 286.

Hutchinson figured more prominently at Westminster after the regicide than he had before it, receiving 24 committee appointments in the Rump – the great majority in the period February 1649 to August 1650. His ideological investment in the new regime is suggested by his nomination to a committee set up on 1 February 1649 for taking the dissent of MPs seeking admission to the House.91CJ vi. 152a; W. Prynne*, A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 25 (E.1013.22). This body, and a much smaller committee set up on 5 March, operated like a committee for absent Members and was important in determining the Rump’s membership and therefore its political complexion. His increased engagement with the House’s proceedings is also clear from his election to the first and second councils of state.92CJ vi. 141a, 362a; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 214. On learning of his impending nomination to the first council, in mid-February 1649, he sent Lucy – or so she later claimed – to attend Ireton and secure his (Hutchinson’s) omission on the grounds that he had ‘already wasted his time and his estate in the Parliament service, and having neither had recompense for his losses, nor any office of benefit, it would finish his ruin to be tied by this employment to a close and chargeable attendance’.93Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 191. But Lucy was mistaken in asserting that Ireton was a member of the nominating committee – indeed, he himself would be omitted from the first council – and Hutchinson was duly elected, which he chose to interpret as a sign that ‘God had called him to this service in counsels as formerly in arms’.94Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 191-2. He made no scruple about taking the ‘engagement’, requiring the councillors to approve ‘all that was done concerning the king [i.e. the king’s trial and execution] and kingship and for taking away the House of Lords and against the Scots’ invasion [in 1648]’.95SP25/1, (19 Feb. 1649); CJ vi. 146b; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 537. Hutchinson was apparently one of the less active councillors, attending 75 of the 319 meetings of the first council and 124 of the 295 meetings of the second.96CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. lxxv; 1650, p. xli. Most of the numerous conciliar committees to which he was named were of relatively minor importance, and he was appointed a reporter to the House on just two occasions.97CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 36, 447; 1650, pp. 2, 483; CJ vi. 212b, 346b.

Hutchinson’s priorities in the Rump itself are not easy to determine. He was named to committees on a bill for abolishing kingship (7 Mar. 1649) and to consider how the Engagement (abjuring monarchy and Lords) could be tendered for mass subscription (9 Nov.).98CJ vi. 132a, 158a, 161b, 204b, 209b, 218b, 221a, 237b, 250b, 255b, 265b, 266a, 267b, 290a, 321b, 420a, 423a, 429a, 444b, 581a, 205a. He was added to several standing committees, including the Committee for Plunderd Ministers* and the Committee of Navy and Customs*, through which he helped to steer legislation concerning his late father-in-law, who had had been victualler of the navy.99CJ vi. 265b, 266a, 290a, 291a, 420a, 444b. He was added twice (on 31 May and again on 19 June) to the 5 March committee for absent Members – a body made up largely, it seems, of the more hard-line Rumpers – and reported the case of Colonel Francis Russell on 4 June.100CJ vi. 221a, 224a, 237b; Worden, Rump Parl. 70. But Hutchinson received too few committee appointments to provide much insight into his political interests or alignment in the House. More revealing in this respect is his tellership on 9 June in favour of a motion to refuse re-admission to those Members who would not acknowledge the House’s authority in establishing a high court of justice to try and judge the king.101CJ vi. 228a. Evidently Hutchinson and his fellow teller Colonel Thomas Harrison I were hoping to restrict the Rump’s membership to those who those favoured the doctrine of the Commons’ supremacy and, by extension, the killing of the king. However, they lost this division to Richard Salwey and Francis Allein. Hutchinson was a teller in two other (apparently minor) divisions in the Rump – one of which saw him pitted against Ireton.102CJ vi. 128b, 506b. His allies in the House, according to Lucy Hutchinson, included Sir Henry Vane II and either Edward or John Ashe.103Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 196, 198.

Naturally, Lucy Hutchinson portrayed her husband as very much his own man in the Rump.104Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 200, 201. There is probably at least some substance to her claim that he was involved in saving the royalist leaders George Goring†, earl of Norwich, and Sir John Owen from the scaffold early in 1649 – much to the dislike of the army and many of its friends.105Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 192-3. However, he was less conspicuous in the role of royalist life-saver than a number of other MPs, most notably Ireton and James Chaloner.106Supra, ‘James Chaloner’; infra, ‘Henry Ireton’; Clarendon, Hist. iv. 507. Whereas Lucy stated that her husband used his influence to relieve the oppressed rather than enrich himself, in fact Hutchinson seems to have done rather nicely out of his time in the Rump.107Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 192, 200. As a councillor of state he was assigned lodgings in Whitehall (furnished by the proceeds of the sale of the king’s goods), and on 25 April 1649, the House ordered that his arrears of army pay – which amounted to £2,672 – be satisfied out of such concealed delinquents’ estates as he should discover to the Committee for Advance of Money*.108CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 552; CCAM 882; CCC, 1708, 1709; CJ vi. 195b; HMC Var. vii. 371-2; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 185-6. Although he evidently had the stomach for this somewhat unsavoury way of recouping his arrears and duly collected most of the £2,672, he was reluctant (as he informed the owner of one concealed estate) ‘to take that strict and rigorous course which the [Commons] order prescribes’.109SP46/95, ff. 144-7. With plenty of cash to invest, he was part of a consortium of prominent radicals and ‘new merchants’ that came together in the late 1640s to colonise the Bahamas.110S.A. Green, J.T. Hassam, R.C. Winthrop jnr. ‘The Bahama islands’ (Procs. of the Massachusetts Hist. Soc. ser. 2, xiii), 5; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 523-7. But much more profitable were his dabblings in the art market. In 1649, for example, he bought Titian’s Venus del Pardo for £600 and sold it to the French ambassador two years later for £7,000.111S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 156. In all, he spent about £2,000 on items in the king’s and other sequestered art collections and made a considerable profit on those pieces he sold on to other buyers.112Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 207, 239. He also used his army debentures, supplemented with money borrowed from several sources, to purchase forfeited and former crown and church properties to the value of at least £3,000.113C54/3593/11; C54/3595/32; LC4/203, f. 212; LR2/266, f. 4; SP28/288, ff. 14, 16, 18; Notts. RO, CA 3425, p. 17; Coll. Top et. Gen. i. 287; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 195-6, 198; CJ vi. 491b, 506b, 518a, 564a; Gentles, ‘Debentures Market’, 301. In 1651, he attempted to purchase an estate in Loseby and surrounding parishes in Leicestershire using £7,500 borrowed from Henry Pierrepont, 2nd earl of Kingston, but instead the earl acquired these properties himself and sold them to John Wildman*.114C10/45/70. Allegations made in 1654 that Hutchinson had fraudulently detained public money and secured recompense for ‘pretended’ arrears of army pay should be treated with caution. Nevertheless, there is probably substance to the claim that he had ‘much enriched’ himself in Parliament’s service and had added £1,000 to the yearly value of his estate.115C5/19/102.

Hutchinson spent most of the summer of 1650 securing Nottinghamshire against the threat of Scottish invasion and royalist insurrection, and thereafter he seems to have attended the House only rarely.116CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 283, 506; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 202. After failing to secure election to the third council of state in February 1651, he applied himself largely to his duties as a Nottinghamshire magistrate, ‘and to the putting in execution of those wholesome laws and statutes of the land provided for the orderly regulation of the people’ – in particular, the eradication of ‘wandering and begging’ by the idle poor and closing down ‘unnecessary’ alehouses.117Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 206. He disapproved of the army’s dissolution of the Rump in April 1653 and of the establishment of the protectorate later that year, believing that ‘the people’s freedom would be best maintained in a free republic, delivered from the shackles of their encroaching slaves, the army’.118Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 206-7, 208, 211, 214. He apparently said as much to Cromwell when the protector visited him at Owthorpe during the mid-1650s.119Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 211-12.

Lucy Hutchinson claimed that her husband withdrew from public life both at local and national level under the ‘new usurpers’.120Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 208. However, in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, Major-general Edward Whalley* reported to Cromwell that ‘the honest party’ of Nottinghamshire had proposed Hutchinson for one of the county places, ‘he having satisfied some of them concerning his judgement of the present government’.121TSP v. 299. Whalley headed off this proposal, clearly regarding Hutchinson as an avowed enemy of the protectorate, and in the event he was not elected. In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, Hutchinson was pricked for sheriff of Nottinghamshire in order to prevent him standing for one of the county places.122Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 212-13.

The restoration of the Rump in May 1659 left Hutchinson ‘much perplexed’, for though he welcomed the revival of the commonwealth, he thought that the army had acted merely from necessity rather than genuine repentance. He was therefore reluctant to comply with those he regarded as ‘traitors’ to the republican interest such as Major-general John Lambert*, ‘who had brought the Commonwealth into such a sad confusion’.123Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 214. Yet ‘in regard of the trust formerly reposed in him’, and determined to thwart what he feared was a design by Lambert to restore the Stuart monarchy, he attended his seat, regardless of the fact that as a sheriff he was technically disqualified from sitting until 20 June, when the House granted him a dispensation from shrieval office.124CJ vii. 689b; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 214; D. Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and oblivion: Lucy Hutchinson and the Restoration’, HLQ lxxv. 254-5. Between May and August 1659, he was named to 11 committees, including that to consider a petition from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire against the activities of James Chadwicke* as steward of the honour of Peverel.125CJ vii. 668a, 691a, 704b, 705a, 714a, 742a, 744a, 751a, 755b, 762a, 763b. On 29 September, he was declared absent without leave at the call of the House and was fined £20 – and he was still absent when the army dissolved the Rump again in mid-October.126CJ vii. 789b; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 218. His antipathy to Lambert and the pro-army republican interest was such that he set about raising a party in Nottinghamshire ‘to suppress these usurpers and rebels’.127Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 219-20. But before the time for armed action came the Rump was restored again, late in December 1659, and Hutchinson was recalled to his seat.

Hutchinson put himself in an almost impossible position during the final months of the Rump and Long Parliament. He recognised that a restoration of monarchy was very likely, but was too wedded to his own judgement and conscience to make common cause with Sir Arthur Hesilrige* and his republican allies, which was the only group at Westminster with any prospect of preserving the commonwealth. Whereas Hesilrige realised the need for clemency against the Lambertonians if the republican cause was to survive, Hutchinson refused to take this politic line. Several sources noted his hostility to Lambert’s leading civilian collaborator – and Hutchinson’s own former ally – Vane II. Indeed, according to an embittered Ludlowe, Hutchinson pressed the House ‘to execute their sentence against that eminent patriot Sir Henry Vane’ and exploited ‘all opportunities against the honest party, of which he had formerly professed to be a zealous well-wisher’.128Ludlow, Voyce, 175; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 217; Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and oblivion’, 239. That Hutchinson acted against Lambert himself is borne out by his Commons’ appointments. On 2 January 1660, he was a minority teller against including the ‘wretch’ Lambert in a vote indemnifying as to life and estate those officers and soldiers who had opposed the restored Rump.129CJ vii. 802b; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 224. The same day (2 Jan.), he was a majority teller with John Fagge against granting these men their liberty in addition to their lives and estates. One of the opposing tellers in both these divisions was Hesilrige.130CJ vii. 802b. The next day (3 Jan.), Hutchinson was a teller with Fagge again, this time against the introduction of an oath devised by Hesilrige for renouncing Charles Stuart as king. Hutchinson thought it a ‘ridiculous thing to swear out a man [Charles II] when they had no power to defend themselves against him’ – by which logic he should have emulated those like Fagge who were seeking to build bridges to the royal party.131Supra, ‘John Fagge’, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; CJ vii. 803b; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 222; Baker, Chronicle, 678. But instead he defied not only Hesilrige’s faction but also, it seems, General George Monck* and his supporters, who represented the best hope by that stage of imposing limitations on a restored monarchy. Thus on 13 February, Hutchinson was a teller against commissioning Monck’s ‘creature’ Thomas Lilburne* as a major of horse.132CJ vii. 842b.

It was perhaps at some point during the latter half of February 1660 that Hutchinson allowed himself to be persuaded by Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* that Monck favoured a commonwealth, or at the very least would promote a settlement that preserved the lives, liberties and estates of even the regicides.133Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 223. At any rate, Hutchinson either supported or acquiesced in the re-admission of the secluded Members on 21 February – a move that effectively spelled the end of the good old cause.134CJ vii. 849a; Baker, Chronicle, 678, 687. His last tellership, which was on 27 February, hints at his despair and confusion, for he represented the majority in the House that favoured appointing Cromwell’s former henchman John Thurloe* – a man whom Hutchinson had doubtless despised under the protectorate – as secretary of state.135CJ vii. 855a. That same day (27 Feb.), Hutchinson was added to a committee for settling Hampton Court on Monck.136CJ vii. 855a. Hutchinson had thrown in his lot with Monck, but would not take the next logical step, urged on him by ‘divers of his friends ... to fall in with the king’s interest’.137Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 223-4; Ludlow, Mems. ii. 286. His 11 committee appointments in the last months of the Long Parliament reveal no clear pattern except his commitment to some form of republican settlement and his abiding hatred of the Lambertonians.138CJ vii. 800a, 803a, 806a, 806b, 818a, 821a, 822a, 841b, 854a, 855a, 856a.

In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Hutchinson put himself forward for one of the Nottinghamshire county places, but stood aside at the request of William Pierrepont and was returned instead for Nottingham.139Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 224, 226; HP Commons, 1660-90. On 3 May, a week or so after the Convention had assembled, Hutchinson delivered a ‘public recantation’ in the Commons, but what exactly he said on this occasion is not known.140CCSP v. 8; Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and oblivion’, 241, 247. On 12 May, he was called on by the House to explain his part in the regicide and declared that ‘what was done by him was out of no ill intent, that he hath seen the ill effects of it and hath since endeavoured to bring the king back’ – a reference, it seems, to his support for Monck and the re-admission of the secluded Members.141Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 228; D. Hirst, ‘Remembering a hero: Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs’, EHR cxix. 682, 687-8; Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and oblivion’, 241-2. This qualified repentance was ‘very handsomely delivered’, but as Hutchinson realised, more would be required of him if he was to escape the vengeance of the resurgent cavalier interest. Either he, or Lucy, or both of them, drafted a letter to the Commons in which he admitted that his speech on 12 May ‘was not a sufficient expression of that deep and sorrowful sense which so heavily presses my soul, for the unfortunate guilt that lies upon it’.142Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 229-30, 290; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 39. (Lucy’s claim that it was she who had concocted this letter, unbeknownst to her husband, and had forged his signature to it has been both contested and cautiously affirmed).143Hirst, ‘Remembering a hero’, 684; Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and oblivion’, 263, 268. This letter mixed truths (his defiance of Cromwell), half-truths (that he had supported Monck against the republican interest) and downright falsehoods (that he had sat in the restored Rump in the hope of serving the king).144Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 290-2; Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and oblivion’, 278-9. When it was read in the House on 5 June it was ‘very well received’, and many Members spoke eloquently on his behalf, including his brother-in-law Sir Allen Apsley, Sir George Boothe and William Pierrepont.145CJ viii. 56a; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 230-1; HP Commons 1660-1690; Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and oblivion’, 252. In respect of his ‘signal repentance’, the House ordered on 9 June that he be disabled from sitting, but indemnified under the Act of Pardon and Oblivion as to his life and estate.146CJ viii. 60a. To the Lords, Hutchinson submitted a ‘humble and sorrowful’ acknowledgement of his crimes, along with a certificate signed by Ashley Cooper and eight others of ‘impeccable loyalty’ attesting to his crypto-royalist sympathies.147HMC 7th Rep. 120-1; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 232-3; HP Commons 1660-1690. The Lords accepted these statements, largely false though they were, and on 23 July removed his name from the record of those who had attended the king’s trial.148LJ xi. 101b.

Although Hutchinson had escaped with his life and estate, he was a marked man with many powerful enemies, most notably the 1st earl of Clarendon (Sir Edward Hyde*).149Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 232, 236, 238, 255, 256. In 1663, his name was mentioned in connection with the Derwentdale Plot, and despite the lack of hard evidence against him he was imprisoned in the Tower in November for ‘treasonable designs and practices’.150Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 243-9; CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 314, 329. In the spring of 1664, he was moved to Sandown Castle in Kent, where he died on 11 September.151CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 574, 579, 662; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 261, 272. His body was released to Lucy Hutchinson and he was buried at Owthorpe.152CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 13; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 274. He wrote a will while he was a prisoner in the Tower, but there is no record that it was ever proved, and no copy has survived.153Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 271. His half-brother Charles Hutchinson†, who purchased Hutchinson’s debt-ridden estate in 1671, sat for Nottingham as a whig from 1690 until his death in 1695.154HP Commons 1690-1715.