Remembering a Hero: Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of her Husband

The dramatic high-point of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of Col. John Hutchinson is the account of the Colonel’s escape from execution at the Restoration as a regicide. Her story of his unflinching honour and her own loving disobedience – a disobedience that rescued him from an impenitent traitor’s fate...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The English historical review 2004-06, Vol.119 (482), p.682-691
Main Author: Hirst, Derek
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beliefs, opinions and attitudes
Children
Civil wars
Criticism and interpretation
Elegies
Historical analysis
Husbands
Hutchinson, Lucy
Hutchison, John
Hutchison, Lucy
Letters of support
Pardons
Personal relationships
Political protests
Recanting
Refutation
Renaissance period
Women authors
Women writers
Works
Writers
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Summary:The dramatic high-point of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of Col. John Hutchinson is the account of the Colonel’s escape from execution at the Restoration as a regicide. Her story of his unflinching honour and her own loving disobedience – a disobedience that rescued him from an impenitent traitor’s fate – has entranced generations of readers, including Whiggish, republican and feminist scholars. Despite evidential flaws, and despite long-available evidence that other republican stalwarts saw John Hutchinson in less flattering light, the power of Mrs. Hutchinson’s narrative has swept doubts aside. An overlooked parliamentary diary of the 1660 Convention makes reconsideration of that narrative unavoidable, for the diarist heard the Colonel abjectly repudiate his republican past. Events in 1660 were not as Lucy Hutchinson represented them. That fact must call her motives into question as she wove her history of Col. Hutchinson’s life. Although the Memoirs present her as selfless author and paragon of wifely duty, she stood at a political distance from her husband. In her writing she elided that distance and remade her husband, and in so doing committed acts of imaginative resistance as great as the political resistance in 1660 she (wrongly) attributed to herself. That Lucy Hutchinson’s account has won so much acceptance, in spite of the evidence, perhaps speaks to our own taste for heroes as well as to her narrative skills
ISSN:0013-8266
1477-4534
DOI:10.1093/ehr/119.482.682