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John Hutchinson (Soldier)

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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John Hutchinson (Writer)

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JOHN HUTCHINSON (1615-1664), Puritan soldier, son of Sir Thomas Hutchinson of Owthorpe, Nottinghamshire, and of Margaret, daughter of Sir John Byron of Newstead, was baptized on the 18th of September 1615. He was educated at Nottingham and Lincoln schools and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and in 1637 he entered Lincoln's Inn. On the outbreak of the great Rebellion he took the side of the Parliament, and was made in 1643 governor of Nottingham Castle, which he defended against external attacks and internal divisions, till the triumph of the parliamentary cause. He was chosen member for Nottinghamshire in March 1646, took the side of the Independents, opposed the offers of the king at Newport, and signed the deathwarrant. Though a member at first of the council of state, he disapproved of the subsequent political conduct of Cromwell and took no further part in politics during the lifetime of the protector. He resumed his seat in the recalled Long Parliament in May 1659, and followed Monk in opposing Lambert, believing that the former intended to maintain the commonwealth. He was returned to the Convention Parliament for Nottingham but expelled on the 9th of June 1660, and while not excepted from the Act of Indemnity was declared incapable of holding public office. In October 1663, however, he was arrested upon suspicion of being concerned in the Yorkshire plot, and after a rigorous confinement in the Tower of London, of which he published an account (reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. iii.), and in Sandown Castle, Kent, he died on the 11th of September 1664. His career draws its chief interest from the Life by his wife, Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, written after the death of her husband but not published till 1806 (since often reprinted), a work not only valuable for the picture which it gives of the man and of the time in which he lived, but for the simple beauty of its style, and the naivete with which the writer records her sentiments and opinions, and details the incidents of her private life.

See the edition of Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson by C. H. Firth (1885); Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 25,901 (a fragment of the Life ), also Add. MSS. 19, 333, 36,247 f. 51; Notes and Queries, 7, ser. iii. 25, viii. 422; Monk's Contemporaries, by Guizot.