2004/06/01 by D. Hirst, Derek Hirst · 30 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Art #Aside #Classics #HERO #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #History #Honour #Law #Literature #Memoir #Narrative #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Power (physics) #Resistance (ecology) #Witness
paper · doi:10.1093/ehr/119.482.682
published in The English Historical Review 119(482), 682-691 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2004/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
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