Hutchinson, COLONEL JOHN

Hutchinson, COLONEL JOHN, the type of the Puritan gentleman, was the son of Sir Thomas Hutchinson, and was born at Nottingham in September 1615. He studied at Cambridge, and next for a short time at Lincoln's Inn, and married in 1638 Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley. He now retired to Owythorpe, and here his meditations on the troubled theology and politics of the time led him at last to side with the parliament rather than the king. He became governor of Nottingham, and successfully held the town against enemies without and intrigue and calumny from within till the close of the struggle. About the beginning of the year 1646 he was sent up by Nottingham to fill his father's place in the parliament, and later sat as one of the commissioners in the High Court of Justice for the king's trial, and signed the warrant for his execution. He sat in the first council of state, but gradually became alarmed at the ambitious schemes of Cromwell, and ceased to take an active part in politics. At the Restoration, along with other regicides, he was included in the Act of Amnesty, but later was imprisoned for about a year in the Tower and at Sandown Castle in Kent on a groundless suspicion of treasonable conspiracy, and died 11th September 1664. The Memoirs, written by his widowed wife for her children, was first published in 1806, and revealed to the world a delightful picture of a grave and courteous gentleman, beautiful and accomplished; tender to his family and the poor; fearless, frank, and honest in temper; intense in devotion, yet entirely free from austerity and fanaticism. The unsought beauty of the style, and the absolute sincerity and truthfulness of the narrative, give the book an almost unique place among English biographies, and the tender devotedness of loving memory with which throughout it is informed has still power to touch the modern reader with a thrill of sympathetic emotion. An excellent edition, by C. H. Firth, was published in 1885.