Chapter 12
We have considered the Nature of Your Majesty’s Declaration from Breda; and are humbly of opinion, that Your Majesty ought not to be pressed with it any further; because, it is not a Promise in itself, but only a gracious declaration of Your Majesty’s intentions.
Address of the House of Commons to Charles II, 27 February 1663
In London, there was ambivalence about what to do with the remaining regicides. There were those who felt the thirteen public executions comprised enough of a blood sacrifice to atone for the years of civil war; others pushed for further acts of retribution, among them the King and his inner circle of advisers who used the supposed threat of a republican resurgence in their drive to extract more revenue from Parliament.
In March 1662, Charles II summoned the Commons to Whitehall: ‘Gentlemen,’ he said,
I need not put you in mind of the miserable effects which have attended the wants and necessities of the Crown: I need not tell you, that there is a Republical Party still in the Kingdom, which have the courage to promise themselves another Revolution: and, methinks, I should as little need to tell you, that the only way, with God’s Blessing, to disappoint their hopes, and indeed to reduce them from those extravagant hopes and desires, is, to let them see that you have so provided for the Crown, that it hath wherewithal to support itself, and to secure you; which, I am sure, is all I desire, and desire only for your preservation.1
The continued punishment of those who had killed Charles I was crucial in reminding everyone how terrible things had been, and could be again, if his son was left inadequately funded. Meanwhile Nature was steadily reducing the number of those who needed to be held to account.
At the Restoration the majority of the regicides were in their fifties and sixties. Grim prison conditions and the stress of their situations added to a steady cull, of whom the defiant Sir John Bourchier had been an early example. Simon Mayne, a Buckinghamshire MP who was related to six other regicides – including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Marten – had concealed himself in a hideaway in his family seat, Dinton Hall, before surrendering in June 1660. He claimed at his trial that Thomas Chaloner had forced him into signing the death warrant, threatening that if he failed to do so his estate would be confiscated. Mayne’s health was never robust; he had been granted a special dispensation in the mid-1630s, allowing him to eat meat instead of the statutory fish on Fridays, because of his ‘notorious sickness’. Condemned to death, he cheated the executioner by succumbing to gout, complicated by fever and convulsions, in the spring of 1661. His body was released to his family, provided he was buried ‘without ostentation’.
The rotund Colonel Vincent Potter had cut a very sorry figure at the regicides’ trial. A founding member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, he had fought in the Pequot War in the 1630s, when English settlers in conjunction with Native American allies attacked the Pequot tribe. The strict Puritan had returned to England in time for the Civil War. He took an active role as a cavalry officer in Parliament’s army, before finding his true calling: controlling military logistics. Potter’s particular contribution to the cause was insisting that the New Model Army pay its way when on campaign, so that it did not alienate the local inhabitants, something the King’s forces were often guilty of.
Potter had signed not only Charles’s death warrant, but also those of the Royalist lords who followed him to the block after the Second Civil War. Arrested at the Restoration, Potter arrived in court in anguish at his plight – ‘I pray that the passing [of] the sentence for execution may be suspended’ – and racked with severe pain from kidney stones – ‘My Lord, my condition requires ease for my body.’ His request for permission to be excused from the courtroom so he could urinate was cruelly denied: the Lord Chief Baron allowed only that a chair be brought for him. When it arrived the shackled Potter was instructed to sit. ‘I hope I may be freed from irons,’ Potter continued, ‘I am in pain, and a man of bulk.’2 Pleading for mercy, his appearance in court was frequently punctuated by tears. It ended in the inevitable guilty verdict and death sentence. He was spared hanging, drawing and quartering by dying of natural causes within a year.
Christmas Day 1661 saw the death in prison of Owen Rowe, a silk merchant who also had trade ties to the American colonies: he dealt in tobacco from Virginia, and was another early investor in the Massachusetts Bay Company. Rowe had long intended to emigrate to New England, but events kept him rooted to London where he simultaneously served as a colonel of militia and arranged rich supplies for the Parliamentary cause. From his trading activities in the Atlantic, Rowe reported that the people of Bermuda remained vehemently opposed to the late King’s execution. He had countered this by effectively taking control of the colony. After casting himself on Charles II’s mercy – ‘I have heard he is a gracious King, full of lenience and mercy, [and] so I hope I shall find it’3 – he died, aged sixty-nine, in the Tower.
Sixty-two-year-old Gilbert Millington, the MP from Nottinghamshire, who had previously married a sixteen-year-old ‘alehouse wench’, had said in mitigation at his trial, ‘My Lord, I am an ancient man and deaf.’4 This had not been enough to gain mercy, but his subsequent grovelling apology to the King would spare his life, if not his property. He was sent to Mont Orgueil Castle on the east coast of Jersey, where he died within a few years – certainly before the autumn of 1666, but no record of the exact date survives. He was joined in this, Jersey’s main prison, by four fellow regicides: Thomas Waite, Rutland’s MP and commander of militia (who had hacked the hands off, and killed, Charles I’s chaplain, Hudson); Henry Smith, a Leicestershire MP and infantry colonel; James Temple, an MP and the New Model Army’s governor of Arundel Castle; and Sir Hardress Waller, one of Oliver Cromwell’s most loyal cronies, who had played a central part in Pride’s Purge, and who had been first to plead guilty to high treason at trial.
George Fleetwood, brother of General Charles Fleetwood, had expected to be pardoned: he had refused to take part in Lambert’s last rising; Monck had entrusted him with a regiment in the months leading up to the Restoration. When sentenced to death he had pleaded for mercy, pointing to his youth and reluctant endorsement of the death warrant: he had only been twenty-five and, he insisted, had been bullied into signing by Cromwell. Monck’s support saw Fleetwood’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and confiscation of his property. In 1664 an order was drawn up for him to be transported to Tangier, the North African territory that had come to Charles II as part of the dowry of his Portuguese wife, Catharine of Braganza. Prison life there was hot and hellish, the regicides’ families fearing it as a ‘barbarous and distant’5 destination for their loved ones. It is not certain if Fleetwood died there, or whether the pleading of his second wife, Hester, managed, as some claim, to secure his secret freedom; according to this version Fleetwood crossed to America and lived in Boston for the rest of his life.
The lawyer Augustine Garland had been chairman of the committee behind the King’s trial – something he tried to explain to his own judge by pointing to the chaos of the time: ‘My Lord, I did not know which way to be safe in any thing, without doors was misery, within doors was mischief.’6 Garland had been accused of being the man who spat in Charles I’s face during his trial, a charge he categorically rejected. Given his prominence in the proceedings, and the astonishing disrespect he had allegedly shown the martyred King, Garland was lucky to have his death sentence quashed. He was instead given life imprisonment. In 1664 he was transported to Tangier. He was ordered to be returned to Portsmouth’s grimly utilitarian Southsea Castle in 1677, at which point he drops out of sight.
Others who had been men of enormous power, but who eked out their final years in imprisoned anonymity, included Robert Lilburne. Monck’s predecessor as commander-in-chief of Scotland, Lilburne had surrendered in the statutory two-week period in June 1660. He was sent to Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound the next year, where he died four years later.
It was a similar tale with John Downes, who had pleaded with the High Court of Justice to hear Charles I before he was condemned – an intervention that had drawn Cromwell’s intense anger. Downes claimed at his own trial that he had only signed the King’s death warrant under duress, during a time of military dominance. ‘When those times were,’ Downes explained, ‘how impetuous the soldiers, how not a man that durst either disown them or speak against them, I was threatened with my very life, by the threats of one that hath received his reward, I was induced to it.’7 Downes was spared execution and committed to the Tower. He came close to release in early 1662, but was disappointed. Downes was still on the roll-call of prisoners in late 1666, yet when he died after that is not recorded.
For some the sentences that sent them into nameless obscurity were punctuated by deliberate, public, humiliation. ‘We walked with thousands of people to Tyburn,’ wrote the visiting Dutch artist William Schellinks on 27 January 1662, ‘and saw there Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay and Mr Wallop lying in their tabards on a little straw on a hurdle being dragged through under the gallows, where some articles were read to them and then torn up. After that they were again dragged through the streets back to the Tower. Their sentence is that they are to be dragged through under the gallows on this day every year.’8 The House of Commons had handed down this punishment to the trio, each of whom was a former MP, six months earlier. All of them were spared execution because they had neither been in court on the day of the King’s sentencing, nor signed the death warrant. But they were told they had done enough wrong by sitting as commissioners of the High Court of Justice to forfeit their freedom for ever, and also that they would have to undergo the annual humiliation witnessed by Schellinks. Their appeal to the Lords against this ‘most ignominious’ ordeal was dismissed.
Mildmay was one of the most unlikely to have his life spared: he was a significant enemy of the Crown, having assisted Thomas Scott as Parliamentary spymaster, and he had loudly opposed any compromise with the King in the weeks preceding Charles’s trial. In 1664 it was ordered that he be imprisoned in Tangier, but he died en route in Antwerp.
Monson had been given his Irish title in the third year of Charles I’s reign, but he had opposed the Crown for years, before siding with Parliament during the Civil Wars. He attended the first three days of the King’s trial and then declined to take any further part. This change of heart saved his life, after he surrendered himself in June 1660. But his claim that he had only taken part in the High Court of Justice in order to save Charles by preventing ‘that horrid murder’9 was rejected. He was stripped of his titles and possessions, and sent to the Fleet prison, an institution he knew well, having been locked up there during the Commonwealth when convicted as a debtor. This was where he died in the early 1670s.
Robert Wallop, a Hampshire MP, was a cousin of Monson’s. Wallop had mounted a similar defence to that of his relative, maintaining that he had sat as a commissioner ‘only at the request of his Majesty’s friends, in order to try to moderate their furious proceedings’.10 The Commons disregarded this excuse and he was imprisoned in the Tower, dying there in 1667.
Colonel John Hutchinson had been quickly forgiven by the Commons, thanks to the carefully pitched speech in which he presented himself as having had a reluctant and insignificant role in the drama of the King’s trial. He had also benefited from the campaign of vocal support orchestrated by his wife and by his brother-in-law, Sir Allen Apsley, one of Charles II’s hard-living set. Attention in mid-1660 had been on finding just seven scapegoats to atone for the days of rebellion against the Crown, and this Nottinghamshire gentleman-soldier was never going to warrant inclusion in such a select number.
His forgiveness was secured in that tiny window between Charles’s restoration becoming inevitable, and the insistence that all involved in his father’s death should be punished. In retrospect, many believed Hutchinson’s pardon to have been over-hasty, ill-considered and incorrect. The chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, rated him one of the most dangerous men in the kingdom. When bureaucrats retrieved the trial records from the bowels of Parliament it quickly became clear that Hutchinson had been intricately involved in its procedure. He was seen to have sat on key committees, and to have been present during most of the hearings. As the net had widened, and every signatory to the death warrant had been found answerable for his hand in Charles I’s demise, so Hutchinson’s escape became increasingly galling. When Scroope’s initial forgiveness was overturned, thanks to later testimony, many wondered if Hutchinson would be similarly up-ended.
Much would depend on Hutchinson’s attitude: the Royalists wanted to see him openly and sincerely repent for his part in the King’s trial and death. Also, with the rest of the regicides coming to trial, he was expected to repay the leniency shown to him by assisting in their prosecution.
But Hutchinson felt guilt, not gratitude, at escaping the fate being prepared for his comrades. He had come to resent his wife for having persuaded him to purchase his life with what had, at heart, been a lie. He had obeyed her in a moment of understandable weakness, but he remained proud of his cause, and his profound religious beliefs made his conscience prickle at his dishonest path to mercy. He took to reading his Bible more, finding in it many passages that confirmed his belief that what he had done in the cause of Parliament – including being one of the King’s judges – had been correct, and should be a source of pride, not shame.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer, the attorney general, summoned Hutchinson from his Nottinghamshire estate to help him prepare for his case against the twenty-nine men that were now held in custody. At their meeting Palmer suddenly produced the King’s death warrant and urged Hutchinson to share his eyewitness account of what had happened at its signing: he wanted to build a picture of each regicide’s attitude and actions at that critical event.
Hutchinson, still smarting at Colonel Ingoldsby’s life-saving lie, drily replied to Palmer that he could not even remember the moment when Cromwell allegedly ‘forced’ Ingoldsby to sign. ‘And then, Sir,’ said Hutchinson, ‘if I have lost so great a thing as that, it cannot be expected less eminent passages remain with me.’11 Palmer next urged Hutchinson to confirm the identity of each of the signatories. Hutchinson claimed this might not prove possible, since he had not corresponded with most of them, so was unfamiliar with their handwriting. When pressed to look more closely, the colonel said some of the signatures looked like ones he had seen before – but the only ones he verified were those of Cromwell, Ireton and Lord Grey of Groby – all three of whom were safely dead.
This absolute refusal to assist the prosecution was reported to Charles II, who was furious with Hutchinson, saying that the colonel would surely do to him what he had done to his father, ‘for he was still unchanged in his principles, and readier to protect than to accuse any of his associates’.12 Ingoldsby recommended that the stubborn Hutchinson be brought to court as a witness. He walked into the packed courtroom and was forced to pass in front of the defendants. Hutchinson’s feelings of fellowship with the accused, and pride in their mutual cause, were matched by his revulsion at those judges who had sided with Parliament but were now assembled to condemn their former comrades. He felt particular disgust for Monck, ‘that vile traitor who had sold the men that trusted him’,13 especially because he had supported Monck on his march south, believing that he had come to save Parliament. Hutchinson was so sickened by the level of treachery and hypocrisy on show in the courtroom that, he told his wife, had he been called to give testimony, he would have spoken for the Parliamentary cause.
At the conclusions of that first day’s hearing, Hutchinson decided he would not repeat the unedifying experience. He left London, sending a pert message to Palmer that, as he had no evidence to give, he would no longer be attending the trial. The attorney general wrote a withering critique of Hutchinson, and sent it to Charles II and Clarendon. It sealed his fate.
Hutchinson experienced a recurring dream at this time. Its central image was a boat on the River Thames which men were struggling to steer against the wind and tide, in order to bring it safely to the borough of Southwark on the far side. In the dream Hutchinson barked at his companions to stop what they were doing: ‘Let it alone, and let me try.’ He pushed the boat with his chest, his efforts easing the vessel across, allowing him to reach the far bank, where he stepped onto ‘the most pleasant lovely fields, so green and so flourishing and so embellished with the cheerful sun’.14 Here he encountered his father, who presented Hutchinson with laurel leaves. These had words written on them that he could never decipher.
Hutchinson’s wife, Lucy, felt the dream’s interpretation was clear: the boat represented the Commonwealth; the other men aboard were those who had hijacked and compromised its cause for their own benefit; while Hutchinson denoted the martyrs who could make the cause come good again – but only through the ultimate sacrifice. Having saved his life by timely pleading and influential allies, Hutchinson now seemed set on forfeiting it for a cause that he believed blended the politically desirable with God’s will. His insulting refusal to bow to the King’s wishes presented his enemies with the perfect opportunity to act against a hated and feared enemy. Clarendon admonished Sir Allen Apsley for having acted on his brother-in-law’s behalf: ‘Oh Nall! What have you done? You have saved a man that would be ready, if he had opportunity, to mischief us as much as ever he did.’15
All those who had supported the colonel’s plea were similarly reproached. The next time she was in London, Lucy Hutchinson found her carriage next to that of a cousin who was an influential courtier. From her window she called out, asking him to help her husband come to no harm. ‘I could wish it had been finished last time,’ the relative replied, ‘for your husband hath lately so behaved himself that it will pass against him.’ Startled, Mrs Hutchinson countered, ‘I pray, let my friends but do their endeavours for me, and then let it be as God will.’ The Royalist cousin replied, ominously: ‘It is not now as God will, but as we will.’16
Another relative suggested that Lucy could save her husband if she secretly handed over any useful information she could glean from him, in particular if she had any intelligence relating to Sir Henry Vane, William Pierrepoint or Oliver St John, three political enemies of the Crown; this would be of such great value that it would save her family from its otherwise inevitable loss and ruin. Lucy refused to be part of a transaction that traded her husband’s wellbeing for the lives of others. Her cousin warned that, if that were the case, the colonel must flee England as soon as possible: if he did not, it had been determined that he would be arrested on the slightest pretext, and once that happened he would have no hope of release. When Lucy passed on this advice, the colonel declined to contemplate escape, claiming that God, who had always protected him in the past, would use him as he saw fit. This was the same way of thinking that had ended in disaster for Lisle.
On a Sunday in October 1663, Colonel Hutchinson led his household’s Sunday religious service at his family seat, Owthorpe Hall, and read a New Testament lesson to his family and servants. After the ceremony, one of his retainers returned in an agitated state: soldiers were approaching. Hutchinson calmly remained in his parlour until the troops arrived. They were from the local militia, and their officer brandished a search warrant for arms, as well as an order insisting that the colonel accompany them.
For two hours the soldiers ransacked the house, turning up nothing more than four shotguns hanging in the kitchen, which were used for killing game for the pot. By the time they had finished it had become, in the words of Lucy Hutchinson, ‘as bitter a stormy, pitchy, dark, black, rainy night as any [that] came that year’.17 But the Royalists refused to allow John Hutchinson to wait till the morning, when his coach might be made ready, and had his son lead him on a horse through the hostile night. They reached the Talbot Inn in Newark at four in the morning, where Hutchinson was shown to a ‘vile’ room, which he was forced to share with two guards.
He was kept there for several days, while the Royalists returned for further searches of his house – some official, others nothing more than plundering parties. They also stationed spies to keep Owthorpe under surveillance. Meanwhile, in London, a case was being built against Hutchinson, the essence of which was that his traitor’s heart was unchanged. It became clear that the colonel had few remaining friends, even among the Parliamentarians: they suspected he had done a deal with the Crown; how else to explain his being spared the vicious death suffered by his fellow regicides?
Hutchinson was taken under cavalry escort to meet the Marquess of Newcastle. Newcastle had commanded the King’s forces in the north of England during the Civil War, at one point offering Hutchinson £10,000 and a peerage if he would surrender Nottingham. Hutchinson had refused, so keeping a key Parliamentary stronghold alive in a largely Royalist landscape. The marquess had gone into voluntary exile after the Royalist defeat at Marston Moor in 1644, returning to his previous eminence with the Restoration, although his colossal wealth had been trimmed: his wife Margaret, a playwright, estimated that supporting the King’s cause had cost the family nearly £1 million.
Newcastle was at a loss to explain Hutchinson’s arrest, confiding to him, ‘Colonel, they say you desire to know your accusers, which is more than I know.’18 Since the Crown had no case, Hutchinson dared hope that he would soon be released. Newcastle showed him a letter he had received from the Duke of Buckingham. In October 1663 the duke had helped suppress the Farnley Wood plot, a small insurrection in Yorkshire by anti-monarchists who planned to take control of the prosperous market town of Leeds, hoping this would lead to a return to the days of the republic. It was part of a minor revolt that occurred simultaneously in two other northern counties, Durham and Westmorland, involving just a hundred men, many of them former Parliamentary soldiers who mistakenly believed they would be led to glory by their old commander-in-chief, Lord Fairfax. But Fairfax was not involved in any way in this feeblest of rebellions – which did not embrace ‘one person of talent or consideration’ (Sir James Mackintosh wrote, 170 years later, in The History of England) – and the suspicion quickly arose that the entire enterprise had been one of the Royalists’ ruses to flush out enemy sympathisers. At the same time the backlash to such imagined threats gave the authorities a chance to haul in other undesirables, by pretending they were guilty by association. Charges of setting up the innocent were strongly refuted at the time, Royalist propagandists stating that only ‘Pens that were dipt in the blood of the late King’19 could dare write such outrageous lies. But what happened to John Hutchinson proves otherwise.
Newcastle had released Hutchinson on the basis that there was no charge to answer. A few days later, though, having been advised by Buckingham that, ‘though he could not make it out as yet, he hoped he should bring Mr Hutchinson into the plot’,20 the marquess sent his apologies along with a fresh arrest force to Owthorpe, to bring the colonel in once more. This time he was placed under close arrest and forbidden use of pen or paper. He was kept in a harsh prison in Newark, where his fragile health quickly crumbled, before being taken south to the Tower of London.
There, Hutchinson was questioned by one of the senior politicians in the land: the newly ennobled Lord Arlington was a favourite of Charles II, and part of his duties was the securing and managing of the King’s mistresses. Arlington presented a bizarre face to the world, choosing to cover a wound he had received on the bridge of his nose, in a Civil War skirmish, with a prominent black plaster. Arlington received Hutchinson in his rooms in Whitehall and presented him with fifteen questions relating to his political and religious beliefs, the identity of his friends, and his recent whereabouts. Dissatisfied with the colonel’s replies, Arlington warned that he would be recalled for further interrogation.
Hutchinson was eating supper in his cell one evening when Arlington made good his threat. A strong escort arrived and took him by boat from the Tower to Whitehall. There, he was informed, he would be questioned again, within the hearing of the King. After a long wait Arlington arrived and steered Hutchinson away from the guards in the room towards a window. ‘Mr Hutchinson,’ he said, ‘you have now been some days in prison. Have you recollected yourself any more to say than when I last spoke to you?’ The colonel said he had nothing to offer. ‘Are you sure of that?’ continued Arlington.
‘Very sure.’
‘Then you must return to prison.’21
Now he came under the full oppressiveness of Sir John Robinson’s rotten regime in the Tower of London. For several weeks he was denied visits from his wife and when at last they were reunited, it was in the presence of a warder. The Hutchinsons’ children were allowed to see their father after the payment of bribes.
It was a freezing winter, and Hutchinson was frail. He was kept in a cell that had reputedly held the ‘Princes in the Tower’. The only open windows there were high above his bed. These let in the cold while giving him little light. His poor health was greeted with indifference by his guards. One day, while huddled by his fire, Hutchinson was approached by one of the sentries. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘God bless you! I have sometimes guarded you in another manner at the Parliament House, and am grieved to see the change of your condition, and only take this employment now to be more able to serve you, still hoping to see you restored to what I have seen you [be].’22 Hutchinson suspected this was an attempt at entrapment and said he had no need of the man’s services. The guard slipped away, saying he would only reappear once he had established his dependability. He approached Frances Lambert, wife of the imprisoned Parliamentary general, for whom he had smuggled messages. She happily vouched for him, before being persuaded by her daughter that what she had done was naïve in the extreme: clearly, she said, her mother was the victim of a Royalist deception.
To save herself, Frances Lambert reported the soldier for trying to trick ‘her under colour of a message from Colonel Hutchinson’. Robinson set about rooting out the man in his ranks who was secretly helping the prisoners and their families. Hutchinson was presented with a line-up of those under suspicion, but refused to identify the guilty man. It did not help: one of the Lamberts’ maids was less protective, quickly pointing him out; he turned out to be a former Parliamentary soldier, who had taken his current job because he needed the money. He had secretly maintained his former loyalty, and helped the prisoners as best he could. For this, he was cashiered and imprisoned. Meanwhile Hutchinson’s custodians again noted his impenetrable obstinacy, and felt confirmed in their belief that the colonel could never be reformed, and should never be released.
The few implicated in the Farnley Wood plot had been quickly dealt with – some hanged from chains, before being beheaded and quartered. Hearings followed to establish who else might have had a hand in the uprising. To the disappointment of the Duke of Buckingham there was no evidence of Hutchinson having been involved in any way as a conspirator.
Lucy Hutchinson secured an audience with Arlington, asking that her husband be released: apart from the effect on his health, she said, his estate in Nottinghamshire was suffering greatly because he was unable to administer it while kept close prisoner. Arlington told her that her husband should blame his current suffering on his former crimes. She countered that he was no criminal – a fact proven by his having been excused under the Act of Oblivion. As she left their meeting Arlington told Sir Robert Byron, a cousin of Colonel Hutchinson’s, ‘that he had heard Mrs Hutchinson relate the sad condition of her husband and his house’, ‘and,’ said he, ‘you may here take notice how the justice of God pursues those murderers, that, though the King pardoned both his life and estate, by the hand of divine justice they were now like to come to ruin for that crime’.23
Two men who had been arrested after the Farnley Wood plot, named Neville and Salloway, were granted their freedom after signing an oath of complete and undying obedience to Charles II. Hutchinson now took the final step away from possible redemption. Presented with the same document, he refused to put his name to it. He told his wife that ‘this captivity was the happiest release in the world to him’, because through it he had retrieved his honour and conscience. His beliefs were confirmed by the reports he heard about Charles II and his dissipated court: he viewed them with utter disgust.
Sir Allen Apsley asked Lord Clarendon one final time to release his brother-in-law, saying there was no difference between Hutchinson and the pardoned Mr Salloway. ‘Surely there is a great difference,’ Clarendon replied; ‘Salloway conforms to the government, and goes to church, but your brother is the most unchanged person of the Parliamentary party.’24
Hutchinson now told his wife and Apsley to stop their representations on his behalf. He had accepted his lot. Hearing that he and the other regicides were to be moved to far-flung prisons – he was earmarked for the Isle of Man – he began writing an account of his five and a half months of poor treatment at the hands of the Royalists. Every week in the custody of Sir John Robinson added to Hutchinson’s litany of complaints: on one occasion the lieutenant had extorted £50 from him in order to allow his children to visit.
Robinson lost no opportunity to incriminate Hutchinson further. On 19 April 1664, according to Hutchinson’s son, Robinson ‘told the King, that when Mr Heveningham and others [of the regicides] were carried out of the Tower to be shipped away, Mr Hutchinson, looking out of his window, bade them take courage, they should yet have a day for it’.25 This was, quite simply, a lie. Its malicious dishonesty infuriated the colonel more than all the other slights he had suffered up to that point.
Having decided he had little to lose, Hutchinson wrote to Robinson listing the many corrupt practices he knew him to be guilty of and threatening to expose him. The immediate consequence of this was the soldiers of the Tower being given fifteen of the twenty-two months’ wages due to them. The guards knew Hutchinson was responsible for their payment, and were grateful. But Robinson was quick to gain his vengeance. He ordered the colonel to be searched, and found a note with the first verse of the 43rd Psalm on it, concealed in his clothes: ‘Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.’ Robinson made public his belief that the ‘deceitful and unjust man’ was the King, knowing in his heart that the reference was to him.
Out of spite, Robinson took away Hutchinson’s retainer, and forbade Lucy from visiting her husband. This ban was only overturned when she threatened to publish the colonel’s letter about his ill-treatment. For the first and only time during the imprisonment they were allowed a day together, undisturbed.
One night Robinson’s deputy, Cresset, came to Hutchinson’s cell to tell him that the next day he would be moved to Sandown Castle in Kent. Hutchinson was too ill to go by horse, but a sympathetic Royalist officer paid for him to be transported by boat to Gravesend. His wife and children followed in another vessel.
‘When he came to the castle,’ Mrs Hutchinson recalled, ‘he found it a lamentable old ruined place, almost a mile distant from the town, the rooms all out of repair, not weather free, no kind of accommodation either for lodging or diet, or any conveniency of life.’ This grim prison was garrisoned by half a dozen third-rate troops under the command of an impoverished lieutenant, who lived with his family in the keep. With Hutchinson’s arrival, ‘a squadron of foot were sent from Dover to help to guard the place, pitiful weak fellows, half-starved and eaten up with vermin, whom the governor of Dover cheated of half their pay, and the other half they spent in drink’. Hutchinson’s accommodation was wretched, his cell part of the castle’s intricate system of passages. He had to buy bedding from a nearby inn, and organise for his windows to be glazed. The air was ‘so unwholesome and damp’, Lucy Hutchinson noted, ‘that even in the summer time the colonel’s hat-case and trunks, and everything of leather, would be every day all covered over with mould’.
There was nowhere in the castle for the Hutchinson family to stay: they lodged in Deal, making daily visits to and from the colonel on foot. Hutchinson’s wife and daughter would often scour the beach for seashells, which the colonel enjoyed sorting and tracing. His chief pastime though was studying the Bible: it became his exclusive reading during the remainder of his imprisonment. Buoyed by what he read, the colonel told his wife of his confidence that the cause he believed in so passionately would rise again one day, because ‘the interest of God was so much involved in it’. Mrs Hutchinson agreed, but said she feared that, given his poor health, he would die in prison before this could come about. ‘I think I shall not,’ he replied, ‘but, if I do, my blood will be so innocent, I shall advance the cause more by my death, hasting the vengeance of God upon my unjust memories, than I could by all the actions of my life.’26
George Hutchinson, the colonel’s brother, arrived at Sandown Castle with good news: Lord Arlington had signed an order allowing the prisoner to walk along the beach, provided he was accompanied by guards. The colonel spent his shoreline strolls discussing the likely future of England with his family.
During his time in captivity on the south coast, Hutchinson’s heart remained hundreds of miles further north, at Owthorpe Hall. When his wife planned to visit the family home, he gave her plans for new plantings in the garden, and for modifications to the structure of the house. ‘You give me these orders, as if you were to see that place again,’ she said. ‘If I do not,’ he replied, ‘I thank God I can cheerfully forgo it, but I will not distrust that God will bring me back again, and therefore I will take care to keep it while I have it.’
Lucy Hutchinson set off for home, worried that she had seen her husband for the last time: she suspected the government was keeping him on the south coast before sailing him away to final imprisonment in Tangier.
While she was gone, in early September, Hutchinson fell into a violent fever after a walk on the beach. His grave illness was punctuated by moments of lucidity, during which he turned to his Bible. Dr Jachin, a famous physician, was summoned from Canterbury to tend the distinguished prisoner. He knew the castle, and asked his companion two questions: what sort of man was the colonel? And in what room was he being kept? When told Hutchinson was frail, and that he was being detained in his passageway cell, the doctor said this would prove to be a wasted journey, ‘for that chamber had killed’. He gave Hutchinson a potion to help him sleep, and placed poultices on his temples. Seeing no improvement in his patient, Jachin warned the colonel’s brother that he would ‘soon fall into ravings and die’. When informed of this Colonel Hutchinson replied, ‘The will of the Lord be done: I am ready for it.’
He became ever weaker, his pulse flickering. When someone mentioned his wife’s name, he summoned his final energy and said, lucidly, ‘Alas, how will she be surprised!’
Those were his last words. Eleven months after his arrest on a fabricated charge, he died.
When doctors cut him open to inspect his innards, they noted two or three purple spots on his lungs, as well as that he had an enlarged gall bladder. His body was taken back to the family vault at Owthorpe for burial.
Lucy Hutchinson was overcome by the tragic trajectory of the colonel’s life: ‘I have often admired, when I have considered the abounding of God’s favour in the want of all things, that he who had had a comfortable house of his own, attendants, and all things that any gentleman of his quality could require from his infancy till his imprisonment, should come to die in a vile chamber, untrimmed and unhung, in a poor wretched bed without his wife, children, servants and relations about him, and all his former employments taken from him.’27 The Royalists had let Hutchinson go prematurely during the first, heady, days of the Restoration – but they got their man, in the end.