Killers of the King

by Charles Spencer

  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 mistakenl
y 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’.