“Not so much open professed enemies as close hypocritical false-hearted people”: Lucy Hutchinson’s manuscript account of the services of John Hutchinson and mid-seventeenth-century factionalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1640s, Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) wrote a manuscript account of her husband’s “services” to the city of Nottingham, a text to which she would return when she came to write the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson in the 1660s. As well as a detailed description of civil-war Nottinghamshire, this early manuscript traces the factious relationships between the Independent, John Hutchinson, and his fellow Presbyterian committee members from 1641–1645. This factionalism was visible on a national scale in the mid-1640s, as divisions within Parliamentary forces played out in public thanks to the rising popularity of the printed pamphlet. This paper explores the links between Hutchinson’s seemingly private manuscript account and this burgeoning form of public news.