Yet after all this he is gone hence, and I remain, an
airy phantasm walking about his sepulchre and waiting for the harbinger of day
to summon me out of these midnight shades to my desired rest — Lucy Hutchinson,
Final Meditation'
"I write not for the presse to boast my own weakness to
the world" — Lucy Hutchinson.
Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution by Claire
Gheeraert-Graffeuille is an extremely important and long overdue evaluation of Lucy
Hutchinson's historical writings and her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel
Hutchinson. The memoirs, although written between 1664 and 1667, were not
published until 1806, and the Memoirs were largely forgotten in the twentieth
century. It could be said that Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille rescues Lucy
Hutchinson from the condescension of history.
Gheeraert-Graffeuille has had a little help in this rescue mission.
The early 1980s saw more historians and literary scholars interested in Hutchinson
and other female writers. Hutchinson's book challenges the assumption that
early modern women could not write the history of the English Revolution. Gheeraert-Graffeuille
shows that Lucy Hutchinson was a reader of ancient history and a gifted historian
of the English Revolution. She should be ranked alongside Richard Baxter,
Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.
The 17th-century philosopher and historian Lucy Hutchinson
was the wife of Colonel Hutchinson, a regicide who sent Charles I to his
execution in 1649. Without his wife's memoirs, this significant figure of the
English Revolution would have been lost to history.
Lucy Hutchinson was born in 1620 to a class of landowning
merchants. She had a comfortable childhood, and her father was a lieutenant of
the Tower of London. Hutchinson was part of a growing gentry, later among the most dominant
class forces during the English Revolution. From a political standpoint, she
dominated the marriage. She was able to pursue a significant political
involvement that was not available to most women. However, she could not
publish under her name using her husbands or remaining anonymous.
At the beginning of the English Revolution, the Hutchinson
family rejected the Royalist cause and became firm Republicans. Her book Memoirs
of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson is an extremely important
documentation of the English Revolution. While an intimate account of her
husband's actions during the revolution, it is a highly lucid political and sociological
analysis of British history's only successful social revolution.
Gheeraert-Graffeuille seeks to restore Hutchinson to the pantheon of writers of the 17th-century English Revolution. Figures like Thomas Hobbes, one of the most important early materialist thinkers, tend to dominate mainstream accounts of the English Revolution.
Hobbes wrote at a time of war And revolution in Europe. Particularly
endemic was the Thirty Years War. This war shaped Hobbes's world view leading
him to write his world-famous view of the state of nature expressed in chapter
13 of Leviathan, in which he describes the life of man in a state of nature as "solitary,
poore, nasty, brutish and short." The state of nature was how human
society fell when civil society broke down. Ann Talbot said, "For Hobbes,
the state of nature was not an abstract, theoretical construct. It was
something that existed in large parts of Europe. Hobbes's response to these
very real causes of fear was to attempt to construct a scientific and
materialist theory of politics that was revolutionary in its implications and
was to reverberate through the Enlightenment.
Hutchinson was a different type of thinker than Hobbes. As
Chris Dite writes, "Hutchinson diverges from Hobbes. "Disorder"
is not some wild state of nature but the corrupt existence of man-made
hierarchies. "Order" is their destruction and replacement with
something natural, good and just. Think of her order-and-disorder schema as a
kind of "socialism or barbarism" for the first revolutionary movement
of early capitalism."[1]
Hutchinson, according to Dite, sought to steer a middle
course. He writes, "Two disastrous poles emerge in Hutchinson's account.
The first is Oliver Cromwell and his Grandees, who successfully vie for a republican
oligarchy. Hutchinson is too proudly independent to support their brutal
centralisation, and she condemns them as corrupt slaves to their ambition. The
second is the Diggers — proto-communists who "endeavoured the levelling of
all estates and qualities." This is no less disturbing to Hutchinson, who
viewed private estates — overseen by good-hearted landlords committed to
justice for the poor and the mighty — as the model community. So this
victorious Hutchinson — so attuned to the power dynamics of revolutionary
change — finds herself too "virtuous" to further usher in any new
world. As Cromwell's dictatorship fell apart upon his death, the monarchy
returned to power in 1660. John was arrested on suspicion of plotting against
King Charles II and died in prison."
Despite the woeful lack of media coverage, this is an
important book. It rightfully restores Lucy Hutchinson's place amongst the
great figures of the 17th century, such as Hobbes, Harrington, Baxter,
Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.
