ABSTRACT
Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of the life and times of her husband, the republican Colonel John Hutchinson, tells the history of the English revolution from her self-declared position as his “shadow” and his champion, and from a wifely position of personal loss and political defeat. Hutchinson's Memoirs takes us to the heart of revolution and restoration in seventeenth-century England: the outbreak of civil war in 1642, the execution of King Charles I in January 1649, the establishment of the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, and the eventual restoration of the Stuart monarchy in May 1660. Composed retrospectively after the death of her husband—a signatory to Charles I's death warrant—in 1664, the Memoirs outline the virtues of John Hutchinson, the figure through whom all aspects of the historical narrative are refracted, constructing and commemorating him as one of the “late commonwealth's” great “worthies.”
