Lucy Hutchinson was born on 29th Jan 1620 at the Tower of London. Lucy spent most of her childhood reading, hating more feminine pursuits such as sewing. She composed works of poetry and translated several religious works from Latin into English.
Lucy married John Hutchinson in 1638, John being attracted by her scholarly accomplishments. The couple moved to the Hutchinson estate in Nottinghamshire a few years later. John and Lucy had nine children together.
When civil war brought out in 1642 Lucy encouraged John to take up arms against the king and fight for Parliament. John was appointed governor of Nottingham Castle in 1643. Lucy spent most of the war at the castle, keeping a diary and nursing wounded soldiers – both Royalist and Parliamentarian.
John Hutchinson was one of the men who signed King Charles I’s death warrant in 1649. John was spared the full horror of a traitor’s death (hanging, disembowelled whilst still alive, and then quartered), when Charles II returned to England in 1660. But he spends his final years imprisoned in the Tower of London, dying of fever there in 1664. Lucy lived on for several more years, dying in 1681 at the family estate of Owlthorpe in Nottingham.
Lucy’s fame today rests mainly on her ‘Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson’, based mainly on the diaries she kept during the civil wars.
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