Women poets of the English Civil War

Sarah C. E. Ross

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780719086243
• eBook ISBN: 9781526125040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Featuring modernised spelling and detailed explanatory notes, this anthology of Civil War-era women poets is perfect for students of English literature and early modern studies.

Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681)

Lucy Hutchinson was an educated republican and religious Independent (believing that church congregations should govern themselves rather than be subject to ecclesiastical or state governance). She was born in 1620 to enlightened parents, Sir Allen Apsley and Lucy St John, who furnished the young Lucy Apsley with an education rivalling that of most boys of the period. While Lucy Apsley’s later identity as a puritan and parliamentarian was influenced by her mother’s religion, her father’s strong royalist connections also influenced the writer. Both her brothers fought for the king, and her cousin Anne St John married Henry Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and was the mother of John Wilmot, the Restoration’s most notorious courtly debauché. Hutchinson’s royalist associations are played out in her reading matter, and the poems included in this anthology reveal diverse literary influences. Lucy Apsley married John Hutchinson in 1638 and several years later moved to Nottinghamshire, where John Hutchinson took up the post of governor of Nottingham Castle. Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson recounts in detail her husband’s actions through civil war and her version of its causes. John Hutchinson spent much time and thought over his decision to sign Charles I’s death warrant.

The couple spent the 1650s mostly at the Owthorpe estate, managing the land and property, and it was probably at this time that Hutchinson wrote much of her poetry, including her version of Lucretius’ Epicurean poem De rerum natura, which was one of the first translations into English of this radical and influential work. This was not a time of retreat from politics, however, as shown by ‘To Mr Waller upon his Panegyric to the Lord Protector’, her vicious parody of Edmund Waller’s ‘Panegyric to my Lord Protector’. This poem shows the couple’s increasing frustration and disillusionment at what had happened to the godly republic for which they had hoped and worked. This was only intensified at the Restoration. Though John Hutchinson was not executed with many other regicides, he was certainly at risk, and it was probably the support of his wife’s family (through both St John and Apsley sides) which saved him. Hutchinson also tells in Memoirs of how she intervened even more actively, forging his signature on a letter recanting his republican views. Whether Hutchinson did indeed forge her husband’s letter, or whether he wrote it and wished to whitewash his reputation after his death by claiming he remained true to his principles, is still a matter of considerable scholarly debate.

John Hutchinson was, however, arrested in 1663 on suspicion of participation in a Fifth Monarchist plot and died in prison in 1664. Much less is known about Hutchinson’s life in the decade after her husband’s death. She managed the Owthorpe estate and continued to write, producing among other things a manuscript collection of poignant and political elegies...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Further reading
• Anne Bradstreet
• Hester Pulter
• Katherine Philips
• Margaret Cavendish
• Lucy Hutchinson
• Textual introduction
• Textual notes
• Index of first lines