Keynote Speakers

Photograph of Ann Hughes

Professor Ann Hughes (Keele University)

The Governor’s Wife: Women and Garrisons in the Civil War.
In her Life of John Hutchinson, Lucy Hutchinson gives a detailed, mostly conventional political and military account of her husband’s zealous service for the parliament, beset by royalist enemies, reluctant townspeople and parliamentarian rivals. There are only glimpses of what we might, simplistically, think of as the more ‘domestic’ aspects of garrison life in Nottingham Castle: the disputes over the Governor’s ‘table’; the opposition to Lucy Hutchinson’s care for wounded royalist prisoners, and the public nature of the Hutchinsons’ doubts and ultimate rejection of infant baptism. Garrisons were places of urban sociability and domestic life as well as centres of military power. Women were present in them and active in military affairs, medical and domestic support, and, sometimes, as literary scholars have noted, writing. This paper will attempt to ‘gender’ garrison warfare, assessing and contextualising Lucy Hutchinson’s activities and her account of the war in Nottingham, and offer comparisons with the roles of women in other garrisons including Warwick and Liverpool, and, of course, the Cavendish sisters at Welbeck.

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Ann Hughes is Professor (Emerita) of Early Modern History at Keele University (United Kingdom) where she taught for almost twenty years, following spells at the Open and Manchester Universities. Her research focuses on the religious and political implications of the revolutionary crisis in mid-seventeenth century Britain, with particular recent interests in print culture and modes of communication, in preaching, and in gender. She is the author of many essays and articles, including ‘Men, the ‘public' and the ‘private' in the English Revolution’ in The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, edited Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (Manchester University Press, 2007) and of four books: Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire (Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Causes of the English Civil War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1998); Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge, 2011); and she co-edited, with Thomas Corns and David Loewenstein, The Complete Works of the radical visionary, GerrardWinstanley (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her work has been supported by grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, and by fellowships at the Huntington and Folger Shakespeare Libraries. She is currently working on studies of Parliamentarian and Puritan preaching in mid-seventeenth century England, and on the complex engagements of women and men with the parliamentarian war-time state.

Photograph of Elizabeth St John.

Elizabeth St. John (Friends of Lydiard Park)

Family Ties: How Lucy Hutchinson’s Royalist Family Impacted her Puritan Reality
Lucy Hutchinson was born into a life of power and privilege at the Queen’s House in the Tower of London. In her formative years she lived the highly advantaged life of a young girl whose father, Sir Allen Apsley, was a trusted advisor to King Charles I. Her station came as result of her mother’s aristocratic connections – Lucy St.John was born into an ancient English family proud of its royal ancestors, and Hutchinson’s aunt, Barbara St.John Villiers, leveraged the patronage of her brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, to facilitate Apsley’s purchase of the office of Lieutenant of the Tower. By the time Lucy married Colonel John Hutchinson, civil war was imminent. But, despite Lucy embracing Colonel Hutchinson’s parliamentary views, and ultimately his role as a regicide, she maintained loving ties with her Royalist brother Allen, and favourite cousin Anne Wilmot, Countess of Rochester. And, throughout the interregnum and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy, Lucy Hutchinson accepted assistance from her influential Royalist relatives to secure a death sentence pardon for her husband, the king-killer. In this presentation, Elizabeth St.John explores Lucy Hutchinson’s powerful Royalist family connections, and how the St.John, Wilmot and Villiers families impacted Lucy’s life—ultimately securing the fate of the Memoirs.

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Elizabeth St.John spends her time between California, England, and the past. A best-selling author and historian, she has tracked down family papers and residences from Lydiard Park and Nottingham Castle to Fonmon Castle and the Tower of London. Her critically-acclaimed novels “The Lydiard Chronicles” draw inspiration from Lucy Hutchinson’s biographical fragment contained within “Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson.” Although the family sold a few country homes along the way (it's hard to keep a good castle going these days), Elizabeth's family still occupy them - in the form of portraits, memoirs, and gardens that carry their imprint. And the occasional ghost. But that's a different story…

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