The Augustan Reprint Society

JOHN TUTCHIN
SELECTED POEMS

(1685-1700)

INTRODUCTION
BY
SPIRO PETERSON

PUBLICATION NUMBER 110
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1964

INTRODUCTION

When John Tutchin died on September 23, 1707, he had already created the image of himself which Alexander Pope has transmitted to posterity. There, in Book II of The Dunciad (1728), the Whig journalist appears as one of two figures in a "shaggy Tap'stry":

Pope, in his variorum notes on the passage, identified Tutchin as the "author of some vile verses, and of a weekly paper call'd the Observator," and revived the fiction of his sentence "to be whipp'd thro' several towns in the west of England, upon which he petition'd King James II. to be hanged." The "invective" against James II's memory, which Pope mentions, has now been identified in the Twickenham Edition as The British Muse: or Tyranny Expos'd (1701).[1] By 1728, this was all the reputation that remained for Mr. John Tutchin, Gentleman—irascible journalist, pamphleteer, and writer of verses.

The truth of the matter is that Pope was no more accurate about Tutchin's being whipped than about Defoe's losing his ears. From the sparse reliable information concerning Tutchin's early years, one consistent pattern emerges: he tended to depict himself as a hero and a martyr. Born in 1661 "a Freeman" of London, he was brought up in a family of scholarly nonconformist ministers probably on the Isle of Wight[2]. Even though an enemy claimed that he had been expelled from a school at Stepney for stealing (DNB), he received some education and travelled on the continent. In defending his skill with languages against Defoe, he once told how at his school, boys translated and capped verses, and how he travelled "from Leivarden in Friezland, thro' Holland and the Spanish Flanders."[3] Throughout his life, he proudly designated himself a gentleman: during his trial for libel in late June of 1704, he even escaped punishment by setting forth that he was a gentleman, and not a laborer as the indictment read.

In later life, he romanticized himself when young as the hero who fought in the Duke of Monmouth's rebellion, received the brutal "whipping sentence" from Lord Chief-Justice Jeffreys during "the bloody assezes" of 1685, petitioned James II for "the Favour of being hang'd" to avoid the sentence, and finally freed himself by paying so burdensome a bribe that he was reduced to poverty. All these claims were first made in "The Case, Trial, and Sentence of Mr. John Tutchin, and Several Others, in Dorchester, in the County of Dorset," which Tutchin added to the fifth edition of The Western Martyrology; or, the Bloody Assizes, published in 1705. As J. G. Muddiman demonstrated in 1929, most of these claims are outright fabrications. Tutchin was never indicted for high treason, he could never have been challenged by Jeffreys to cap verses, and he invented the petition to be hanged.[4] In The Observator (July 25-29, 1702), he honestly admitted that he was never tried in Devonshire, but claimed he did buy his liberty of James II; and in a later issue (Aug. 4-7, 1703) he challenged an enemy: "if he Pleases to give the World an Account, When, Where, and for What I was Whip'd thro' a Market-Town, he will inform Mankind of more than I or any Body else knows...." John Dunton believed in the whipping sentence; and Defoe, the story of the petition to be hanged. Throughout Tutchin's stormy career, his enemies made political capital of the flogging that never took place. He was probably twenty-four years old when, using the alias "Thomas Pitts," he was tried at Dorchester for "Spreading false news and fined five marks and sentenced to be whipped"—but he came down with smallpox and so was not whipped.[5] Lord Macaulay, who is incorrect on the facts taken from The Western Martyrology, certainly exaggerated in stating that Tutchin's temper was "exasperated to madness by what he had undergone."[6] That the Monmouth adventure and its aftermath mark a turning point in the young man's life, however, cannot doubted.

Tutchin may have fought with William III's army in Ireland as an officer.[7] After the Glorious Revolution and the establishment of William and Mary on the throne, Tutchin devoted himself to a succession of liberal causes. On