John Tutchin

John Tutchin (c.1660/1664 – 23 September 1707) was a radical Whig controversialist and gadfly English journalist (born in Lymington, Hampshire), whose The Observator and earlier political activism earned him multiple trips before the bar. He was of a Puritan background and held strongly anti-Catholic views.

In 1685 he wrote Poems on several occasions. With a pastoral. To which is added, a discourse of life at the same time that he was beginning his agitation against the possible accession of James II of England. He joined in the Monmouth Rebellion that year and was tried by Judge Jeffreys during the Bloody Assizes. Jeffreys mocked Tutchin's verse from the bench and sentenced him to:

Tutchin, facing this sentence, appealed to be hanged, instead. His punishment became a cause célèbre among the Whig and Tory partisans, with the result that he was released after a year. He then married Elizabeth Hickes, the daughter of a Puritan minister who had been vocal and active in the anti-Jacobite causes.

The arrival of William III of Orange pleased Tutchin, and he wrote An heroick poem upon the late expedition of His Majesty to rescue England from popery, tyranny, and arbitrary government in 1689. William was not, however, republican enough, and Tutchin's political philosophy was moving toward overt republicanism. However, Tutchin was rewarded for his Williamite support, and possibly for his role in the Monmouth Rebellion and Bloody Assizes, by being appointed a minor post in the victualling office.

Tutchin was convinced, throughout his life, that corruption was rampant and that people were trying to defraud the government or serve an anti-English master, and in 1699 he was rewarded with £12 for his officious "saving so much of the bloody pickle which drained from the casks and binns which hold the flesh at the Victualling Office." This was indicative, in a sense, of Tutchin's terrier-like concern. At the same time, he grew disaffected by William's Dutch courtiers and wrote, in 1700 The Foreigners. It was a very poor poem filled with xenophobia that outlined a Lockean position on the social contract and suggested that William was not a valid sovereign. Tutchin was arrested, but, because he had slightly disguised the proper names of the figures he lampooned, the poem could be pronounced a "seditious libel," but Tutchin could not be tried for sedition. Daniel Defoe answered Tutchin with The True-Born Englishman.

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