Earless on high, stood un-abash'd Defoe,
And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge, below.
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 the one hand, he persisted in identifying himself with the former commonwealth, the Monmouth cause, the Revolution, the reform movement especially in the theater, and Whig liberty. He became noted for tactless exposés of high-level misconduct in his pamphlets and in The Observator (Apr. 1, 1702-Sept. 23, 1707). His detractors frequently paired him with Defoe as a monster or a villain. Again and again, he made himself obnoxious to important personages such as the Earl of Albemarle or the Duke of Marlborough.[8] On the other hand, his hatred for tyranny propelled him frequently into such extremes as his disgraceful complicity in William Fuller's impostures. In the years 1700-1704, he was generally reputed to be "Secretary to the abominal Society of King-Killers"—the secret Calves-Head Club made up of dissenters who met on January 30th, the anniversary of the death of Charles I, to sing prophane anthems.[9]
Dunton generously summed up the widely varied causes of "the loyal and ingenious Tutchin (alias Master Observator); the bold Asserter of English Liberties; the scourge of the High-flyers; the Seaman's Advocate; the Detector of the Victualling-office; the scorn and terror of Fools and Knaves; the Nation's Argus, and the Queen's faithful Subject."[10] Even his death in Queen's Bench Prison, on September 23, 1707, was romanticized into another instance of martyrdom. "... he liv'd and dy'd," announced the Country-man of The Observator, "for the Service of his Country." Tutchin's followers dramatized his death as the result of a politically-inspired thrashing which "six ruffians" administered to him, in revenge for slanderous remarks made in The Observator against Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Dilkes.[11] The "Pulchrum Est Pro Patria Mori" portrait, reprinted here as the frontispiece, was circulated to attest to Tutchin's political martyrdom. However, as the autopsy-report demonstrates and as Muddiman rightly concludes, "Tutchin really died from a specific disease and not from the thrashing undergone seven months before his death."[12]
The young man of twenty four who went off to join Monmouth's forces had already published, in 1685, Poems on Several Occasions. With a Pastoral. To Which is Added, A Discourse of Life. In the preface, writing like a fashionable man-about-town, Tutchin describes the lyrics, translations, and satires of this volume as "trifles" which he had let circulate and had now secured "by promising to Print them." The book shows the variety in poetic kinds that one would expect in a young writer who had been drinking deeply of Lord Rochester, Waller, Cowley, the Earl of Roscommon, Oldham, and Dryden. Juvenalian satires reminiscent of Oldham are neatly balanced by memorial verses to Oldham and Rochester, late metaphysical lyrics ("And why in red dost thou appear"), classical dialogues ("Cleopatra to Anthony"), translations of Horace, and the well-turned "autobiographical" couplets of "A Letter to A Friend." In its variety and themes, Poems on Several Occasions resembles Oldham's Works, which was published twice in 1684. Tutchin's "The Tory Catch," like Oldham's "A Dithyrambick. A Drunkard's Speech in a Mask," has a speaker who ironically brags of the social misconduct which the author satirizes. "A Letter to a Friend" is a skillfully exaggerated account of the attractions and dangers in rhyming. Although perhaps autobiographical in part, the poem also imitates the long-standing tradition derived from Horace's first Epistle of Book I, and revived most recently in Oldham's "A Letter from the Country to a Friend in Town."[13] Both "The Tory Catch" and "A Letter to a Friend" are reprinted here from Poems on Several Occasions.
Tutchin's first book shows two impulses: the awkwardly lyrical and the directly satiric. He feels compelled, in the Preface, to defend his choice of less serious subjects. His light poems do not, "in the least, detract from Virtue; since I have Read the Poems of Beza, Heinsius, our own Donne, &c." He promises to turn to "some Graver Subject." There are other equally significant comments in a Preface that reveals a great deal about changing literary taste. In "To the Memory of Mr. John Oldham," Tutchin curiously avoids the main subject of Dryden's finer elegy, namely, Oldham's achievement in rough satire. His praise is that "Crashaw and Cowley both did live in thee." However, in his "Satyr Against Vice" and "Satyr Against Whoring," Tutchin has already learned the art of declaiming, from the poet who has been called "the English Juvenal," John Oldham.
In the years between 1685 and 1707, Tutchin's separate poems were mainly occasional and satirical. Panegyric for William III dominates such an early piece as An Heroic Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty (1689), and hatred for the Stuarts possesses a later poem like The British Muse: or Tyranny Expos'd (1701). In Civitas Militaris (1690) Tutchin engages in city politics. The elegy on the death of Queen Mary irritated Defoe enough to have "T——n" placed among the "Pindarick Legions" in The Pacificator (1700). Two poems, however,—The Earth-quake of Jamaica (1692) and Whitehall in Flames (1698)—differ from the others in that they are Cowleyan "Pindaricks" moralizing on disasters. The Earth-quake of Jamaica is reprinted here to illustrate Tutchin's descriptive talent. He starts with an actual event, the Jamaican disaster of June 7, 1692; and then, as the epigraph on the title page suggests, he presents a variation on Horace's rejection of "senseless Epicureanism," in Ode 34 of Book I. The Earth-quake of Jamaica may have been worked over longer than was customary. It was published shortly before December 10, the manuscript date on Narcissus Luttrell's copy now in the Houghton Library. Some six months earlier, in the late morning of June 7, the earthquake had erupted in Port Royal, the "boom" port on the south side of the island. In three schocks lasting less than three minutes, the famed capital of the buccaneers had fallen. News of the disaster did not reach London until August 9. The earthquake then became one of the most widely discussed events. The London Gazette ran stories on it, scientists like Sir Hans Sloane published eye-witness accounts in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the moralists declared God's wrath had come upon the wickedest place in Christendom, and "the actors of the drolls" in Southwark Fair even mockingly re-enacted the event until the Lord Mayor put a stop to the performances.[14]
If contemporary accounts of the Port Royal earthquake are compared with The Earth-quake of Jamaica, the reader becomes impressed by Tutchin's way of adapting the well-known details to a moral comment on life. His scenes are indeed graphic, but they do not have the immediacy of such eye-witness accounts as the following, preserved by Luttrell: