THE PERFECT WIFE. cost the Hutchinsons upwards of a thousand pounds. Finally, there being a feeble rumour of a rising in the north of England, to restore the old Parlia- ment, Colonel Hutchinson was by some means implicated, through what agency may be guessed from a phrase used by the Duke of Buckingham in a letter of instructions to the Marquis of Newcastle, when he says, that "though he could not make it out as yet, he hoped he should bring Mr. Hutchinson into the plot." One Sunday night, October the 11th, 1663, a party of soldiers arrived at Owthorpe, with a warrant for the arrest of Colonel Hutchinson. The inmates made no resistance on the men entering and pro- ceeding to ransack the house, for too well they knew with whom they had to deal. It was " as bitter a stormy, pitchy, dark, black, rainy night as any that year," and the Colonel was totally broken in health; but the men refused to wait until morning, despite Mrs. Hutchinson's heart- rending entreaties, and carried their prisoner off to Newark, his eldest son accompanying him. On the 31st of October, after having been treated with every possible indignity, the prisoner was committed "for treasonable practices" to the Tower, and to the keeping of a coarse and brutal Lieutenant, who, offering a pitiable contrast to the mild and generous Sir Allen Apsley of former days, exercised the most outrageous extortion and galling tyranny upon his unfortunate captives. Lucy Hutchinson, 45
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