"I was born in the Tower of London at 4 of the clock in the morning..."
A single sentence in a 400-year-old memoir, and the hidden world it unlocked
Somewhere between the reading of a primary source and the writing of a novel, there is a moment of recognition so precise and so unexpected that it feels less like scholarship than hearing a voice directly speaking. It was a fragment of a woman’s unfinished manuscript, tucked into the opening pages of her seventeenth-century memoir, that called to me.
Lucy Hutchinson wrote memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson in the years following her husband John’s death in 1664, and it is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement: the full-length biography of a man she had loved and admired, set against the sweep of the English Civil War, drawing on her own direct experience of events that had shaken the country to its foundations. Lucy was a woman of formidable intellectual gifts. She was the first person to translate Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura into English verse, a poet and theologian in her own right, and the Memoirs reflects those gifts on every page. It is political, passionate, meticulously observed, and written with a command of English prose that places it comfortably among the finest biographical writing of its century.
But it is not the Memoirs themselves that have lodged most deeply in my imagination. It is the fragment of her own life that speaks volumes.
Tucked into the opening pages of the manuscript, before the biography of her husband begins in earnest, is a short autobiographical piece that Lucy started and never completed. She set it aside, and there are the remains of several torn pages ripped from the volume. Perhaps she felt it too personal, perhaps the larger project overtook her, and it sat in manuscript, largely unnoticed, for the better part of two centuries before editors began to take it seriously. It runs to only a few pages. And it begins with a sentence that arrested me entirely the first time I encountered it:
“It was on the 29th day of January, in the yeare of our Lord 1619/20, that in the Tower of London, the principall citie of the English Isle, I was about 4 of the clock in the morning brought forth...”
What is so immediately striking about this sentence is not its drama but its ordinariness. The matter-of-fact precision of the date and hour, the easy, proprietorial confidence with which the Tower of London is named as a place of residence, because for the family into which Lucy was born, it required no further explanation. She was not imprisoned there, nor visiting, nor passing through on some errand of state. She was born there because the Tower was simply where her family lived, and a four o’clock January birth in such a household was one more event in the rhythm of domestic life behind those famous walls.
That sentence, and the world it so casually implies, is the reason I came to write The Lady of the Tower. But beyond its significance to me as a novelist, it strikes me as one of those rare archival gifts that reorients our understanding of a place we thought we already knew.
The Memoirs as a whole are principally concerned with the great public drama of the Civil War, with battles and sieges and the agonising moral choices of men and women caught between conscience and loyalty. Lucy writes of those events with the authority of an eyewitness and the analytical intelligence of a historian. But the fragment pulls us back to something earlier and, in its own way, equally illuminating: the childhood world in which Lucy’s extraordinary mind was formed.
Her father, Sir Allen Apsley, held the office of Lieutenant of the Tower of London, responsible for the institution’s governance, its prisoners, and its considerable household establishment. What the fragment conveys, in its unguarded and informal register, is that for Lucy, the Tower carried none of the associations of dread it held for the wider world beyond its gates. It was home in the fullest and most unreflective sense: the particular smell of the river at different seasons, the bustle of family life shared with her brothers in a schoolroom, the sound of the guard changing in the small hours, the comings and goings of an establishment that was one of the most peculiar and socially complex households in England.
And then there is her mother. Lucy St. John, the woman whose story became the foundation of my novel The Lady of the Tower, is drawn in the fragment with an affection and a specificity that makes her leap from the page across four centuries. She managed the household with what her daughter’s account suggests was formidable competence and considerable intellectual ambition, extending medical care to prisoners who lacked the means to afford a physician, and engaging seriously with the chemistry and apothecary experiments of the Tower’s most distinguished captive. Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Bloody Tower while Lucy lived next door in the Queen’s House, had established a small laboratory and cultivated herbs in the Lieutenant’s garden. Lady Apsley studied his preparations with enough seriousness that her daughter records it as a matter of note, as a dimension of her mother’s character, not merely a curiosity of their circumstances.
There is something almost vertiginous about that image, once one pauses to consider it: the Lieutenant’s wife and Sir Walter Raleigh in conversation over the herb beds in the Tower of London, while her children played in the courtyards and the lions in the Royal Menagerie added their voices to the general noise of the Thames, and the great machinery of English political life ground on beyond the walls.
What Lucy Hutchinson’s fragment does, in an extraordinary primary source, is remind us that the Tower of London was never simply the place of its most famous stories. At the opening of the seventeenth century, it was a functioning community of considerable social density: the Yeoman Warders and their families, the extensive staff of the Royal Mint which had operated within the walls since the thirteenth century, the keepers of the Royal Menagerie, the chaplains attached to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, the surgeons and tradespeople whose services a large establishment inevitably required. The parish records of that chapel—the burial place of some of the Tower’s most famous prisoners—are full of baptisms and marriages and entirely unremarkable deaths that have nothing whatsoever to do with political disgrace. People raised their children within those walls. They buried their dead in that chapel. They went about the daily business of their lives in one of the most extraordinary addresses in England, and the great events unfolding around them were simply the weather of the place: present, inescapable, and eventually ordinary.
This is the history that the fragment preserves, and that the conventional record has done least to recover: the domestic interior of the Tower, the lives of the people who made it function, the texture of daily experience behind walls that history has associated almost exclusively with imprisonment and death. The Lieutenant’s wife managed an establishment whose inhabitants ranged from the highest nobility to common prisoners and required different registers of care and attention at every turn. The social intelligence demanded by such a position was considerable, and yet it is almost entirely invisible in the sources, recoverable only in the margins of other people’s accounts, in footnotes, in the unfinished autobiographical pages of a woman who set her pen down one day and never picked that particular thread up again.
This, I think, is where Lucy Hutchinson’s unfinished pages speak most directly to those of us who spend our working lives in the company of the past. The Memoirs survived because they were a substantial and significant document, the biography of a man who had played a genuine role in the great events of his time. The fragment survived almost by accident, tucked into the opening of a larger manuscript, easy to overlook and easier still to discount as a minor personal aside to the main business of the text.
But it is in precisely that quality of the accidental and the incomplete that the fragment’s value lies. Finished accounts are finished for a reason: they have been shaped, edited, and presented for an audience, and in that process something of the unguarded original is inevitably lost. The fragment, by contrast, was written for no audience at all. Lucy was not performing her memories of the Tower; she was simply beginning to record them, in the natural and unself-conscious way that one begins a thing one never expects anyone else to read. And that is why, four centuries later, we can still feel the cold of that January morning in 1620, and hear, somewhere in the background, the sound of a child being brought into the world at four o’clock in the morning in the Tower of London, in a household where the Lieutenant’s wife kept a medicinal garden and the most celebrated prisoner in England was growing herbs a few yards away.
That the Memoirs are still read, still taught, still argued over by historians and literary scholars, is a tribute to Lucy Hutchinson’s extraordinary gifts. That the fragment survived alongside it is simply good fortune that, as anyone who has spent time in archives will know, you learn never to take for granted, can sometimes be life-changing, and always to be grateful for when it appears.
The Lady of the Tower, By Love Divided and Written in Their Stars form The Lydiard Chronicles, my series of historical fiction novels based on Lucy Hutchinson’s autobiography and memoirs.
What an amazing woman Lucy was. Really happy I found this article, thank you Elizabeth
Great story! My 11th great-grandfather served as Lieutenant of the Tower in the 1600s. Ironically, when Charles II came to power, he was imprisoned there until his death in 1661. I'm working on a story about his life. It should be ready to publish in another week or so.