A Foundling Archbishop?

Matthew Hutton who became Archbishop of York under Queen Elizabeth is probably the most significant national figure to emerge from the small North Lancashire village of Priest Hutton (pop. 185).

But confusion still surrounds the details of his birth, as I discovered when I gave a talk in the village about the new edition of John Lucas’s eighteenth century history of the parish. The question is this: was he or was he not a foundling?

John Lucas, writing between 1710 and 1744, is both adamant and indignant on the subject.

“The most reverend Father Dr Matthew (son of Mathew) Hutton, was not a foundling child, as some have falsely published, but was born…of honest parents in this town.”

People who live in the village today, however, still know and repeat stories that have been passed down the generations. One gentleman at my recent Priest Hutton talk shared the version told to him and his classmates by the village school teacher in the 1970s: that the baby who grew up to become an Archbishop had been left on the doorstep at Beech House, a farmhouse on the edge of the village. Before the meeting Keith Brady — a member of the Mourholme History Society — had  told me a tale he’d heard when his family moved into Priest Hutton in the 1980’s: the baby had been found by the side of Janet’s (or Jenet’s) Well, about 100 yards from Beech House. Armed with a sturdy pair of garden loppers Keith led me to an unpromising line of hedge where he clipped back the foliage to reveal an old well-head.

More detailed versions of the story suggest the baby had been named Hutton after the village where he was abandoned, and Matthew because he was found on St Matthew’s Day (September 21).

Those are the stories. What is the truth? Let’s be honest: I don’t know. But we could examine some evidence. A good place to start when exploring any issue of local history in these parts is the Mourholme History Society’s online magazine archive .

Tap in the name ‘Matthew Hutton’, and you discover two articles  written in the 1980’s by the late Joan Clarke of Yealand Redmayne, a former Secretary of the Society. Joan was a diligent researcher who also wrote well. Her articles tell us about the Archbishop’s life and works. But first she addresses the controversy surrounding his birth.

“There is no evidence that this story was current in Hutton’s lifetime,” she writes, adding that a certain Dr Ducarel, who wrote a biography of the Archbishop in 1756, blamed the invention of the story on another historian: a Mr Torr.  According to Ducarel, this Mr Torr  wrote “it is the common tradition of that place [i.e. Warton] that he [Hutton] was a foundling there.”

The “most telling reason” for rejecting the story, writes Joan Clarke,  is that Matthew Hutton was not a lone foundling: he had brothers and other relatives in Warton. One brother, Robert, became the Rector of Houghton-le- Springs  and Archbishop Hutton left him £20 in his will.

So at this stage one might reasonably form the view that the Archbishop probably wasn’t a foundling. He had extensive family in Warton; there are no known contemporary accounts of his foundling status; and the suggestion he was abandoned at birth allegedly stems from a single, erroneous statement in one written history.

And we could — just about — let matters rest at this point.

But these days the wonders of the internet mean we can all dive into primary historical sources at the click of a mouse. If you follow this link, you can (as I did!) read Dr Ducarel’s account at first hand. But before you get stuck in, here’s a bit more background. Dr Andrew Coltée Ducarel (9 June 1713 – 29 May 1785), was an English antiquary, librarian, and archivist. He worked at Lambeth Palace for the Archbishop of Canterbury of the day who — strange to relate — was one Dr Matthew Hutton (1693-1758), a direct descendant of our own Matthew Hutton. And it was the later Archbishop who had commissioned Ducarel to write his ancestor’s biography. One imagines that Dr Hutton might have been keen to correct reports of his forbear’s illegitimacy.

Dr Ducarel — the official biographer —  is certainly very emphatic that the foundling story is bunkum.

“This story is as false as it is injurious,” he complains. “We do not find that it was ever mentioned by any contemporaries, as it undoubtedly would, at a time when feuds and parties ran high; when both Papists and Puritans were inveterate against the Protestant clergy and bishops, and would have let nothing slip that could any way blacken and expose them, or destroy their credit and influence with the nation. But no such thing appears in their swarms of libels. It was, therefore, reserved for the invention of J. Torr, a hasty and injudicious collector, who raked together everything that came in his way, and composed in such a hurry, consequently with so little thought and reflection, that he transcribed 1250 columns, ” mostly close writ and in a very small hand,” in less than a year and a half.”

Ducarel’s point that Archbishop Hutton’s contemporary critics would have seized on any suggestions of his illegitimacy is surely a powerful argument against the story. But he clearly also felt obliged to lash out at “J. Torr” for being a sloppy historian who got his facts wrong. Which made me wonder about “Mr Torr”.

James Torre (1649–1699) came from Lincolnshire. He graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge and entered the Inner Temple as a student lawyer. He didn’t become a barrister, but instead studied the ecclesiastical antiquities of Yorkshire.”‘The former he followed with that prodigious application and exactness as perhaps never any man before or since could equal’, wrote his fellow historian Francis Drake in 1736.

Torre, I notice,  collaborated and was friendly with the Leeds historian, Ralph Thoresby, who was later to become a mentor to Warton’s own historian, John Lucas. Everyone — bar Dr Ducarel it seems — judged James Torre to have been a meticulous and prodigiously hard working researcher and historian. Contemporary accounts of Dr Ducarel, in contrast, are markedly less generous. The lexicographer Francis Grose described him as “a very weak man, and ignorant, though he was ambitious of being thought learned.” Grose also said he had a poor command of Latin and was drunk on a daily basis. The writer and politician Horace Walpole found   Ducarel “a poor creature” who was reluctant to lend him works from the Lambeth Palace library unless he agreed to buy antiquities from him at an exorbitant price.

None of this — of course — proves that Ducarel was wrong and that James Torre was right about the Archbishop’s birth.

But if the later Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of Canterbury, hoped that Ducarel’s biography would scotch the foundling stories,  he was to be disappointed. They continued to circulate. This, for example, was published in 1839:

“Matthew Hutton was a foundling. He was left at a person’s door in Priest Hutton, in the Parish of Warton on St Matthew’s Day. Hence his name.”(‘Some Account of the Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and Anecdotes of Eminent Men Connected therewith’, 1839) See link here

As we’ve already heard, local people still repeat the story 488 years after the Archbishop’s birth.

But is it true? In the absence of Parish records or other reliable documentation I don’t see how we can know for certain. If he was a foundling he must have been adopted into the existing Hutton family in Priest Hutton. Ducarel is surely right that religious and political enemies would have used the foundling story  in Hutton’s own lifetime to undermine his authority. But I know of no evidence that they did. You would think the Parish historian John Lucas would know what he was talking about when he says, categorically, that Matthew Hutton was not a foundling. The more cynical souls among us might argue that Lucas would want to defend the reputation of a local hero and benefactor who had founded his old school.

There may yet be more to uncover. But in the end, we might have to accept that Hutton’s foundling status can be neither fully substantiated nor entirely dismissed. Strangely, the story which  caused pain and embarrassment to his family and friends centuries ago, is now — at a greater distance —  a badge of honour: the tale of a poor abandoned boy who rose to become one of the highest prelates in the land. It’s a powerful allegory and true or false, I’d say it’s history…of a sort.

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