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