the First Protectorate Parliament in 1656, but Major-general Whalley's influence induced them to change their minds. According to his wife Lucy Hutchinson, Cromwell attempted to persuade her husband to accept office, "and, finding him too constant to be wrought upon to serve his tyranny", would have arrested him had not death prevented the fulfilment of his purpose. The certificate presented in Hutchinson's favour after the Restoration represents him as secretly serving the royalist cause during the Protectorate, but of this, there is no independent evidence of this. The real object of his political action seems to have been the restoration of the Long parliament. He took his seat again in that assembly when the army recalled it to power (May 1659), and when John Lambert expelled it (October 1659) and prepared to restore its authority by arms, he secretly raised men, and concerted with Francis Hacker and others to assist George Monck and Arthur Hesilrige against Lambert and his party, In his place in parliament he opposed the intended oath abjuring the Stuarts, voted for the re-admission of the secluded members, and followed the lead of Monck and Cooper, in the belief that they were in favour of a Commonwealth. He retained sufficient popularity to be returned to the Convention Parliament as one of the members for Nottingham, but was expelled from it on 9 June 1660 as a regicide. On the same day he was made incapable of bearing any office or place of public trust in the kingdom, but it was agreed that he should not be excepted from the Act of Indemnity either for life or estate. In his petitions he confessed himself "involved in so horrid a crime as merits no indulgence", but pleaded his early, real, and constant repentance, arising from "a thorough conviction" of his "former misled judgment and conscience", not from a regard for his own safety. Thanks to this submission, to the influence of his kinsmen, Lord Byron and Sir Allen Apsley, to the fact that he was not considered dangerous, and that he had to a certain extent forwarded the Restoration, Hutchinson escaped the fate of most of the other regicides. Yet, as his wife owns, "he was not very well satisfied in himself for accepting the deliverance. … While he saw others suffer, he suffered with them in his mind, and, had not his wife persuaded him, had offered himself