John Tutchin (c.1660 or 1664 – 23 September 1707) was a radical Whig controversialist and gadfly English journalist (born in Lymington, Hampshire), whose The Observator and earlier political activism earned him multiple trips before the bar.
The arrival of William III of Orange pleased Tutchin, and he wrote An heroick poem upon the late expedition of His Majesty to rescue England from popery, tyranny, and arbitrary government in 1689.
However, Tutchin was rewarded for his Williamite support, and possibly for his role in the Monmouth Rebellion and Bloody Assizes, by being appointed a minor post in the victualling office.
Tutchin was convinced, throughout his life, that corruption was rampant and that people were trying to defraud the government or serve an anti-English master, and in 1699 he was rewarded with £12 for his officious "saving so much of the bloody pickle which drained from the casks and binns which hold the flesh at the Victualling Office."
In October 1706 John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough wrote in a letter to Harley, of the matter, "If I can't have justice done me, I must find some friend that will break his and the printer's bones."
While The Observator, in particular, was a noted venue for anti-Jacobite opinion, Tutchin's tendency toward paranoid-seeming fears and suspicions about the government had gotten him few contemporary friends.
Even after his death under suspicious circumstances, he was not widely mourned, and Alexander Pope, in particular, memorialized him viciously in The Dunciad a full seventeen years after his death, where he has the publisher Edmund Curll given a gift of a tapestry by Dulness showing the fates of dunces, where the whipping of Tutchin through the west country is a featured panel.