Seems to me that advice won't really help because it comes down to a disagreement between the two of you. I'm sure the info from Boggleheads is pretty good.
Paying someone to manage your investment at 1% is wasteful, but not as wasteful as letting it sit in a bank account and lose value each year to inflation. Of course, a bad money manager can bankrupt you, too, so be careful. Perhaps your husband would agree to pay a one time fee to a financial adviser rather than pay an ongoing fee to a money manager? Sort of a compromise?
You didn't elaborate on your retirement money. Is that in a 401k and diversified somehow, or is it in pensions?
Basic advice is to set aside in a money market fund or CDs enough cash to sleep at night and invest the remainder of your idle cash in a mix of stock and bond index funds at an allocation that makes sense to your risk tolerance. Include your 401k money in your asset allocation calculations if that is invested someplace.
The math generally says that investing everything in a lump sum at once rather than dollar cost averaging is a better method on average. Most people feel better about easing in with a DCA model just because of psychology.
For example, say your expenses are 5K a month.
Set aside 15-30K in a money market fund as your emergency fund / sleep at night cushion. You don't really need a large emergency fund (or any cash emergency fund) when you have so much money invested. You can always sell shares out of your taxable accounts. But most of us still feel better with some cash, logic aside.
If your risk tolerance is pretty average, then target an AA of 75/25 stocks/bonds with the remainder. Again, consider any 401k investments in calculating your AA. Most people on these boards would say that's too conservative, but this is generic advice for someone having trouble investing at all.
Then divide up the rest of your cash between VTSAX (stock index) and VBTLX (bond index) and call it a day.
If you haven't seen it, J Collins has a wonderful set of posts about investing and the stock market in general.
http://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/