American Jezebel (12 page)

To protect Mary and her husband from public shame, Hutchinson and Hawkins swaddled the tiny corpse, concealing its deformities. When Mary Dyer regained consciousness, the midwives told her only that her baby had died. But what to do with the body? Anne Hutchinson proposed that they bury it and not speak of it again. The risk of this, as both she and Jane Hawkins knew, was that if townspeople heard what had happened, they would suspect evil intent, which would only intensify the Dyers’ shame. English common law allowed a midwife to bury a dead baby in private, as long as “neither hog nor dog nor any other beast come into it,” but the Massachusetts court had forbidden this practice as a way of preventing attempts at abortion. Anne Hutchinson thought to ask the Reverend Cotton for his advice.

Well past midnight, she walked from the Dyers’ house, at the corner of what is now Summer Street, to the Cottons’ gabled mansion, which was surrounded by a large garden, on the lower slopes of Pemberton Hill. Despite the glow of moonlight on the peninsula, Anne could not see the reds and yellows of the scattered trees in the town. She had one purpose.

As she approached the Cotton house, with its unique double-sash windows containing diamond-shaped panes, she saw a single light burning. Her teacher was awake, working. A “universal scholar,” in the
words of his grandson Cotton Mather, John Cotton usually studied “twelve hours in a day…resolving to wear out with using than with rusting.” Anne tapped on the parlor window, and the minister let her in. In the candlelight, she described Mary Dyer’s birthing and requested his counsel.

Yes, conceal it, Cotton agreed, aware of the English custom and law. She thanked him and went back out into the night. Before dawn, she and Jane Hawkins buried the baby. According to one account, Cotton accompanied the midwives and dug the grave. A few other women who had been present at the difficult birth knew of the baby’s state. But no man in the colony save John Cotton, William Dyer, and probably Will Hutchinson knew that the midwives and the minister had conspired to save the Dyers additional pain.

In the long view of history, Cotton is an enigmatic character who embraced unorthodoxy yet despised controversy. In his writings he was cautious, according to Moses Coit Tyler, who observed that Cotton’s “vast tracts of Puritanic discourse” contain not “a single passage of eminent force or beauty.” Cotton saw his own Reformed Christianity as the sole true religion, and he rejected toleration of other religions because they “tell lies in the name of the Lord.” He repudiated the nascent concept of democracy, asking, “If the people be governors, who shall be governed?” Although Copernicus’s and Galileo’s ideas about the universe were current among Puritans, Cotton was convinced that the earth does not move. If it did, he argued, then “when a man throws a stone, the same way the earth moves, he might easily overtake” it and “be under the stone when it should fall.”

Despite his deeply conservative tendencies, Cotton’s theological inclinations drew him to preach dangerous things, fomenting dissent. In England his unorthodoxy prompted church authorities to investigate him repeatedly. Eventually they called him to the Court of High Commission in London for questioning by the archbishop, as Anne’s father had been summoned a generation earlier. Unlike Francis Marbury, however, Cotton avoided imprisonment. He went into hiding and fled to America, where the ripples of the stones he dropped in his sermons had now brought Massachusetts to the brink of civil war.

Cotton mediated skillfully between his contradictory tendencies, impressing all who met him with his brilliance at conciliation. He
learned from his mentor, the Reverend William Perkins, a fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, to “temper his show of doctrine with expedience.” In 1587, when Perkins was reprimanded by church authorities for lecturing too vehemently against kneeling at the sacrament and facing east, he chose neither to give in nor to continue with defiance. Instead, he maintained his principles but worded them more carefully, preserving his reputation as the greatest living Cambridge preacher. Perkins showed Cotton “how to practice what one believed and yet retain favor,” according to his biographer. As Cotton later explained, “Zeal must be according to knowledge, knowledge is no knowledge without zeal, and zeal is but a wildfire without knowledge.”

Like Anne Hutchinson, John Cotton felt an unusually strong sense of having been called by God. Based on his writings, he suffered none of the spiritual struggles that afflicted his contemporaries. This resulted partly from his nature. In addition, he was convinced that the world he lived in was about to end in an apocalyptic conflagration, to be replaced by a world like that in the days after the resurrected Christ was revealed to his apostles. At any moment God would usher in this purified, covenanted, Christian world. This great hope, which he shared with all, enabled him to avoid discouragement. The Roman Catholic Church would dissolve, and a true church would be established in England. He considered himself a member in good standing of the Church of England, which he believed contained many godly men. At the same time, he believed the Anglican bishops were in a succession that led ultimately to Rome and thus to the Antichrist.

This vision created problems for Cotton in Boston, Lincolnshire, where some of his parishioners were orthodox, preferring the rituals and views of the Anglican hierarchy. Among this minority, the most troublesome parishioners subscribed to Arminianism, the doctrine that people need not wait passively for God’s grace but can work their own salvation. Rejecting the Calvinist notion that predestination and election are unconditional, the Arminians gave free will a role. To disarm them, Cotton minimized God’s apparent arbitrariness in damning human beings. Predestination is so absolute, he preached, that to earn reprobation one must also behave badly. The Arminian party shrank.

A larger problem remained—how to reconcile his nonconformity
with the distasteful structure and demands of the church hierarchy. In Anglicanism, as in Catholicism, every parish resident was automatically a member of the church. Everyone but the most notorious sinner was compelled, or at least expected, to attend and participate at church. All were entitled to the sacraments of the Church of England. In this open sort of congregation, there were surely some, if not many, souls that were reprobate, or foreordained to damnation. How could the Reverend Cotton preach to people whom God had not elected before birth as eligible to receive his saving grace?

John Cotton found his answer to this dilemma in chapter 2 of the Song of Solomon. “As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters” was the passage. The lily, he believed, was the community of the elect, while the thorns were those with whom the elect hold fellowship, who could be reprobate. True believers need not separate from the church, he decided, but they must display within the larger congregation their special status. As he later explained, “The church may be Christ’s love, yea, and a fragrant and pure flower in his sight and nostrils, and yet live amongst briars and thorns.”

Having solved his dilemma, he set out cautiously to distinguish “the lily” from “the thorns.” Once this process of identification was complete, he withdrew into a tighter group with the “lilies,” worshiping specially with them. With them he entered into a covenant with the Lord, promising “to follow after the Lord in the purity of his worship” and hoping for the intimacy with God that the ancient Jews enjoyed. Only the lilies were qualified to receive the Lord’s Supper, which, he wrote, should be given only to those who “experienced a work of regeneration in their souls.” They were also allowed to absent themselves from obligations that he considered idolatrous, such as kneeling at the Lord’s Supper and at prayers.

In creating this congregation within a congregation, Cotton started the first Congregational church, although he did not coin that term until 1642. In later Congregationalism as it developed in New England in the 1630s, membership was restricted to “saints,” people who could convincingly describe in public an experience of saving grace. In this “pure” church, members clearly professed their faith, showed knowledge of doctrine, and walked with God. Its high standards for membership
would lead to decades of conflict among the ministers of Massachusetts as to the proper method of testing candidates for actual signs of grace.

This idea of a congregation within a congregation may sound exclusive, and indeed it was, but to a seventeenth-century woman of exegetical bent it opened doors that were otherwise shut. Covenanted worship served Anne’s needs by removing gender as a requirement for ministry. She was an inner-circle woman in this system of lilies and thorns. Cotton’s doctrine encouraged her to practice as preacher, prophet, and theologian, all roles denied to women. It did not allow her a pulpit, but it gave her power and access to power that she otherwise lacked.

But empowering women was not John Cotton’s intention, conscious or otherwise. Like Winthrop and all his colleagues, he viewed women as inferior to and subject to men. Arriving in Massachusetts, he requested that women desiring church membership be examined in private only because public confession was “not fit for a woman’s modesty.”

Cotton’s system worked for Anne Hutchinson, who was as particular about her priests as he was about his parishioners, but it did not suit all the congregants of Saint Botolph’s. The thorns were naturally outraged at being excluded from the vicar’s covenant of grace, and they went in protest to the bishop’s court at Lincoln. The court suspended Cotton. The vicar appealed his suspension to a higher church court, at which with “pious subtlety” he presented himself as a preacher who could and would conform. Allowed to return to Boston, he continued to preach and worship as before, and his covenanted congregation flourished.

In 1618, to placate the thorns, Cotton had the church corporation add a second clergyman, Edward Wright, to minister solely to them. Every Sunday, on the broad stones outside the church’s south door, the lilies and the thorns passed each other headed in different directions. After Wright completed the Apostle’s Creed, at which the Anglicans stood, the Puritans filed in to hear Cotton preach, and the Anglicans quickly departed before the vicar’s interminable sermon began.

To satisfy the authorities, Cotton furnished the church as they demanded, keeping the stained glass, the ornate tapestries, and the statues that Puritans disdained as idolatrous. He cleverly manipulated church
routine, having Wright perform the ceremonies Cotton considered offensive. “The truth is,” he explained, “the ceremonies of the ring in marriage, and standing at the creed, are usually performed by myself; and all the other ceremonies of surplices, cross in baptism, kneeling at the communion, are frequently used by my fellow-minister in our church.” Meanwhile, Cotton administered church rites for his inner circle of true believers. For several years, these two congregations existed side-by-side in Saint Botolph’s, largely due to John Cotton’s “godliness” and personal appeal.

This delicate peace was shattered one night in April 1621 when men armed with hammers broke into St. Botolph’s and destroyed its stained glass windows, tapestries, and stone statues. Out of deference to Cotton, the pulpit was not touched. Most offensive to the authorities, the vandals cut off the cross on the king’s arms atop the mace that the mayor carried to church each Sunday and Thursday. The intruders were lilies, of course, inspired either by Cotton’s invectives against “graven images” in church or by the scheduled sermon the next day by the prominent orthodox Anglican Robert Sanderson. In that sermon, which Sanderson delivered in the damaged nave on April 24, he said, “The right England Protestant…standeth in the middle between, and distinguished from, the Papist on the one hand, and the (sometimes styled) Puritan on the other”—a direct cut at Cotton. The vicar, for his part, was shocked at the violence that his passionate pursuit of reform had unleashed.

To the thorns, this mutilation of church art—especially the mayor’s mace—was an act of sedition. They notified royal authorities, and a civil commission was soon appointed to investigate the crime. There was no evidence suggesting Cotton was involved. During the investigation the town clerk, who was Cotton’s brother-in-law, testified, “Mr. Cotton never did connive at the cutting of those crosses.” Nevertheless, Bishop Monteigne of Lincoln suspended him for nonconformity. But when the two men met in Lincoln to discuss the matter, Monteigne was so impressed with the vicar’s piety and learning that he gave Cotton another chance. He could return to Saint Botolph’s if he would conform by kneeling just once at the Eucharist, or he would show good reason why he refused. In Cotton’s view, such kneeling was a sin against the second commandment—“Thou shalt not make for thyself a carved
image…. Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor serve them…”—so he chose the second alternative. He sent the bishop this explanatory syllogism:

Bishop Monteigne, too busy to trouble himself further with the matter of the damage to the church, let the matter drop. A few months later he was appointed Bishop of London and was succeeded in Lincoln by John Williams, who proved more tolerant of Puritans. Bishop Williams came to admire Cotton, finding him “unlike most Puritans” because he “did not appear to be a zealot but preached a more gentle species of Calvinism and pursued his nonconformity quietly.” Cotton relaxed under Williams and even admitted in writing to his method of having another minister perform ceremonies he considered offensive.

While Lincolnshire was growing more amenable to Puritanism, the Church of England was tilting back toward Rome (away from Calvinist Geneva). In 1622 the hierarchy in London banned the nonconformist sermon practice of applying Scripture passages to modern times. Two years later all books on religion were required to be licensed by the church. In 1625, at the request of Prince Charles, who would soon become king, Bishop William Laud wrote in his diary a list of churchmen, placing next to each name either an
O,
for orthodox, or a
P,
for Puritan. The duke of Buckingham gave this list to King Charles soon after his coronation.