American Jezebel (16 page)

As she approached her conclusion, Anne’s voice grew even stronger. “Therefore, take
heed
how you proceed against me,” she warned the magistrates. “For you have no power over my body. Neither can you do me any harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah my Savior. I am at his appointment. The bounds of my habitation are cast in Heaven. No further do I esteem of any mortal man than creatures in his hand. I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold
me of these things. And I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands,” she said, coming to her climax with a brazen challenge. “I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin
you
and your posterity, and this whole state!”

She posed herself as on God’s side and against the state, while the magistrates saw themselves as with God and against her. Linking herself directly to God was heresy. While the Reformation had reduced the role of priest as mediator between human and God, most Protestants still saw ministers as necessary interpreters of God’s word and believed that no man (and certainly no woman) could have direct communion with God or the Holy Spirit. It was permissible to call a storm a sign of God’s anger or a safe trip a sign that he was pleased, but it was not acceptable to claim to hear God speak. Even John Winthrop believed he knew God’s wishes—God had planned and approved of his coming to the New World to create a New Jerusalem, he was certain, and Winthrop himself had been chosen by God for this purpose—but the governor had never heard God’s voice.

Either John Winthrop or Anne Hutchinson was deluded, he believed. It was imperative that the court punish her so the Lord would not in retribution punish the state.

Thomas Dudley asked the court, “What is the Scripture she brings?”

Israel Stoughton, one of the assistants, thought he saw the spirit of the Devil in the body of Anne Hutchinson. “Behold, I turn away from you,” he said.

She replied, “But now, having seen him which is invisible, I fear not what man can do unto me.”

“Daniel was delivered by miracle,” Governor Winthrop told her. “Do
you
think to be delivered so, too?”

Nodding, she said, “I do here speak it before the court. I look that the Lord should deliver me by his providence” because he had said to her, “though I should meet with affliction, yet I am the same God that delivered Daniel out of the lion’s den, [and] I will also deliver thee.”

Thinking her damned for sure, Roger Harlackenden, an assistant from Cambridge, remarked, “I may read Scripture, and the most glorious hypocrite may read it and yet go down to Hell.”

“It may be so,” she agreed.

Sensing her peril, a magistrate named William Bartholomew, who had long been offended by her talk of prophecy and revelation, began to speak. He recounted that he and his wife, Mary, had hosted Anne and William Hutchinson in London before the two families sailed to America on the
Griffin.
On board the ship, he recalled, “when she came within sight of Boston, and looking upon the meanness of the place, she uttered these words: if she had not a sure word that England should be destroyed, her heart would shake. Now it seemed to me at that time very strange and witchlike that she should say so.” Had she been a minister, like Thomas Hooker, prophesying the same thing, it would not have been strange at all; numerous Puritan divines—the word is from the Latin for “soothsayer” or “prophet”—felt certain that the world as they knew it was about to come to some apocalyptic end. But Hutchinson was not a divine, for no woman could be.

Witch hunting in America did not begin in 1690 in Salem Village. By 1630 it had been imported to the colonies from Europe, and twenty years later a wealth of documentation existed describing witch hunting. At least a hundred English settlers were convicted of or charged with witchcraft before 1690. Witches were commonly thought to be people—women, mostly—with satanic, or diabolical, powers, who repudiated religion and aimed to do ill. Just as God was in the soul of the saint, so the Devil abided within the witch. In the seventeenth century few challenged this view. Queen Elizabeth (who regularly consulted her court astrologer, Dr. John Dee) had passed statutes against witchcraft, as had her father, Henry VIII, and her successor, King James. Witches were linked to licentiousness and female sexuality; they had an extra nipple, it was said. They were seen as the cause of sudden, inexplicable, illnesses and deaths and various psychological disturbances. Anyone challenging the social order could be accused. According to the historian David Hall,
witch
was “a label people used to control or punish someone,” and hunting witches reaffirmed the orthodox male authority whenever it was questioned, as by an Anne Hutchinson. Healers and fortune-tellers were often accused because of their social power. Women, especially those over age forty, were singled out and sanctioned disproportionately. The colonial laws against witchcraft arose from the 1604 English civil statute that defined it as a felony, punish
able by hanging. Witchcraft was not considered a heresy, which was punishable by burning at the stake. As everyone in the Cambridge courtroom knew, the Devil often tempts women, but convicting a person of witchcraft required solid evidence.

Anne Hutchinson, asked to comment on Bartholomew’s account of her alleged prophecy, denied it. “I do not remember that I looked upon the meanness of the place, nor did it discourage me, because I knew the bounds of my habitation were determined.”

“I fear that her revelations will deceive,” Bartholomew offered.

Winthrop asked him, “Have you heard of any of her revelations?”

“I remember as we were once going through [Saint] Paul’s churchyard” in London, and she “was very inquisitive after revelations and said that she had never had any great thing done about her but it was revealed to her beforehand.”

Anne repeated that she did not recall this.

Bartholomew quoted her saying “she was to come to New England but for Mr. Cotton’s sake,” which was true. He recalled her daughter Faith, then age seventeen, telling him aboard the
Griffin
that Anne “had a revelation that a young man on the ship should be saved” if he walked with God.

Eager to add his own shipboard experience of Hutchinson’s heresies, the Reverend Symmes recounted her challenges to him. “Then, [she said to me,] what would you say if we should be at New England within these three weeks?” he quoted her. “I reproved her vehemently for it.”

Frowning, John Endicott said, “She says she shall be delivered by a miracle. I hope the court takes notice of the
vanity
of it, and the
heat
of her spirit.”

Thomas Dudley said, “I desire Mister Cotton to tell us whether you do approve of Mistress Hutchinson’s revelations as she hath laid them down.” The deputy governor was challenging her teacher to support her now.

“I know not whether I do understand her,” John Cotton said, buying time. “But this I say: if she doth expect a deliverance in a way of
providence,
” meaning in eternal time, “then I cannot deny it.”

“No, sir,” Dudley retorted, “we did not speak of that” sort of distinction.

“If it [her deliverance] be by way of
miracle,
then I would suspect it,” Cotton conceded. A miracle was God inserting himself actively into the events of this world, while a providence could take place on the longer scale of eschatological time, including in the afterlife.

But “do you believe her revelations are
true
?” the frustrated deputy governor inquired further of Cotton, whom many present suspected of being the source of her heresies.

Cotton said quietly, “That she may have some special providence of God to help her is a thing that I cannot bear witness against.” In his view, her revelations, however immediate they may have seemed to her, could be justified as true if they existed “in” or “through” or “with” Scripture, the word of God.

“Good sir,” Dudley persisted, evidently irritated, “I do ask whether this
revelation
be of God or no?” In other words, Is God going to ruin every member of the court, all their descendants, and the state, as she prophesies?

“I should desire to know whether the sentence of the court will bring her to any calamity,” Cotton replied, “and then I would know of her whether she expects to be delivered from that calamity by a
miracle
or a
providence
of God.” Cotton turned to Hutchinson, according to Winthrop’s journal, and asked her, “By a miracle do you mean a work beyond the power of nature, or only above common providence, for if you expect deliverance from this Court beyond the power of nature, then I should suspect such a revelation to be false.”

She replied, “You know, when [revelation] comes, God doth not describe the way.”

Changing his terminology, Cotton said to her, “Do you mean a deliverance from the sentence of the court or from the calamity of it?”

According to the trial transcript, Anne Hutchinson told her teacher and the court, “By a
providence
of God, I say, I expect to be delivered from some calamity that shall come to me.” She was not claiming a miracle, only that God in his providence would protect and deliver her.

“This case is altered,” Governor Winthrop announced, confident that he had heard enough about her “bottomless revelations” to move the question to a vote. “The ground work of her revelations is the
immediate
revelation of the spirit and not
by
the ministry of the word. This is the means by which she has very much abused the country that they
shall look for revelations and are not bound to the ministry of the word!” The issue was no longer just her assault on the ministers; it was that she professed direct revelation from God, which Winthrop viewed as an ecclesiastical crime. The governor was relieved finally to have found—actually, received from her—a charge against her that, at least in early America, could stick. Pointing at Anne Hutchinson, he cried, “
This
has been the ground of all these tumults and troubles.
This
is the thing that has been the root of all the mischief.”

“We all consent with you,” most of the judges cried out.

Thomas Dudley judged that the time had come to raise the frightening outcome of religious extremism that had afflicted Germany a century before. In 1534 radical Protestants called Anabaptists had taken over the city of Münster. The siege of the city had ended in a bloodbath as the orthodox Protestants slaughtered the radicals. These Anabaptists emphasized the “light within” rather than clerical authority in judging the veracity of religious experience. Another extreme Protestant sect, the Family of Love, or Familism, centered in Holland, was associated with the concept of “free grace,” or salvation unleashed from works. Familism was founded in the sixteenth century by a Dutch mystic named Hendrik Nichlaes who claimed to receive revelations from God. According to David Hall, Familists “were popularly (and incorrectly) supposed to believe in ‘free love’ between the sexes.” In actuality, they preferred the “spirit” to the “letter” of the Bible, they denied original sin, and they believed that women and men are equal before God. “Familists laid themselves open to the accusation of advocating free love by insisting that marriage and divorce should be a simple declaration before the congregation of the church,” the historian Selma Williams observed. Moreover, they “denied the immortality of the soul and therefore the existence of heaven and hell, or afterlife.” While the Familists and Anabaptists neither preached nor supported promiscuity, they were, at least in the minds of the orthodox Puritan magistrates in Cambridge, purveyors of licentiousness and free love.

Dudley suggested that Hutchinson subscribed to one or both of these sects. “These disturbances that have come among the Germans have been all grounded upon revelationship,” he said, “and they have stirred up their hearers to take up arms against their prince and to cut the throats one of another. Whether the Devil may inspire the same in
their hearts here I know not, for I am
fully
persuaded that Mistress Hutchinson is deluded by the Devil, because the spirit of God speaks truth in all his servants.”

“I am persuaded,” Governor Winthrop said, “that the revelation she brings forth is delusion.”

“We all believe it!” more than thirty magistrates cried. “We all believe it!”

Moving swiftly, Winthrop noted that “the court hath thus declared itself,” having heard “what she by the providence of God hath declared freely without being asked.” And “they would now consider what is to be done to her.”

Even after the Great and General Court of Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly to convict Anne Hutchinson, several men stood to speak on her behalf. Thirty-nine-year-old William Coddington, the wealthiest man in Boston, who had lost his magistracy the day before because he supported her, declared, “I do not, for my own part, see any equity in the court in all your proceedings.” Stating what now seems obvious, Coddington went on, “Here is no law of God that she hath broken, nor any law of the country that she hath broke. Therefore I would entreat you to consider whether those things you have alleged against her deserve such censure as you are about to pass.”

William Colburn, a prominent merchant who was the town assessor, added, “I [too] dissent from censure of banishment.”

Ignoring these men, Governor Winthrop returned to the issue of the oath, which no longer seemed necessary now that he had convinced most of the judges that the defendant was guilty of claiming false revelations. But Winthrop wanted to strengthen his case. He predicted that the ministers’ objections to the oath would be less strenuous now. “We desire the elders to take their oaths,” he said, prompting “a great whispering” among the ministers. Some drew back; others stepped forward.

Gamely, the Reverend John Eliot said, “If the court calls us out to swear, we will swear.” Winthrop declared that two ministers would be sufficient. Eliot and Weld raised their hands and took the oath—“I swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth as far as I know; so help me God”—and repeated what they recalled her saying about the inadequacies of their preaching: they preached a covenant of works, they were not able ministers of the New Testament, and they were not sealed with the Spirit.

John Cotton saw that his disciple was doomed. As if in a flash, he saw clearly what before had been obscure: she was proud, too sure of her own election. He remembered worrying on occasion that she strengthened her faith through private meditations, apart from the public ministry, and that she was more censorious of others than a servant of God should be. Earlier that year, he remembered, he had “dealt with Mistress Hutchinson of the erroneousness of these tenets and the injury done to myself in fathering them upon me.” She so “clearly discerned her justification” that she had to work to avoid pride, he later explained. She was “puffed up with her own parts,” overly confident of her salvation. In describing her thus, Cotton might have been describing himself, since he had deigned to distinguish between “lilies” and “thorns.”

“I remember,” Cotton said in the courtroom, joining the chorus of her challengers, “she said she should be delivered by God’s providence, whether now or at another time she knew not.”

This may have shocked Hutchinson, who had anticipated his continuing support. After all, he and she had shared evangelical work, preaching God’s word and saving souls, for more than two decades. She had never strayed from his doctrine, she felt, and always saw her views as consistent with his.

But the ministers were not entirely surprised by Cotton’s shift. Nine weeks earlier, in late August, they had reconciled with him. At the Religious Synod in Cambridge, at private meetings of which Hutchinson was unaware, they had persuaded Cotton to abandon his grievances. Near the end of the synod, at which the ministers had condemned eighty-two errors, there were only five points remaining between Cotton and Wheelwright and the rest. In a spirit of reconciliation, Cotton had conceded on these. Wheelwright’s refusal to concede had led to his banishment, while Cotton’s compromises had brought him back into communion with most of his colleagues. As he had done in England, according to the historian Janice Knight, Cotton relied on “the wisdom of strategic self-revisions [and] outward compliance [to] secure an essential freedom of opinion.” In this way Cotton “kept his pulpit, chastening his rhetoric without revising the substance of his own doctrine.”

In the courtroom, the Reverend Hugh Peter publicly welcomed Cotton back into the fold. “I profess I thought Mr. Cotton would never have took her part.”

Seeing even Cotton distance himself from her, Governor Winthrop determined to read the verdict. “The court hath already declared themselves satisfied concerning the things you hear, and concerning the
troublesomeness
of her spirit and the
danger
of her course amongst us, which is not to be suffered. Therefore, if it be the mind of the court that Mistress Hutchinson for these things that appear before us is
unfit for our society,
and if it be the mind of the court that she shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away, let them hold up their hands.”

All the magistrates but three—Colburn, Coddington (whose vote should not have counted, as he had been removed from the court), and William Jennison, a deputy from Watertown—raised their hands, according to the transcript. Unlike her father’s judges at Saint Paul’s, these magistrates had a public vote. In this early approximation of democratic justice, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts found Anne Hutchinson guilty as charged and “not fit for our society.”

Winthrop did not define her crime, which appears to have been beside the point. As the literary scholar Lad Tobin noted, even before her judges had “settled on a charge, they were certain of the verdict…guilty.” The journal kept by the legally trained governor suggests that the court considered her guilty of two crimes. The first was heresy—the ecclesiastical crime for which her father was imprisoned, a half century earlier, by a Church of England court—on account of her revelations. In deeming her a heretic, they neglected to specify which doctrine of the Church of England she had violated. These doctrines had been established, in 1571, under Queen Elizabeth, as the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, not one of which refers to revelation. Hutchinson’s second crime was sedition, or resisting lawful authority, because she had questioned and criticized the colonial ministers.

English common law had a shadowy role in these proceedings. While it underlay much of the judges’ thinking, it did not bind them as it would have in English courts. As Francis Bremer explained in his biography of John Winthrop, the governor actively opposed the idea of creating a fixed code of colonial laws. He disagreed with Dudley and others who saw codification as a way of ensuring social stability and bringing colonial life into accord with the mandates of the Bible. Winthrop’s opposition reflected “his background in the common law,
the proper administration of which was, to Englishmen like himself, the essence of the ‘ancient constitution,’ which at this time was seen as a framework setting forth the obligations and responsibilities of the subject more than as a guarantee of rights,” according to Bremer. Winthrop “expressed a preference for judging cases according to circumstances and allowing the law to develop through the accumulation of such precedents,” as in the common-law tradition. He also argued that a code of colonial laws was prohibited by the charter, which required making “no laws repugnant to the laws of England.” Bremer notes, “Much of what was done in New England was, indeed, repugnant to the laws of England, but as long as that practice was customary and not mandated by state, the letter of the charter provision was not violated.” Even in the Bible commonwealth, Winthrop was able to exploit his extensive training in English common law.

“Mistress Hutchinson,” he called out, “the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.”

Stricken but not silenced, Anne Hutchinson inquired, “I desire to know wherefore [why] I am banished.”

“Say no more,” Winthrop commanded her. “The court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of the foregoing event, “Mrs. Hutchinson” in
Tales and Sketches,
“the excitement of the contest” makes Anne Hutchinson’s heart “rise and swell within her, and she bursts forth into eloquence.”

In seventeenth-century Cambridge, the judges filed out of the meetinghouse, and the crowd dispersed. Outside, on the market square, Anne’s supporters gathered around her and Will. No one knew where she would have to go or when.

Anne and Will retraced their steps of two mornings before, traveling home on foot across fields of ice and snow. They passed the cow common and exited the town gate. The ox pasture and planting field to the right were fallow and coated with frost. The couple followed the Indian path across the fields of Cambridge, north of the marsh bordering the river, heading toward Charlestown and its ferry landing, the route to Boston.

Scrub grass covered the gently rolling landscape, on which few trees grew. The Hutchinsons passed land farmed by their neighbors on Shawmut to supplement their house gardens. To the south were the Great Marsh and the Charles River. At a deserted Indian village, untilled fields and scattered corpses and skulls testified to the plague of smallpox imported by their countrymen a decade or more before the Hutchinsons arrived.

The sun was near the horizon when they reached the Charlestown dock. Will called for the ferryman. Thomas Marshall, a stocky, irascible widower in his forties, emerged from a shed carrying a long wooden oar. They gave him two shillings for their passage. He rowed them across the choppy mouth of the Charles toward Shawmut. To the east, the sea was wrinkled and cold. The ferry landed, and the Hutchinsons walked the last mile to their house. It was “by duskish” before they arrived home.

At the meetinghouse in Cambridge, the magistrates met privately after the trial to decide what to do with Mistress Hutchinson. Having won the “first great struggle for control” of Massachusetts, these men would show “little mercy to the vanquished,” observed David Hall, the colonial historian. For Winthrop and his allies, the conflict that had roiled the colony for more than a year was over. They would move
quickly to solidify their power and further reduce Hutchinson’s. That night, one imagines, Winthrop and Dudley and the orthodox ministers slept better than they had in months.

In the next few weeks the General Court removed all Hutchinsonians from power. On November 15 Will’s brother Sergeant Edward Hutchinson was jailed for a night, disfranchised, fined, and “discharged from any public office” for “using contemptuous speeches” and signing the Wheelwright petition. The same day the court disfranchised, fined, and “discharged from any public office” Sergeant William Baulston for signing “the seditious libel called a remonstrance or petition.” (Only Anne’s relative was sent to jail.) The top three Antinomians, Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and Aspinwall, were already banished. Eight other men close to her—Coggeshall; Baulston; Edward Hutchinson; the blacksmith, Richard Gridley; the ferryman, Thomas Marshall; William Dyer; William Dinely; and Captain John Underhill—were disfranchised for signing the petition and lost their “public places.” Ten other signers acknowledged their “sin,” had their names scratched off the remonstrance, and so remained freemen.

Five days later every man who had signed the petition was disarmed. Even the Pequot War hero Captain Underhill had to turn in his sword. They were ordered to surrender “all such guns, pistols, swords, powder, shot, and match as they shall be owners of, or have in their custody, upon pain of ten pounds for every default.” Disarming a man was a severe punishment, especially as the court had just ordered in March that because of increased fear of natives on account of the Pequot War all men over eighteen had to carry muskets “furnished with match, powder, and bullets.” Of the seventy-five men disarmed now, fifty-eight were from Boston, five from Roxbury, two from Charlestown, five from Salem, three from Newbury, and two from Ipswich. After the disarmament order, thirty-five more petition signers acknowledged their fault and were allowed to keep their guns: “If any that are to be disarmed acknowledge their sin in subscribing to the seditious libel, or do not justify it, but acknowledge it evil to two magistrates, they shall be thereby freed from delivering in their arms.”

“In what amounted to a coup,” according to the historian Janice Knight, “the Winthrop party thus guaranteed against their possible ouster by election or by violence. Truly extraordinary by any standard,
these tactics of exiling the opposition, restricting new settlement, and limiting eligibility for public office to those residing in the Bay for at least one year (meaning that only survivors of this partisan scrutiny would be allowed the privileges of freemanship) ensured that the party elected in 1637 would hold power for a good time to come.”

Finally, the Massachusetts court determined to build the colony’s first college as a way of minimizing Hutchinson’s threat. “The college,” which would later be named for the wealthy newcomer John Harvard, “is ordered to be at Newtown,” the court stated on November 15. At a college, orthodox ministers would be able to indoctrinate young men before they fell under the Antinomian spell. While the court had discussed the prospect of a college for some months, there was now a pressing need to begin construction.

Just over a year earlier, in August 1636, Governor Vane and the court had granted four hundred pounds toward the creation of a college so that the first graduates of Boston Latin could continue their study. Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, was just above the Hutchinson and Winthrop houses, on School Street, at a corner of what is now Boston’s Old City Hall. A year later, just days before Hutchinson’s trial, the court—“dreading to leave an illiterate ministry”—appropriated further funds for the college that did not yet exist. In a nod to Newtown, which through the efforts of Pastor Shepard had avoided all Hutchinsonian doctrine, the college would be located there. Modeled on such English colleges as Emmanuel College, Cambridge, it would offer Traditional Arts, Philosophies, and Learned Tongues. Newtown itself they renamed Cambridge.