Authors: Eve LaPlante
In this fledgling community the men agreed to graze all their sheep and cattle together on the northernmost tip of the island, which they fenced off and called Common Fence Point, overlooking the waters of Mount Hope Bay. South of the spring, and next to the land granted to William Baulston, the former innkeeper of Boston, they chose a field to be their training ground and meeting place. They gathered here at irregular intervals for town meetings, starting on May 13, 1638, when the thirteen men present voted, among other matters, that “Mr. William Hutchinson is permitted to have six lots for himself and his children, laid out at the Great Cove.” A week later the land allotments included, “To Mr. William Hutchinson six acres being ten rod [fifteen and a half yards] in breadth bounded by the Great Cove on the east and fourteen at the west, so it runs eighty pole in length westward,” plus six acres each to “Samuel Hutchinson,” probably his young son, in absentia; “Edward Hutchinson, Senior,” his brother; “Edward Hutchinson, Junior,” his oldest son; and his son-in-law John Sanford. The meeting place was also used, on occasional Mondays, for military exercises. It is now the site of the Founders’ Brook and Anne M. Hutchinson Memorial Park, established in 1930. The bubbling brook that runs alongside this charming park is the remnant of the founders’ spring.
A few weeks after Anne Hutchinson’s arrival on Aquidneck, an earthquake shook the island. John Winthrop, who assiduously kept abreast of all her doings even in banishment, saw this tremor—it occurred as “Mistress Hutchinson and some of her adherents happened to be at prayer”—as proof of “God’s continued disquietude against the existence of Anne Hutchinson.”
Still, he continued, in the privacy of his study on Shawmut Peninsula, to worry about the breadth of her influence. Under his leadership
the Church of Boston and the General Court continued to punish Hutchinsonians and others, especially women who seemed likely to make similar trouble. In April 1638 the church cast out Judith Smith, the maidservant of Anne’s brother-in-law Edward Hutchinson, for her “obstinate persisting [in] sundry errors.” Six months later the court ordered Katherine Finch whipped for “speaking against the magistrates, against the churches, and against the elders.” The following summer Finch was called before the court for not behaving “dutifully to her husband,” and released upon her promise to reform. In September 1639, after a widow named Phillipa Hammond stated publicly “that Mistress Hutchinson neither deserved the censure which was put upon her in the Church, nor in the commonwealth,” the Boston church excommunicated Hammond “as a slanderer and reviler both of the church and the commonwealth.” The court ordered a minister of Weymouth, Robert Lenthall, who “was found to have drunk in some of Mistress Hutchinson’s opinions, as of justification before faith,” to retract these views in writing. (Lenthall left Massachusetts for Rhode Island in 1640.) In late 1638 Hugh Peter’s church at Salem obediently followed suit, excommunicating four women who, inspired by Hutchinson and Williams, refused to worship with the congregation and denied the colonial churches were “true.” The Boston church later cast out two other prospective Hutchinsonians: Sarah Keayne for “irregular prophesying in mixed assemblies;” and Joan Hogg “for her disorderly singing and her idleness, and for saying she is commanded of Christ so to do.”
However, by the end of 1639, eighteen months after Hutchinson departed, Massachusetts was relatively free of her taint, Winthrop felt. “All breaches were made up,” he reported, “and the church was saved from ruin beyond all expectation.” Antinomianism was discredited, sanctification and justification were linked, and women were again meek. Most local women would have attacked her earlier, he felt, “if their modesty had not restrained them.” In the Boston church “there appeared a great change,” for “whereas, the year before, they were all (save five or six) so affected to Mr. Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson, and those new opinions, as they slighted the present governor [himself] and the pastor [Wilson], looking at them as men under a covenant of works, and as their greatest enemies; but they [Winthrop and Wilson], bearing all patiently, and not withdrawing themselves (as
they were strongly solicited to have done), but carrying themselves lovingly and helpfully upon all occasions, the Lord brought about the hearts of all the people to love and esteem them more than ever before.” Governor Winthrop credited himself and Pastor Wilson, “guided by the Lord,” with diverting ruin.
Whether or not Winthrop was right about God’s “continued disquietude against” Anne Hutchinson, she was indeed suffering physical distress. The unaccustomed weakness she had experienced in the fall and through the winter of her imprisonment continued into spring. She had throbbing headaches and bouts of violent vomiting. Now forty-six years old, she was roughly seven months pregnant. Pregnancy does not always proceed as expected, she was well aware. She had seen many infant and maternal deaths, even with her fine record as a midwife. Most women her age could not conceive, and if they did, the ensuing pregnancy was often difficult.
Still, she must have been distressed to go into labor in May, about six weeks before she expected her sixteenth child, and deliver a strange mass of tissue nothing like an infant. In appearance and size it resembled a handful of transparent gooseberries or grapes. She previously may have seen this birth anomaly, which is now known as a hydatidiform mole. Relatively rare, it occurs most often in women older than forty-five and is the result of one or two sperm fertilizing a blighted ovum. (The Reverend John Cotton’s description of it to his congregation—“Several lumps of man’s seed, without any alteration, or mixture of any thing from the woman”—was oddly prescient of modern biology.) Most molar pregnancies end in early miscarriages, but some, like Anne’s, are carried almost to term.
After the delivery Anne bled profusely, as is typical after late-term miscarriages. Her family feared she would die. They sought the assistance of a local preacher who supported her views, twenty-eight-year-old John Clarke, the 1637 émigré to Boston whose name preceded Will’s on the Portsmouth Compact. Clarke had been educated at Cambridge and possibly also the University of Leyden. At the time, ministers had some medical training and were occasionally called on to serve as doctors of medicine, a profession that in its modern sense did not exist. Arriving at the Hutchinson house, the Reverend Clarke found her “feeling her body to be greatly distempered and her spirits failing, and
in that regard doubtful of her life.” In a letter to his colleague Cotton, Clarke described her condition as “doubtful and dangerous.”
In Boston, Cotton related this news to Winthrop, who immediately wrote to Clarke requesting a much fuller account of Hutchinson’s “unnatural” pregnancy. Winthrop appears to have taken pleasure in the news. “Mistress Hutchinson being big with child, and growing toward the time of her labor, as others do,” he reported later with exuberance,
she brought forth not one (as Mistress Dyer did) but (which was more strange to amazement) thirty monstrous births or thereabouts, at once; some of them bigger, some lesser, some of one shape, some of another; few of any perfect shape, none at all of them (as far as I could ever learn) of human shape. These things are so strange that I am
almost
loath to be the reporter of them, lest I should seem to feign…. But see how the wisdom of God fitted this judgment to her sin every way, for look—as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters. And as [there were] about thirty opinions in number, so many monsters. And as those were public, and not in a corner mentioned, so this is now come to be known and famous over all these churches, and a great part of the world.
Hutchinson’s late miscarriage was soon the talk of Boston. Cotton “made use of it in public” at the next lecture day, choosing it as his text. Mistress Hutchinson’s “unnatural birth,” he told his wide-eyed congregation, “might signify her error in denying inherent righteousness” and saying that “all was Christ in us, and nothing of ours in our faith and love.” The ministers of Massachusetts neither doubted—nor failed to convey—that God punished the heretic, and anyone who followed her should also be punished.
For these men, the deformed birth, like that of Mary Dyer, demonstrated the obvious link between the intellectual woman and the Devil. Winthrop saw Dyer’s stillborn as a Satanic mix of “woman child, a fish, a beast, and a fowl, all woven together in one, and without an head.” Women who bore such babies were, like witches, possessed by the Devil.
Winthrop soon noted that Mistress Hutchinson, for “converting” a man on Rhode Island, “gave cause of suspicion of witchcraft.”
The Reverend John Wheelwright, hearing from colleagues of these excited exchanges between Winthrop, Clarke, and Cotton, wrote from New Hampshire to correct the Massachusetts governor. The monsters that Winthrop described were, in Wheelwright’s view, nothing but “a monstrous conception of his brain, a spurious issue of his intellect.”
Nevertheless, wild rumors arose in Boston of Hutchinson’s promiscuity. A widely circulated theory was that Henry Vane had fathered both deformed births. Twenty years later, in England, a nobleman recalled that “Sir Henry Vane in 1637 went over [as] governor to New England with two women, Mistress Dyer and Mistress Hutchinson,” and “he debauched both, and both were delivered of monsters.”
There is a tendency in some accounts of Hutchinson’s career to eroticize her relationships with men other than her husband, despite the lack of historical evidence for this conjecture. Hawthorne finds her standing “loftily” in the Cambridge courtroom, surveying the powerful men she awed: “unknown to herself, there is a flash of carnal pride half hidden in her eye.” A late-twentieth-century biographer of Henry Vane presumed a sexual attraction between the youthful governor and Anne.
Vane joined her following soon after he arrived [in Boston], attracted by her eloquence, the intensity of her conviction, and his pleasure at finding her views reinforcing his own…. Here was no tedious recital of some past event, but a continual outpouring of spiritual force, unregulated, not really conscious of itself, and therefore unpredictable and exciting.
Soon Anne was also drawn to young Vane…. As she lectured she was particularly aware of the sensitive face, the brooding eyes, those soft hands that would never grip a musket or a sword or a dagger, hands made only for the pen and the book. And even more she was aware of his attentive sympathy, the nuances and shifts of mood that matched her own. Vane was the young Seeker, drawn to a woman who was mother and sister and in some remote and subtle way lover, with whom he could share distant mutual ecstasies.
These presumptions make no sense in light of her long and happy marriage to Will, with whom she conceived a child roughly every eighteen months for well over twenty years. Still, the heroine, unlike the hero, is sexualized. John Winthrop was also an intimate of the much younger Henry Vane, and these two men continued a warm correspondence long after Vane returned to England. John Cotton hosted Vane (and, over the years, many other young men) in his home for periods of months. But nowhere is there even a suggestion of a sexual connection between the men.
As news and gossip sailed back and forth across the water, Winthrop still worried over the impression his colony made on royal authorities. In September 1638, after Archbishop Laud again demanded the return of the colonial charter, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts excused itself from complying. London issued further threats until 1640, when Charles I recalled Parliament because he needed funds to fight the Scottish Covenanters. This session of Parliament, which had not met for twelve years, lasted only three weeks, until the king dissolved it again. A few months later, however, when the Scots invaded England, Charles again recalled Parliament. Two years later, civil war broke out between King Charles and Parliament. The latter eventually took power, and in 1649 King Charles was beheaded. These political changes in England effectively ended the first “great migration” to New England, for the Puritans now held power in England. Following a decade, the 1630s, in which four thousand English families—roughly fifteen thousand individuals—left for the New World in three hundred separate voyages, Puritan emigration largely ceased.
In Boston, Winthrop continued to monitor and, if possible, guide the activities of “that wandering sheep” Anne Hutchinson. In February 1640 he and the Boston church, still hoping to wring from her a recantation, sent three church members “(men of a lovely and winning spirit, as most likely to prevail) to see if they could convince and reduce her, according to 2 Thessalonians 3:13.” No doubt Winthrop was aware of the echoes of the three magi who came to the infant Jesus and of the three men who visited Abraham and Sarah, bringing news from God.
The three men of Boston took the same overland route to Rhode Island that Hutchinson had taken nearly two years before. Again, snow covered the ground. Arriving on Aquidneck, they beached their canoes,
were “entertained at our Brother Coggeshall’s house,” and inquired as to the location of the Hutchinson house. The men of Boston—Captain Edward Gibbons (who had urged caution before excommunication at her church trial), John Oliver (a son of the surgeon Thomas), and William Hibbins—found Anne outside, in her garden. In an account of this event by Robert Keayne, a brother-in-law of the Reverend Wilson and one of the few merchants of Boston who had opposed Hutchinson, Anne, seeing the men approach, asked them, “From whom do you come, and what is your business?”
“We are come in the name of the Lord Jesus,” said one, “from the Church of Christ at Boston, to labor to convince you of the—”
“From the Church of Boston?” she cried, according to Keayne. “I know
no
such church, neither will I own it! You may call it the ‘Whore and Strumpet of Boston,’ but no church of Christ!”
In the account of John Oliver, who was present, the dialogue lasted longer. In advance, Oliver noted, John Coggeshall had warned the Boston men that the Portsmouth settlers “did not know what power one church had over another church,” “conceive one church hath not power over the members of another church,” “do not think they are tied to us by our covenant,” and “denied our commission and refused to let our letter [from the Boston church] to be read” in public. Oliver reported that after he and his colleagues told Anne Hutchinson they “had a message [for] her from the Lord and from our church,” she said, “There are lords many and gods many, but I acknowledge but one Lord. Which Lord do you mean?”