American Jezebel (29 page)

“We came in the name but of one Lord, and that is God.”

“Then so far we agree,” she replied. “Where we do agree, let it be set down.”

“We have a message to you from the church of Christ in Boston.”

“I know no church but one.”

“In Scripture,” they said, “the Holy Ghost calls them churches.”

“Christ had but
one
spouse.”

“He had in some sort as many spouses as saints,” they countered.

“For your church,” she replied, “I will not acknowledge it any church of Christ.”

According to both Oliver’s and Keayne’s accounts, the men “of a lovely and winning spirit” left her and went in search of her husband,
hoping for a more compliant response. Finding Will, they requested his help in reducing his wife. He answered with the only spoken words actually attributed to him: “I am more nearly tied to my wife than to the church. I do think her to be a dear saint and servant of God.”

Oliver, Gibbons, and Hibbins returned to Boston in mid-March. Winthrop noted in his journal that it was “a close, calm day. There fell diverse flakes of snow of this form, very thin, and as exactly pointed as art could have cut in paper.”

Early Rhode Island, unlike Massachusetts, did not organize a formal church. In keeping with their belief in greater freedoms than those permitted in Massachusetts, the people of Portsmouth worshiped in a far looser way. As a result, there are few extant records of their religious activities. The Reverend John Clarke, who attended Anne after her miscarriage, preached in Portsmouth, but there was no church founded or meetinghouse built there during this period, and what congregation there was soon split over whether or not to worship on the Lord’s Day. They “gathered a church in a very disordered way,” Winthrop noted in 1639, and “took some excommunicated persons.” Cotton added that “most of them [held] all manner of filthy opinions.”

Hutchinson was said to preach even more in Rhode Island than she had in Boston, which suggests she held Scripture meetings for women and perhaps men. “The grand mistress of them all,” as the Bostonian Edward Johnson called her, “ordinarily prated every Sabbath day, until others, who thirsted after honor in the same way with herself, drew away her auditors.” A local history of Portsmouth notes that the “rapid growth of Pocasset,” the town’s Indian name, in the late 1630s “was due chiefly to the temporary popularity of Mrs. Hutchinson’s religious teachings.” At the same time, there is no record of her leading any worship service outside her home in Rhode Island or supporting the idea of a woman preaching in a church. For suggesting that idea, a man was whipped in Portsmouth in 1639. Nevertheless, Portsmouth and Providence were both far more lenient in this regard than Massachusetts.

Even with Rhode Island’s loose organs of government, civil troubles arose. The top official, William Coddington, who had quietly suggested to the Massachusetts court that Anne’s punishment was disproportionate to her acts, seemed in his magistracy to become imperious and autocratic. He alienated his neighbors by allotting land as he
liked and supporting the establishment of a church like those in Massachusetts Bay. Early in 1639 Hutchinson befriended a prominent radical named Samuel Gorton, who attacked the legitimacy of all governing magistrates. A forty-seven-year-old clothier from London who knew Greek and Latin but had not attended college, Gorton had landed in Boston in 1637, soon left for parts south, and would in 1643 settle the town of Warwick, Rhode Island.

On Thursday, April 28, 1639, Samuel Gorton and a dozen other men of Portsmouth rebelled against William Coddington. They ejected him from power and formed a new body politic. It is not entirely clear that Anne Hutchinson supported Gorton’s rebellion, for she soon broke with Gorton, but the rebels chose as their new governor Will Hutchinson, who appears never to have sought political power. The town meeting record of April 30, 1639, reads, “We whose names are underwritten [ William Hutchinson, first, and more than thirty other men] do acknowledge ourselves the loyal subjects of King Charles, and in his name do hereby bind ourselves into a civil body politic, and do submit unto his laws according [to] matters of justice…. We have freely made choice of William Hutchinson to be ruler or judge among us.” A month later Winthrop reported, “At Aquidneck the people grew very tumultuous, and put out Mr. Coddington and the other three magistrates, and chose Mr. William Hutchinson only, a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife,” who “had been the beginner of all the former troubles in the country, and still continued to breed disturbance.”

Coddington fled to the southern end of Aquidneck Island, where on May 1 he created the settlement of Newport, which had a far deeper harbor, and claimed its magistracy by default. Coddington wrote to Winthrop in late 1639 to say he had separated from the Hutchinsons and would welcome Winthrop’s help in setting up a church. Massachusetts recognized Coddington as Newport’s governing authority, further isolating the Hutchinson group. Late that year William Coddington named himself the governor of the united “Colony of Rhode Island.” Perhaps to mollify the residents of Portsmouth, in March 1640 he named Will Hutchinson as one of his three assistant governors. (For a time, then, Will served as both governor and assistant governor of the island.) Meanwhile, Massachusetts Bay prepared to annex land on
Narragansett Bay, giving Anne Hutchinson reason to fear that Massachusetts would soon take over her new little colony, either by royal charter or by military force. By the summer of 1640, according to an English visitor named Lechford, Aquidneck was home to “about two hundred families” clustered in Portsmouth, to the north, and Newport, to the south. While neither town had an organized church, Lechford noted, some residents of Portsmouth met to “teach one another, and call it prophecy.”

Will Hutchinson’s tenure as a governor of Rhode Island lasted hardly a year. In early 1641 he decided to step down. Like many dissident Rhode Islanders, the Hutchinsons no longer believed in human magistracy, or the rule of governors and judges. In their view, a saint—in whom the Holy Spirit dwells—cannot be ruled by a secular authority or by anyone else not ordained by God. This seemingly anarchic and fatalistic reliance on the absolute will of God arose from Hutchinson’s strict interpretation of Cotton’s doctrine of unconditional election. While it did not please John Winthrop, it was perfectly consistent with the Calvinist view of God’s omnipotence and humanity’s utterly depraved state.

Various Christian sects emerged during this period in Rhode Island, although there is no evidence that Anne and Will joined them. Many Rhode Island settlers defied the Congregational ministers, much as the Antinomians had in Boston. “Conflict was intrinsic to the congregational system,” according to David Hall. “Too much was vague, too much was open to interpretation.”

Many of Anne’s earliest and strongest supporters, including the Coddingtons and the Dyers, would later join the Society of Friends, founded by George Fox in England in 1647 and imported to Rhode Island in 1655. Becoming Quaker (initially a derogatory term for the bodily shaking of Friends during worship) was for many Hutchinsonians “the natural ending,” according to the Bradstreet biographer Helen Campbell, because “the heart of Anne Hutchinson’s doctrine [was] a belief in the ‘Inward Light.’” Quakers believed that one knows God through this inner light from the Holy Spirit, which is not unlike Anne’s notion of the Spirit dwelling in the saint’s soul. They supported toleration of other faiths, refused to swear oaths to king or country, and eventually would refuse to take up arms. Rejecting the need for minis
ters and church services, they believed that women and men are equally capable of leading worship. In David Hall’s view, Hutchinson “anticipated certain Quaker themes.”

The Quakers, who had little presence in New England until the late 1650s, were but one of many new sects—including Anabaptists, Baptists, Rogerenes, and Gortonists—that flourished (or were imagined to flourish) in early Rhode Island and were disallowed in early Massachusetts. Anabaptists were the spiritual descendants of the sixteenth-century rebels who had taken over the German city of Münster; even the specter of Anabaptism terrified orthodox Puritans, as Dudley had expressed in court in November. Anabaptists and Baptists—followers of John Smyth, who founded the Baptist Church in England in 1604—rejected infant baptism, believing that this sacrament, like the Lord’s Supper, should be reserved for aware, regenerate adults. Some Hutchinsonians—although apparently not Anne—shared this view. Winthrop noted in his journal in 1639 some gossip that he had heard: “a sister of Mistress Hutchinson,” Katherine Marbury Scott, “being infected with Anabaptistry, went last year to live at Providence,” where “Mr. Williams was taken (or rather emboldened) by her to make open profession thereof, and accordingly was rebaptized”—given adult baptism—“by one Holyman, a poor man late of Salem. Then Mr. Williams rebaptized some ten more. They also denied the baptizing of infants, and would have no magistrates.”

Williams soon abandoned Anabaptism. In his final effort to purify his church, he denounced all the New England churches. In his view, anyone who had communion with the Church of England—most colonial churches did—was not a true church. Williams refused to worship with anyone but himself. He would not even say a blessing at meals with his wife because she sometimes attended public worship.

To keep Massachusetts pure, the colonial court made laws against all who professed these faiths. In 1644 the General Court ordered that Anabaptists were banished, upon pain of death, and in 1658 it extended this punishment to Quakers.

Whether or not his information was accurate, Winthrop reported in 1641 that Anne Hutchinson “turned Anabaptist.” His journal is one of the few sources of information about her life in Portsmouth because he recorded every detail he heard, but its veracity must be questioned
on account of his distance and especially his desire to discredit her. According to him, she supported passive resistance to authority, “denied all magistracy among Christians, and maintained that there were not [any] churches since those founded by the apostles and evangelists, nor could any be.” Horrified, he recounted how “Mistress Hutchinson and those of Aquidneck Island broached new heresies every year. Diverse of them turned professed Anabaptists, and would not wear any arms, and denied all magistracy among Christians, and maintained that there were not churches since those founded by the apostles and evangelists, nor could any be, nor any pastors ordained, nor seals administered….” In the fall of 1641, he lamented, “She continued on in the wilderness, as yet she was.”

Like him, she felt some missionary zeal in trying to correct her opponents’ misconceptions. She sent a letter to clarify and justify her views to the General Court of Massachusetts in early 1639. The magistrates refused to “read it publicly because she had been excommunicated.” No copy of her letter survives; indeed, we have nothing in her hand.

In the summer of 1641 she sent two of her relatives on a mission to Massachusetts on her behalf. Her twenty-year-old son, Francis, her father’s namesake, and her twenty-two-year-old son-in-law, William Collins, traveled from Portsmouth to Boston, where they likely did not stay at the family’s old house facing the Winthrop house on Shawmut. (Ownership of the house and its garden, orchard, “courtyards, stables, stalls, outhouses, commons, and appurtenances” had been transferred to Edward Jr. in 1638 and then in June 1639 to Will’s brother Richard Hutchinson, a wealthy London ironmonger who appears never to have occupied it. Edward and his family likely remained in the house until Richard Hutchinson divided the property and sold it in two parts in 1658.) William Collins was a nonconformist minister from Barbados, in the West Indies, where, according to Winthrop, “he had preached a time and done some good, but so soon as he came to [Hutchinson in Rhode Island he] was infected with her heresies.” He had also married the Hutchinsons’ fifteen-year-old daughter, Anne. In 1640 Collins had written several letters to people in Boston charging that the Massachusetts ministers and magistrates were “anti-Christian” and the king of England was like the king of Babylon, who oppressed the people of God.

The General Court, learning that William Collins and Francis Hutchinson were within its jurisdiction, called up the young Hutchinsonians and demanded an explanation for their presence. The two young men refused to appear before the court, so “they were brought [and] led” to the meeting of September 7, 1641. Collins acknowledged to the court that he had written a letter “and maintained what he had written, that there were no gentile churches (as he termed them) since the Apostles’ times, and that none now could ordain ministers.” Francis Hutchinson disavowed the rumor that he would not sit at table with his mother. Like his mother, he “reviled the church” of Boston as a “strumpet.” At this, that church, which the year before had refused Francis’s request to be removed as a member, promptly excommunicated him. The court ordered that both men be fined and imprisoned.

To the court, these sums were small in comparison with the amount that the Hutchinsons had cost the state: “That family had put the country to so much charge in the synod and other occasions, to the value of 500 pounds, at least.”

The two young men consistently refused to renege on their support of Anne Hutchinson’s views, and so they remained in the Boston prison for several months. In early October the court tried to end the standstill by reducing their fines from one hundred to forty pounds, for Collins, and from fifty to twenty pounds, for Francis. “And if they give security to pay the same within six months, it is referred to the Governor to send them away.”