American Jezebel (32 page)

The biblical Jezebel, whom we know from Hebrew accounts in 1 and 2 Kings, lived more than eight centuries before Christ. Born a princess, she was the daughter of Ethball, a high priest who became king of the Sidonians in the Phoenician city of Tyre, in modern-day Lebanon, on the Mediterranean Sea. Like her people, Jezebel worshiped the ancient Canaanite gods such as Baal, the god of rain and fertility, who takes the shape of a bull or calf. To the Hebrews, whose God had no image or face, the Phoenician gods were pagan idols, not worthy of respect.

As a young woman, Jezebel married Ahab, a Jew who became king of Israel in 874
BCE
. In this mixed marriage King Ahab worshiped the Hebrew god, Yahweh, while Queen Jezebel worshiped the Phoenician gods. This arrangement worked for some time in their court in the city of Jezreel. But Jezebel wanted more, so Ahab built a temple and an altar to Baal in Samaria, along the Jordan River. To please her he made a wooden image of Baal, an act proscribed by the Hebrew God: “Thou shalt not make a graven image before thee.” 1 Kings 16:33 states, “Ahab did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.” Queen Jezebel, like others in Israel’s
reign of “pagan monarchs,” had to be destroyed, her “whoredoms and witchcrafts” ended.

The recounting of Jezebel’s death in 2 Kings 9 begins with Jehu, a commander in the army of Israel, riding toward Jezreel with his troops. When Jezebel learns that Jehu is approaching, she puts paint on her eyes and adorns her head. This is the cause of her millennial reputation as a tart. Jehu charges toward her palace, where she awaits him at her window. (Winthrop must have seen Hutchinson at the window of her bedchamber on Shawmut, gazing out past his house to the sea.) Jezebel taunts Jehu by invoking the name of another army commander who died after a similar mission: “Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?”

Furious, Jehu orders her thrown from the window of her palace. Her blood spatters. Jehu tramples her body with his horses and chariot. When her servants come to bury her, they can find only her skull, her palms, and her feet. Her absence fulfills the prophecy of Elijah of Gilead, in 2 Kings 9:36, that “in the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel; and the carcass of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, ‘This is Jezebel.’” Jehu arranges further to efface the heroine by slaughtering Jezebel and Ahab’s seventy sons, fulfilling the prophecy that the Lord would take vengeance on Jezebel’s “poisoned seed.”

The Hebrew Bible, like Winthrop’s account of Anne Hutchinson, is an orthodox history—history as written by the victors. Just as Hutchinson was to Winthrop “the subtlety of Satan,” so Queen Jezebel was, in the minds of the authors of the Old Testament, a false prophet. In removing Hutchinson, Winthrop succeeded in restoring what David Hall called “the myth of New England as a land that God had specially favored.” We can only wonder what we might learn if the ancient Jezebel, like Anne, had left transcripts of her opinions and beliefs.

Winthrop’s account of Hutchinson’s career, first published in London in 1644, contained all the relevant documents, including his descriptions of Dyer’s and Hutchinson’s abnormal births, the catalog of Hutchinson’s eighty-two “erroneous opinions,” the petition in support of Wheelwright, summaries of the proceedings of court and church against Hutchinson, and additional pages of his recollections and thoughts. The governor had collected and shipped these writings to his colonial emissary in London, the Reverend Thomas Weld—Hutchinson’s jailer and
inquisitor in Roxbury—who edited and arranged them for publication. The two men hoped this account of the triumph of Congregationalism over Antinomianism in New England would serve as a warning to the English of the dangers of Antinomian sects.

They also wished to diminish Sir Henry Vane, who was now the leader of the English Independent party, working with Cromwell against the monarchists. Parliament was divided between the Independents, led by Cromwell and Vane (still a strong proponent of religious liberty), and the Presbyterians, many willing to share power with the king. Winthrop could not foresee that his account of Hutchinson would not only antagonize Vane’s following but also give moderate Scots Presbyterian leaders like the Reverend Robert Baillie ammunition against the “Congregational”—New England—“Way.” Baillie used it as evidence of the failure of the immigrants to New England, accusing John Cotton of “wandering into the horrible errors of the Antinomians, and Familists, with his dear friend Mistress Hutchinson.”

Many historians consider Winthrop’s “Short Story,” as his 1644 work is now known, to be uncharacteristically emotional. Edith Curtis called it the “fantastical” product of “a pen dipped in the bitterness of polemic animosity.” The colonial historian James Savage termed it “discreditable,” “narrow, vindictive, virulent and malignant.” Yet the “Short Story” remains a window on Winthrop’s final view of “the sorest trial that ever befell us since we left our native soil.”

Its expansive title page contains the first published use of the term
Antinomian
in connection with Anne Hutchinson:

The Reverend Thomas Weld appended to the text a brief preface, in which he set the scene: “After we had escaped the cruel hands of persecuting prelates [in England], and the dangers at sea, and had prettily well outgrown our wilderness troubles in our first plantings in New England; and when our commonwealth began to be founded, and our churches sweetly settled in peace (God abounding to us in more happy enjoyments than we could have expected), lest we should, now, grow secure, our wise God (who seldom suffers his own, in this their wearisome pilgrimage to be long without trouble) sent a new storm after us”—the presence and power of Anne Hutchinson.

A year after the publication of the “Short Story,” the Reverend John Wheelwright, who was now the pastor at Wells, Maine, published a book refuting it and justifying himself, titled
Mercurius Americanus,

Wheelwright had left New Hampshire for Maine in 1643, when Massachusetts subsumed Exeter, and then wrote to Winthrop and the court to apologize for his “vehement, censorious speeches” in 1636 and 1637. He requested permission to visit and “give satisfaction” to the Massachusetts court, which was granted—for two weeks in the late summer of 1643. In person, he asked the court to overturn his sentence
of banishment. As he awaited the court’s answer, he learned that his sister-in-law and six of her children had been killed.

The General Court of Massachusetts, under Governor Winthrop, lifted Wheelwright’s banishment the following May. This rapid shift appears to have resulted from Wheelwright’s potential usefulness to the colony in gaining public support in Cromwellian England and from Wheelwright’s earlier decision to go into exile apart from the Hutchinsonians on Rhode Island. Three years later, in 1647, Massachusetts called back the fifty-five-year-old Wheelwright to become assistant pastor in Hampton, New Hampshire, then part of the colony, where he served without incident. In 1650 he received the deed to a two-hundred-acre farm, and his annual salary increased from forty to fifty pounds. The same year his twenty-year-old daughter Katherine, who had been born during the year of the plague in Alford, returned to Boston and married Robert Nanny, a wealthy merchant in his late forties, who died a few years later. Katherine remained in their house on Cross Street, beside Mill Pond near the landing place for the Shawmut-Charlestown ferry, where the remains of her privy would be uncovered more than three centuries later. She married again, unhappily. She filed for a divorce from her second husband, a Boston merchant named Edward Naylor, and the divorce was granted in 1671. Katherine Wheelwright Nanny Naylor died years later at age eighty-four in Charlestown.

In 1656, when England was under the rule of her father’s old school buddy, Oliver Cromwell, the Reverend Wheelwright had returned to the land of his birth. The Parliamentarians had beheaded Archbishop Laud at the Tower of London in 1645, and the king four years later. From 1649 until 1653, England had been a Puritan republic, or commonwealth, with parliamentary rule. In 1653 Cromwell had dismissed the so-called Long Parliament, ending the commonwealth and making Britain and Ireland a protectorate, with himself as Lord Protector, or chief, although he refused the title of king. Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 and was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son, Richard, who lacked his political skill. In 1660 King Charles II took back the throne and executed a few of the Puritans who had opposed his father. Two years after the restoration of the monarchy, the Reverend Wheelwright returned to
Massachusetts as minister of Salisbury, where he served until his death, at eighty-seven, in November 1679.

At the time of Anne Hutchinson’s death, her mother, who had married for a second time in 1620, was still alive, in her late seventies. Bridget Dryden Marbury Newman died in April 1645 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. All the Marbury offspring save Anne and Katherine remained in England. Anne’s brothers Erasmus, Jeremuth, and Anthony received degrees from Oxford, and one Marbury brother was a London doctor.

John Winthrop died six years after Anne Hutchinson, in Boston, on March 26, 1649. He had been at the center of colonial government and religion since 1630, having been chosen every year as either governor, deputy governor, or assistant to the General Court. Late in life, it was said, he regretted his actions toward the Hutchinsonians. On his deathbed, when asked by Thomas Dudley to sign yet another banishment order, Winthrop said he had “done too much of that work already.” A plaque near his grave in Boston reads, “Winthrop dedicated his life to the creation of a model Christian community [and he] died at age 61 years in 1649, no doubt a disappointed man.”

By this time, several figures in the Hutchinsonian controversy were back in England, where Cromwell was establishing his Puritan commonwealth and presiding over the trial and execution of King Charles I. The Reverend Hugh Peter had returned in August 1641 on a mission to make excise and trade law more favorable to the colony. Peter joined the Parliamentary party and became Cromwell’s chaplain in the army. Later, after the restoration of the monarchy, Peter was committed to the Tower and indicted for high treason for his alleged role in the death of Charles I. Some said he had stood on the scaffold while the king was beheaded; others said he was the hooded executioner. Hugh Peter’s head was cut off, stuck on a pole, and placed on London Bridge. Thomas Weld, who had accompanied him back to England in 1641, died there twenty years later, at sixty-five. Even the old Hutchinsonian William Aspinwall, who had gone to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1638, returned to England, where he died in 1662.

John Cotton died three years after John Winthrop, at age sixty-eight, in his house in Boston, two days before Christmas 1652. “His lat
ter days were like the clear shining of the sun after rain,” a younger contemporary observed. Even the Reverend John Wilson, who remained pastor of the First Church of Boston until his death in 1667, when he was seventy-eight, remarked after Cotton’s death that Cotton had been, of all things, “a most skillful compounder of all differences in doctrine or practice according to God.” A late poem by Cotton captures his enduring sense of contentment, which seems to have eluded many of his peers.