American Jezebel (33 page)

Cotton and Winthrop each had a son and namesake who followed in his stead. John Winthrop Jr. was a governor of the Connecticut colony, and John Cotton Jr. was a Boston minister. Cotton and Winthrop were both buried in the old graveyard next to King’s Chapel, near Cotton’s friend John Davenport, who died in 1670.

This burying ground, Boston’s first, was taken over by the crown in 1686 to give the Church of England a foothold in Boston. Beside the burying ground the Church of England built the King’s Chapel, which is partly a monument to the decline of Winthrop and Cotton’s Congregational Church. Some Hutchinson descendants—several Savages and
Governor Hutchinson—are also buried here, a block west of where Winthrop and Hutchinson lived and half a block south of the site of the Cotton house. Cotton’s and Hutchinson’s lines were joined in 1710, when his great-granddaughter Dorothy Cotton (1693–1748) married Anne Hutchinson’s great-great-grandson the Reverend Nathaniel Gookin (1687–1734), the son of the Harvard president and Hannah Savage Gookin.

Simon Bradstreet, an assistant during Anne’s trials, was later elected governor of Massachusetts. He died in 1697, a quarter century after his wife Anne Bradstreet. Her first volume of poems was published in London in 1650 by her brother-in-law, apparently without her knowledge, under the title
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.
Most of her other work appeared posthumously. The Bradstreets’ daughter Dorothy, who was born in Boston in 1633, married Seaborn Cotton, the minister’s first son. Anne Bradstreet’s father, Thomas Dudley, one of Anne Hutchinson’s most brutal foes, lived to the ripe old age of seventy-five. When he died, in his house in Roxbury on the last day of July 1653, this poem, in his own hand, was found in his pocket.

Another court assistant in Anne’s day—and one of her least tolerant judges—was John Endicott, of Salem, who was elected governor an impressive fifteen times, in 1644, 1649, from 1651 to 1653, and from 1655 to 1664. An efficient administrator, Governor Endicott was known for his harshness to Quakers, witches, and other latter-day Antinomians, with whom he battled until his death in 1665.

One Quaker encountered by Governor Endicott was Anne’s youngest sister, Katherine Marbury Scott, who returned to Boston in 1660 as a “grave, sober, ancient woman” to protest the amputation of the ear of another Quaker, Christopher Holder. The General Court under Endicott had ordered that all followers of Anabaptism, the Soci
ety of Friends, and other such sects be banished from Massachusetts upon pain of death. In some cases blasphemy was punished with the amputation of an ear, presumably on the theory that the voices the person heard were not God’s. Soon after Anne’s death Katherine Scott had said the Massachusetts court was “drunk with the blood of the saints,” but since then she had lived quietly on Rhode Island. Now, because of her objection to the court’s treatment of Holder, the court had her jailed and thrashed with a threefold, corded, knotted whip. The magistrates sent her away and threatened her with death if she returned. Echoing her older sister Anne, Katherine Marbury Scott said to the Massachusetts court, “If God calls us, woe be to us if we come not, [because God] will make us not to count our lives dear unto ourselves—for the sake of His name.”

“And we,” Governor Endicott promised, “shall be as ready to take away your lives as ye shall be to lay them down.” Scott died twenty-seven years later, in Newport, Rhode Island.

Mary Dyer also returned to Massachusetts in protest while Endicott was governor. The Dyers, having followed the Hutchinsons to Rhode Island, returned in 1650 to England, where they became Quakers. Six years later they came back to Rhode Island as Quaker missionaries. Their ship landed in Boston. Learning that Mary Dyer, now in her forties, was in Boston, the General Court ordered her out of its jurisdiction. When Dyer refused to leave the colony, Massachusetts authorities arrested her, stripped her to the waist, and whipped her in public. Tried by the court along with two Quaker men, in 1659 she was convicted of blasphemy and led to the gallows on Boston Common, in front of today’s State House. The executioner hanged the two men and put Mistress Dyer on a horse and ordered her away to Rhode Island. Again she returned and was told by the court that she would die if she did not leave. She refused. The court condemned her to death for “rebellious sedition, and presumptuous obtruding herself after banishment upon pain of death.” Her son William Dyer petitioned for a reprieve on the condition that she depart within forty-eight hours. Despite his efforts to save her life, she returned to Boston a third time.

On June 1, 1660, Mary Dyer stood motionless on the scaffold on Boston Common as a rope was placed around her neck. At the executioner’s command, she climbed the ladder. Before a great crowd, among
whom stood the magistrates and ministers of the colony, she said, “My life not availeth me in comparison to the liberty of the truth—” As the executioner yanked away the ladder, her neck snapped. She was survived by her husband, who died at Newport in 1677. A year after her death, at the behest of the freemen of Boston and the order of King Charles II, the court reduced the penalties for religious crimes. There were no more executions of Quakers, although whippings of Quakers continued.

Anne Hutchinson’s governor, Sir Henry Vane, also lost his life for his support of religious liberty. Having returned to England in August 1637, a few months before her Cambridge trial, he had married Francis Wray and become a member of Parliament, where he and Oliver Cromwell led the Independent Party against the Presbyterians. He was named treasurer of the navy and knighted in 1640, and he was known during the English civil war as a moderate, arguing for religious toleration and a constitutional monarchy. As in Boston, Vane impressed many with his idealism and honor. In 1652 the poet John Milton wrote this admiring sonnet “To Sir Henry Vane the Younger.”

Despite such accolades, Vane also continued to disappoint, even irritate, those with whom he allied. In 1649, after Oliver Cromwell tried and executed King Charles I, Vane became an influential member of the
Commonwealth government. His influence ended in 1653 when he clashed with Cromwell over the latter’s decision to dissolve the Long Parliament and establish his own rule. “Oh, Sir Henry Vane,” Oliver Cromwell said at the time. “Thou with thy subtle casuistries and abstruse hair splittings, thou art other than a good one! The Lord deliver me from thee, Henry Vane!” Three years later Cromwell had Vane imprisoned briefly for writing a pamphlet,
A Healing Question,
against arbitrary government. After Cromwell’s death in 1658, Vane sat in Parliament under Cromwell’s son. At the fall of Richard Cromwell’s government, Vane argued for the restoration of the Long Parliament. In 1660 Charles II, son of Charles I, retook the throne.

In 1662 Henry Vane was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death, despite his 1649 refusal to participate in the execution of King Charles I. (The corpse of Oliver Cromwell, who had led the trial and execution of the king, was exhumed, and his head was displayed at Westminster Hall.) On June 14, 1662, at the execution stand before the Tower of London, forty-nine-year-old Henry Vane approached the scaffold. He lay his head on the block. The ax severed his neck. The executioner raised Vane’s head and cried, “Behold, the head of a traitor!”

“There must have been grim, knowing looks in Massachusetts when news of Vane’s death arrived,” the historian Michael Winship surmised. “His execution fulfilled a bloody prophecy a minister made slightly before his departure.” The minister was Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, who himself collapsed and died in August 1649 at only forty-five. In a 1638 sermon at the Cambridge meetinghouse, Shepard had prophesied for Vane a ghastly end. According to Winship, the colonial establishment “seemingly had the last word in revelations; Massachusetts still existed; Vane and Hutchinson were dead.

“But Massachusetts had only twenty-two more years of autonomy left in which to chase the theocratic dream of Elizabethan Puritans…of a religiously and morally cleansed Reformed Christian polity—one state, one church, one godly path to heaven.” The colony’s charter was voided for good in 1684 by King Charles II. This Stuart king, whose father the Puritans had beheaded, would do anything to prevent the return to England of “the disorder of two decades of failed Puritan rule.” The final governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Simon Bradstreet,
was replaced by a series of royal governors selected and sent from abroad. Particularly offensive to the Puritans of Boston, the king who chose the first royal governor of New England (which extended from Nova Scotia to Delaware), Charles II’s successor, James II, was a Roman Catholic. In the summer of 1686, two years after the charter was voided, English ships sailed into Boston harbor carrying the order to create the King’s Chapel, transplanting the “popish” Church of England to the still-impure New World.

“Thus,” Michael Winship noted, Anne “Hutchinson had been right in 1637 when she predicted destruction on the Massachusetts magistrates for trying to export their problems” by banishing her and her followers. She was “right in ways both broader and more symbolic than she had intended, but right nevertheless—their inability to work out a way to live with their hotter brethren and sisters prophesied Puritanism’s doom.”

Three hundred and fifty years after her prophecy, this “hotter” sister, John Winthrop’s “American Jezebel,” was welcomed back into the fold. In 1987 Michael Dukakis, Winthrop’s political descendant as governor of Massachusetts, formally pardoned Anne Hutchinson. No longer “banished from our jurisdiction as a woman not fit for our society,” Anne Hutchinson is again present.

Finding the sites of Anne Hutchinson’s life requires the imagination of a skilled realtor showing potential buyers a derelict mansion. Under the dismal carpet lies a gorgeous, original wood floor. Can I peel up the edge here to show you? Beneath these layers of grime and paint are beautifully carved moldings. With vision and patience, a potential buyer may envision the mansion as it once was and could still be. It is the same with the seventeenth-century world of Anne Hutchinson: with patience and vision, one can both find and imagine it alive.

The obvious starting place is her Boston house, whose footprint still exists in the modern city—remarkably, given that most of seventeenth-century Boston is gone. The brick, gambrel-roofed Old Corner Bookstore building in downtown Boston, one of the city’s oldest standing structures, was built in 1718 on the exact site of her 1634 house. Her son Edward Hutchinson Jr. had sold that house in 1639 to his uncle Richard Hutchinson, who divided the lot in two and sold it outside the family in 1658. An apothecary named Thomas Crease purchased the house and corner lot (at the corner of Washington and School Streets today) in the early 1700s and used the house as both home and office.

In October 1711, in the Great Fire of Boston, the former Hutchinson house burned to the ground. Seven years later Thomas Crease erected a brick structure in the same alignment and orientation on the footprint of the house that Will Hutchinson had built. This brick house still stands, along with much of its original exterior brickwork. Its front door, at 271 Washington Street, opens into the Boston Globe Bookstore, the Old Corner Bookstore’s successor, which is devoted to New England memorabilia. Entering the building from the School Street side, one can climb to the second and third floors and view some
of its original 1718 timbers, preserved in a hallway. The upper floors of the building, which has been owned by the corporation Historic Boston since 1960, contain the offices of that preservation group, the Freedom Trail, and the Boston Globe Bookstore.

A wonderful little book published in 1939,
The Thomas Creese
[sic]
House: being the Description of a typical townhouse of the early Eighteenth century and containing a History of the site thereof from the time of Anne Hutchinson to the Present day,
describes the original early-eighteenth-century house, its wooden predecessor, and its various changes in the centuries since. In the mid-nineteenth century it housed Tichnor & Fields, the publisher of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott. The modern-day view from the upper windows of the Old Corner Bookstore building is of street and skyscraper, nothing like the view the Hutchinsons enjoyed from the windows of their house here. That view is best approximated by visiting the second or third floors of any downtown, harbor-front hotel or high-rise.

For a wider perspective on Anne Hutchinson’s Boston, a useful aid is the WalkBoston map of the “Shawmut Peninsula Walk: Tracing Boston’s Original Shoreline,” which offers a “guided tour imagining the past by experiencing early Boston on foot.” It superimposes the outline of colonial Boston on the map of the modern city. The original town dock was inland and slightly to the north of today’s Long Wharf, home of the Aquarium, the Boston Harbor Hotel, and Rowes Wharf. The town spring was just above the Old State House at the top of Washington Street, a block northeast of the Old Corner Bookstore. Adjacent to the spring was the marketplace and the First Church of Boston, where Anne’s excommunication trial was held. On this site a skyscraper now stands.

The church, now known as the First and Second Church of Boston, has moved several times over the centuries. It is presently Unitarian Universalist and located at 66 Marlboro Street, at the intersection with Berkeley Street, in the Back Bay. Until a 1968 fire, it contained a wooden plaque honoring Hutchinson that read “Anne the Pioneer, Anne the Trouble-Maker, Anne the Martyr.” The First and Second Church now displays calligraphic memorabilia relating to Hutchinson and other early congregants.

One block north of the Old Corner Bookstore on School Street, past the Old City Hall, is the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, where lie the remains of the Reverends Cotton and Davenport, John Winthrop, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, and several Savages descended from Hutchinson. Inside the King’s Chapel is the Governor’s Box, where Thomas Hutchinson worshiped before fleeing the colony.

The site of John Winthrop’s Boston mansion house—diagonally across from the Old Corner Bookstore—is now occupied by the Winthrop Building (278–286 Washington Street), a handsome Victorian skyscraper made of orange brick, which takes up the small block between Spring and Water Streets. The actual stone foundation of Winthrop’s first house, in Charlestown, is still visible, near the Bunker Hill Monument, as a result of archeological work done during Boston’s Big Dig. Mary and William Dyer lived at the corner of Washington and Summer Streets, just southwest of the Hutchinsons. The Reverend John Cotton’s house was across Tremont Street from the modern Boston City Hall, on the eastern edge of Pemberton Hill, which was sometimes called Cotton’s Hill.

To the west of Charlestown, in Cambridge’s Harvard Square, is the site of Hutchinson’s first, or civil, trial. The first meetinghouse of Cambridge was located at the southwest corner of modern-day Mount Auburn and Dunster Streets, where a brick building housing a Nantucket Nectars office and a J. Press haberdashery now stands. The street sign on Dunster says in small letters, “Water Street, 1631.” A short block west on Mount Auburn, at Winthrop Square, a Cambridge Historical Commission billboard depicts the history of Newtown and Cambridge.

For those in search of three-dimensional depictions of Hutchinson’s life in America, there are several excellent museums of living history. Two in Massachusetts—Plymouth Plantation, south of Boston, and Pioneer Village, north of Boston—are set in the 1620s. Although it is farther afield, St. Mary’s City, in southern Maryland, founded in 1634, gives an even better idea of what the Hutchinsons’ life was like. St. Mary’s City is an actual archeological site, probably the oldest such site of a European settlement in North America. Because Maryland’s climate is milder than that of Massachusetts, its colonial houses are closer to the spacious, relatively comfortable abodes enjoyed by the Hutchinsons and
their wealthy Boston neighbors than the small, dark interiors of Plymouth Plantation.

These created or re-created depictions of seventeenth-century America are refreshing in light of the tendency to see colonial America as starting around 1770, well over a century after Anne’s time. The Smithsonian Museum’s exhibit on colonial America, for instance, goes back only to 1775, as does the Women’s Military Memorial at the Arlington National Cemetery. Colonial Boston, as depicted in three dimensions in the fine model inside Boston’s Old South Meeting House, just across Washington Street from the Old Corner Bookstore, is dated 1773, when Anne’s great-great-grandson, the governor of Massachusetts, lived in the city’s North End. The model also includes the “Thomas Crease house,” as the building was then known.

Monuments to Hutchinson and her contemporaries do exist in modern Boston. Bronze statues of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer grace the front lawn of the Massachusetts State House. The Hutchinson statue, by Cyrus Dallin, was a 1923 gift of the Anne Hutchinson Memorial Association and the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s Clubs. Oil portraits of the Reverend John Wheelwright, Governor John Winthrop, Governor Thomas Dudley, and Governor Simon Bradstreet hang inside the state house, and the Fogg Art Museum, at Harvard University, holds another portrait of Winthrop. A statue of the young Henry Vane in a wide-brimmed cavalier hat stands in the lobby of the Boston Public Library, in Copley Square. “An ardent defender of civil liberty and advocate of free thought in religion, he maintained that God, Law, and parliament are superior to the King,” the plaque reads.

Most of these early Boston settlers lived in the area that is now Government Center. To travel from her house on Shawmut to her Cambridge trial in early November 1637, in modern terms, Anne Hutchinson walked from the Old Corner Bookstore site up Washington Street to the top of State Street, passing the meetinghouse and market square, and crossed what is now Government Center and the North End en route to the landing for the Shawmut-Charlestown ferry. The ferry landing was beside Mill Pond, a basin of water between modern-day Haymarket Square, North Washington Street, and Merrimac Street, which was filled in with soil from the top of Beacon Hill during the
nineteenth century. A historical marker on the Keany Square Building at 251 Causeway Street—once the northeast corner of the marshy pond—indicates the raised footpath that native Americans used to cross the pond; hence the name of Causeway Street in Boston’s North End. The route of the ferry that the Hutchinsons took to and from Charlestown in November 1638 was roughly the span of today’s Charlestown Bridge, at the mouth of the Charles River.

Joseph Weld’s house, where Anne Hutchinson was held prisoner for nearly six months during the winter of 1637–38, was in the Dudley Square neighborhood of Roxbury, at the intersection of Washington and Dudley Streets. For a modern tour of historic Roxbury, drive or take a bus from downtown Boston west to Dudley Square and walk north two short blocks up Dudley Street to the First Church in Roxbury, at John Eliot Square. (The honors go to Hutchinson’s contemporaries Thomas Dudley and the Reverend John Eliot.) The present church, erected in 1804 on the site of the first (1632) meetinghouse of Roxbury, is now Unitarian and offers one weekly service, Sundays at eleven. This is the spot from which William Dawes set off on April 18, 1775, for Lexington and Concord, as Paul Revere began his parallel ride from Charlestown. This site, halfway up a hill, affords a fine view of the skyscrapers of the Back Bay, a neighborhood that in the days of Hutchinson, Dudley, and Eliot was under water. The widow’s walks on extant eighteenth-century houses in this Roxbury neighborhood attest to the former proximity of the sea. Continuing north up the hill past the First Church and turning left on Fort Avenue, one reaches the summit and Fort Hill Park, also known as Highland Park. This charming green space, designed in the late nineteenth century by Frederick Law Olmsted, boasts weeping willows, benches, and a historic water standpipe at the former site of the Roxbury high fort.

On the current waterfront, in Dorchester, adjacent to the John F. Kennedy Library, is another treasure trove for students of Hutchinson’s life and times: the Massachusetts Archives and Commonwealth Museum, often known as the Big Dig Museum. The archives contain many documents of early colonial Boston, including some written by Hutchinson’s male relatives. The museum’s ongoing exhibition, Highway to the Past: The Archaeology of the Central Artery Project, contains seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century artifacts collected and analyzed by
archeologists during the fifteen-year excavation of the Big Dig in downtown Boston in the late twentieth century. These include many household objects owned by Anne Hutchinson’s niece, Katherine Wheelwright Nanny Naylor (1630–1715), whose privy was unearthed. Naylor was the first child of Anne’s brother-in-law John Wheelwright and his second wife, Mary Hutchinson, Will’s youngest sister, who immigrated to Boston in 1636. Katherine would have known her aunt Anne well as a toddler in Lincolnshire (which the Hutchinsons left when Katherine was four) and then in Boston and Mount Wollaston as a five-, six-, and seven-year-old.

The original transcripts of Hutchinson’s two trials, the most important documentation of her life and thought, are lost to history. The surviving copy of her church trial is an eighteenth-century transcription of the original done by Ezra Stiles, the Newport, Rhode Island, minister who later became president of Yale. It is in the Ezra Stiles Papers at Yale University. The transcript of Hutchinson’s civil trial appears in an appendix to volume 2 of Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s 1776
History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay.
The governor had inherited an “ancient manuscript” containing the original trial transcript, which is believed to have burned in a fire in his house during the Stamp Act riots in 1765.

The Hutchinsons’ six-hundred-acre farm south of Boston stretched from Wollaston Heights, a neighborhood in modern-day Quincy, down to Wollaston Beach. The island granted to Will Hutchinson in 1634, which was named Taylor’s Island in the court record, is not marked on extant maps, but it was likely located in this southerly part of Boston harbor. In nearby Quincy Center, the National Parks Service runs a visitor center for the Quincy and Adams homesteads. Directly next door to this visitor center is the First Church of Quincy, the successor to the 1636 church in which Anne’s brother-in-law John Wheelwright preached. The church’s crypt contains the remains of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. This church, like the First and Second Church of Boston, considers Anne Hutchinson a former member of the congregation, for she occasionally worshiped in Wollaston during her years in Massachusetts. There was once an Anne Hutchinson Square near Quincy’s Wollaston depot, as evidenced by historic markers beside the Wollaston fire station on Beale Street west of Newport Avenue.

The Anne M. Hutchinson Memorial Park, also known as Founders Brook Park, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, is a lovely wooded site just below the Boyd Lane exit off Route 24 south, beside the Mello Garden Store and farm stand. A sign on the highway reads, “Welcome to Portsmouth, Birthplace of American Democracy, established 1638.” Among the many memorial rocks placed to honor the Portsmouth Compact and the earliest settlers here is one from April 1996 with a brass plaque that reads, “To the memory of Anne Marbury Hutchinson 1591–1643. Wife, mother, midwife, visionary, spiritual leader and original settler.” The brook bubbling in the background is the remnant of the original spring around which the families who followed Anne Hutchinson into banishment created their settlement in 1638. Their meetinghouse and training ground (for military exercises) were located on this spot.