American Jezebel (4 page)

She shifted her weight from foot to foot, trying to find a comfortable position. Cold and tired, she longed to sit down. She was still nursing her youngest child, nineteen-month-old Zuriel, and she believed she was now pregnant for the sixteenth time.

She had risen that day with the sun, which rose each morning over the ocean beside her house on the Shawmut peninsula—then the center of the colony and now a slender strip of downtown Boston. After her usual morning prayer, Scripture reading, and breakfast of corn mush (cornmeal with milk or molasses), baked apples or stewed pumpkin, and cider, Anne had set out with William for the Charlestown ferry, almost a mile from their house. Ordinarily they made a
trip of this length, roughly five miles to Cambridge, on horseback or by coach, but they had traveled on foot because of the ice, which could break a horse’s leg.

At the ferry landing they had met William’s younger brother Edward, a thirty-year-old whom the court had also called that day because of his signature on the petition supporting Wheelwright. Edward and his wife, who had two young sons, had come to Boston in 1633 on the same ship as John Cotton. As the ferry crossed the mouth of the Charles River that morning, the ferryman had told the Hutchinsons of the man dying on the river the week before. During their four-mile walk inland from Charlestown to Cambridge, they had passed Indian encampments, a few colonial houses and farms, the expansive marshland that bordered the northern bank of the river, and deep forest, extending for miles north and west, beyond what was known. The same trip today, by subway or car, takes twenty minutes, but on foot it took the Hutchinsons more than two hours that morning in 1637.

Unexpectedly, the walk had exhausted Anne. This pregnancy seemed different from all the rest, although each one was distinct in her mind. The first, twenty-four years before, was Edward, born in her hometown of Alford, Lincolnshire, just ten months after her wedding day; Edward was now father to her new little grandson, Elishua. The rest had followed at intervals of roughly a year and a half. Her second child and first daughter, Susan, had died at sixteen when the bubonic plague ravaged Alford. Anne’s third child, Richard, was now twenty-one. Faith, twenty, was her oldest living daughter. Then came eighteen-year-old Bridget. Francis, just seventeen, could already vote alongside his father and older brothers. Elizabeth, her next child, had died at eight, three weeks after Susan, also of the plague. Then came sweet William, who survived toddlerhood but died before he turned six. Samuel, now almost thirteen, was a year shy of the age at which he would be allowed to stand beside his brothers and father as freemen; since the voting age had been lowered to sixteen, boys of fourteen and fifteen were also permitted to vote. Eleven-year-old Anne. Mary, age nine. Seven-year-old Katherine. William, who arrived after the first William died, was already six years old. Little Susan, the last born in England, was nearly four. And then came Zuriel, the only baby born in the New Jerusalem, who was baptized in the Boston meetinghouse on
March 13, 1636, and given the Old Testament name, which means in Hebrew “my rock is God,” belonging to the Levite chief prominent during the Exodus. Not one of those fifteen pregnancies had produced the faintness and fatigue she felt now.

The governor was talking again, describing her guilt by association. “Why for your doings, you did harbor and countenance those that are parties in this faction that you have heard of. If you do countenance those that are transgressors of the law, you are guilty too.”

“That’s a matter of conscience, sir.” With this remark, a woman with no formal schooling had fought the Cambridge-educated lawyer and governor to a draw. She was saying that her beliefs were her own business, not in the public realm, and therefore not actionable in court.

Having advanced nothing, Winthrop turned to a new line of questioning in the hope of humbling her. He introduced the fifth commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother,” which he and other colonial leaders interpreted to mean, “Honor the fathers of the commonwealth.”

Her clever, hypothetical riposte was “But put the case, sir, that I do fear the Lord
and
my parents; may not I entertain them that fear the Lord because
my parents
will not give me leave?” That is, should human authority take precedence over the divine?

This was a reasonable question in a time and place with little separation of church and state. The very concept of such a separation would not be introduced in Massachusetts society until more than a half century later, following the debacle of the witch trials in Salem Village. The settlers had come with the express purpose of creating a community in which to worship God rightly. Their charter “of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England” mandated that the “people, inhabitants there, may be so religiously, peaceably, and civilly governed, as their good life and orderly conversation may win and incite the natives of the country
to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Savior of mankind, and the Christian faith, which,
in our royal intention and the adventurers’ free intention,
is the principal end of this plantation.
” Although some of the founders of Massachusetts, including most notably John Winthrop, had been trained in English common law, their new code of laws arose largely from the Bible, which they saw as containing all history—past, present, and future. Public funds paid all church expenses. Only men who were admitted to church
membership had the right to vote. Becoming a church member involved a lengthy interview in which one had to show “evidence” of being elect, and thus saved, by God. In this way, political power was limited to those who were, in the eyes of the church, saints.

Moreover, the few men of the General Court jointly held multiple powers that would later be divided among the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government. A court system—in the modern sense of the word
court
—did not exist, according to Elizabeth Bouvier, a court archivist in modern Boston. “The judicial, administrative, legislative, and executive functions were then all intertwined in the General Court, as well as the religious authority—all of it!” This court’s vast power over the populace limited people’s freedom to a degree that is unimaginable today. People were banned, for instance, from wearing any fur, lace, or colorful cloth, and all citizens, whether or not they were church members, were required to attend Sunday services.

Despite their vast powers, the magistrates were mindful of the even greater power, across the ocean, of the English monarchy. All of the General Court’s authority came from the royal charter, granted to Winthrop and his company in 1629, which the Catholic-leaning King Charles I could revoke at any time. By bringing the physical document of the charter to America in 1630, Winthrop had put six thousand miles between it and any English effort to retrieve it. Four years later the ship that carried the Hutchinsons to Boston had also carried King Charles’s written demand that the charter be returned, which the colonists so far had ignored. Partly because of their concerns about the charter, the judges of Massachusetts needed to maintain the peace in the colony and some semblance of honor and fairness—along the lines of English common law and Puritan political theory—in their dealings with Anne Hutchinson. They could not simply banish her without reason.

“Your course is not to be suffered for,” or tolerated, Winthrop reminded her. “[It is] greatly prejudicial to the state. It is to seduce many honest persons that are called to those meetings, and your opinions—being known to be different from the word of God—may seduce many simple souls that resort unto you.” Despite the governor’s aloof and chilly mien, his temper could rise. “And now these opinions have flown off from magistrates and ministers since they have come to you. And, besides that, it will
not well stand
with the commonwealth that families
should be neglected for so many neighbors and dames and so much time spent. We see
no
rule of God for this. We see
not
that any should have authority to set up any other exercises besides what authority hath already set up. And so what hurt comes of this,
you
will be guilty of, and
we
for suffering you.”

“Sir,” she said calmly, “I do not believe that to be so.”

“Well,
we
see how it is. We must therefore put it away from you or restrain you from maintaining this course. We are
your
judges, and not you ours, and we
must
compel you to it.”

“If you have a rule for it from God’s word you may.” Boldly, she held him to his own standard, that all authority must come from the Bible. “If it please you by authority to put [my teaching] down, I will freely let you, for I am subject to your authority. I desire that you would then set me down a rule by which I may put them away that come unto me and so have peace in so doing.”

Rather than answering her, the governor deflected her question. “Yes, you are the woman of most note, and of best abilities, and if some others take upon them the like, it is by your teaching and example, but you show not in all this by what authority
you
take upon
you
to be such a public instructor.”

Anne had a good answer for him, from the book of Titus, but she could not give it. Suddenly, without warning, she fell to the floor. She had fainted before the court.

Although entirely without formal schooling, like virtually every woman of her day, Anne Hutchinson had been well educated at her father’s knee. Francis Marbury, a Cambridge-educated clergyman, schoolmaster, and Puritan reformer, was her father. In the late 1570s, more than a decade before her birth, his repeated challenges to Anglican authorities led to his censure, his imprisonment for several years, and his own public trial—on a charge of heresy, the same charge that would be brought against his daughter, of refuting church dogma or religious truth. Marbury’s trial was held in November 1578 at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, fifty-nine years and an ocean distant from her far better known trial.

His trial left an abiding mark on her, though, and its themes foreshadow those of hers. During a lengthy period of church-imposed house arrest that coincided with Anne’s first three years of life, her father composed from memory a biting transcription of his trial, which he called “The conference between me and the Bishop of London” with “many people standing by.” This dramatic dialogue, published in the early 1590s as a pamphlet, was one of the central texts he used to educate and amuse his children. “Thou art a very ass, an idiot, and a fool,” his buffoonish bishop chides Marbury the hero, in a dramatic style not unlike that of his contemporary William Shakespeare, who was then a decidedly non-Puritanical playwright and actor living in London. The other texts Marbury used to teach his daughters and sons—the Bible, first available in a printed English translation around 1540, and Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs: A History of the Lives, Sufferings and Triumphant Deaths of the Early Christian and the Protestant Martyrs,
a 1583 compendium of martyrs emphasizing those of post-Reformation England, particularly
during the reign of the Catholic queen “Bloody” Mary—were available to most children in sixteenth-century English Puritan gentry homes. What was unusual in Anne’s house was the third text, authored by her father, as well as the simple presence of her father, who was forced by church authorities to remain, unemployed, at home.

The Reverend Francis Marbury was born in the fall of 1555 in London, where he was baptized on October 27 in the Church of Saint Pancras, Soper Lane. His parents, William Marbury and Agnes Lenton, had come from Lincoln and Northampton, both Midland shires more than a hundred miles north of London. Francis and his six siblings were raised in Grisby, Lincoln, their father’s ancestral home. The family was lesser gentry, although a great-great-grandfather in the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Blount of Grisby, was a knight.

Francis left home at age seventeen to attend Christ’s College, Cambridge. At the time, Cambridge drew all the gifted Puritan schoolboys of sufficient status, who considered Oxford too Catholic. Francis spent four years studying at Cambridge, received a master’s degree, and was soon ordained a minister of the Church of England.

Anglicanism had replaced Roman Catholicism as England’s state church in 1534, when King Henry VIII broke from Rome, declaring himself the “Protector and Only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England.” With this move, King Henry and thus England joined the waves of change that are now dubbed the Reformation, when religious reform inspired by the likes of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli drew large swaths of Europe away from the Church of Rome.

English Puritanism, which began in the late 1550s, was a Reformed sect aimed at further ridding the English church of Catholic tendencies and practices. The name
Puritan
came from the sect’s stated aim of purifying the church—creating a “true” church, like the early church in the years following the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Puritans themselves rejected the “vile” term Puritan, seeing themselves as “nonconformists” or “true” Anglicans, while the Anglicans they opposed were seen as papists.

The areas of dispute between Puritans—for the slur stuck—and Anglicans included the training of clergy, the order of the service, clerical vestments, and church ornamentation. Puritans considered many En
glish clergy poorly educated (lacking a university degree and knowledge of Greek and Hebrew) and thus ill equipped for preaching, which they saw as a high skill, meriting elaborate preparation. This conflict over the quality of preaching arose in part, according to a history of seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, because of “the growing formalism of the Church.” Many people viewed the service of the Anglican Mass “as a kind of charm” to ensure their salvation “if they could afford sufficient celebrations after their death,” and preaching “was little practiced.”

Besides stressing the importance of sermons, Puritans wished to simplify the service and the church. Kneeling for the sacrament of communion, using a ring in marriage, and even having a cross in the church were “romish” or “popish” habits, they felt, “awful vestiges” of Catholicism, which smacked of Antichrist, a term they used for anything friendly to Satan or hostile to God. The Puritans shrank the number of sacraments from seven to two or three, leaving only baptism, communion, and sometimes marriage. They renounced as superstitions the calendar of saints’ and holy days.

Inspired at first by King Henry VIII’s 1548 order to remove images from churches as “corrupt, vain, and superstitious,” English Protestants of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries destroyed much of the legacy of medieval England, including stained glass windows, fabrics, icons, and rood screens and lofts. Protestants preferred less-adorned churches than did Catholics, and Puritans far surpassed Anglicans in this regard. To avoid any pagan idolatry, such as the second commandment forbade (“Thou shalt not make for thyself a carved image”), Puritan ministers forsook the surplice—the loose-fitting white ceremonial vestment worn by Catholic and Anglican clergy—for a black preaching gown and skullcap. (White symbolized the sacrificial Mass and the priestly role that they rejected.) Shocking many, Puritans wore hats in church (following Jewish practice), refused to bow or kneel during worship (which they saw as a violation of the third commandment), and allowed pigs and chickens in the church, and some of them didn’t even know the Lord’s Prayer. During this period of upheaval, as the English church adapted to the Reformation, behaviors such as these divided towns, congregations, and even families.

Francis Marbury’s first assignment was as a deacon, or assistant minister, at a church in Northampton, in central England, the main
town of the shire in which his mother had been born. Without apparent concern for his future career, Deacon Marbury preached to his Anglican congregation that the Anglican bishops were but politicians. They lacked true understanding of the Bible, he said, and they chose ministers without concern for their training or their zeal. In a period when relatively few English ministers had a university degree—fewer than 30 percent of those in neighboring Lincolnshire at the start of the seventeenth century, for instance, a percentage that would rise to almost 90 by the end of the century—Puritans advocated an educated ministry.

The Reverend Marbury’s sharp, public attacks prompted his bishop to withdraw the young man from his post and send him to jail. Francis was freed several months later but censured as a preacher and ordered never to return to Northampton. Within weeks, the brash twenty-two-year-old was back, preaching in Northampton as before. Church authorities arrested him again, detained him, and sent him to London to stand trial in November 1578 before the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission.

This court, charged with enforcing conformity in the church, inquired into and punished crimes ranging from heresy, violations of canon law, and libels against the monarch to incest, adultery, and gambling. It answered only to God and the monarch—not to Parliament or English common law—and was active under Queen Elizabeth in harassing Puritans. After secretly gathering evidence and charges, the court called up the defendant, stating neither the accusations against him nor the names of his accusers. If he refused to vow to make “full, true, and perfect answers” to the court, he would be fined for contempt. The judges, all bishops or ministers, acted also as prosecutors.

Francis Marbury, like his daughter a half century later, stood before his seated judges, who gathered in the consistory hall in the southwest corner of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, a vast thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Norman and Gothic structure that also served, after the Reformation, as London’s center of trade. Almost thirty years earlier, in 1549, Protestant preachers had incited a mob to sack Saint Paul’s, destroying its altar, wall hangings, and many stone tombs. A dozen years after that, in a lightning fire on June 4, 1561, the church lost its nearly five-hundred-foot steeple, at the time the tallest in Europe, which was never rebuilt. The interior of the church—which would burn to the ground in the
Great Fire of London in 1666—was derelict by Marbury’s time. Pamphleteers and merchants hawked their wares in stalls planted along the stone floor of the nave, which a late-sixteenth-century observer called “a brothel for the ears.” Merchants stored barrels of ale and books, wood, and coal in the church’s vaults. Despite the disrepair inside, large crowds often gathered outside the church’s south wall, at an open-air pulpit called Paul’s Cross, to hear Puritans like Marbury preach.

The Court of High Commission met in the consistory, a large fenced-in room adjacent to the cathedral’s main door. Two long benches of dark oak lined the room’s longer, north and south, walls. Bishop John Aylmer, the portly presiding judge, who was then in his late fifties, occupied a wooden throne set alone on the west wall. Francis Marbury faced Bishop Aylmer from the middle of the room, where he was flanked by two rows of the dutiful Anglican officials who were members of the court.

Bishop Aylmer did most of the questioning of the defendant, just as Governor John Winthrop would in Massachusetts in 1637. As at Anne’s trial, supporters of the defendant clustered to the rear and sides of the hall.

“What have you to say to us?” Bishop Aylmer demanded of Marbury, beginning the trial.

“Nothing but God save you both,” replied the defiant deacon, demonstrating a wit and confidence his daughter would inherit. Pressed further, according to his transcript, Marbury outlined his main charge, that the bishops were “killing” souls by ordaining uneducated ministers. “I say the bishops of London and Peterborough and all the bishops of England are guilty of the death of as many souls as have perished by the ignorance of the ministers of their making whom they knew to be unable.” This was mild language from a Puritan, compared to petitions to Parliament from the same period, which described Anglican ministers as “dumb dogs, unskillful sacrificing priests, destroying drones, or rather caterpillars of the Word.”

“Thou speakest of making ministers,” Bishop Aylmer replied. “The bishop of Peterborough”—Lord Edmund Scambler, then present in the hall, who had ordained Marbury the previous year—“was never more overseen in his life than when he admitted
thee
to be a preacher in Northampton.”

“Like enough so (in some sense) I pray God those scales may fall from his eyes,” Marbury retorted.

“Thou art a very ass, thou art mad, thou art courageous, nay thou art impudent,” the bishop said, adding to his brethren, “By my troth I think he be mad”—a notion that would also cross the minds of some of Anne Hutchinson’s judges at her trial.

“Sir, I take exception against swearing judges,” Marbury said. “I praise God I am not mad, but sorry to see
you
so out of temper.”

“Did you ever hear one more impudent?” the bishop asked the room.

“I humbly beseech you, sir, have patience,” the twenty-three-year-old defendant pleaded, half in jest. “Give this people better example. I am that I am through the Lord.” Then, making the same sort of shift that his daughter would make on the stand, he turned from the present human realm to the spiritual: “Though I fear not you, yet I fear the Lord.”

To prove his claims against the church, Marbury quoted Scripture, which was seen by all as the final authority in all matters, religious and otherwise. Regarding the bishops’ killing of souls, he said, “If they order unable or unmeet ministers, they give imposition of hands over hastily to those men, which to do, the Apostle saith”—in 1 Timothy 5:22—“is to be ‘partaker of other men’s sins.’” He also quoted the prophet Hosea 4:6, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” and asked, “But who should teach them knowledge?”

A church commissioner named Lewys broke in to demand of Marbury, “What trial would you have more than this? [Bishop Aylmer] is an honest man, and like to prove learned in time.”

“But in the meantime the people perish,” the defendant replied. “You will not commit your sucking child to a dry milk nurse, be she never so honest.”

Choosing a different metaphor, the Reverend Lewys said, “A good life is a good sermon, and such slay no souls though they be not so exquisite.”

Jousting with his opponent’s figure of speech, the Reverend Marbury said, “To teach by example
only
is good in a matron whom silence beseems.” He brought up Paul’s letter to Titus, which reads, “Thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders [ministers] in every city…. For a bishop must be blameless, as the
steward of God…Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers” (1:5–9). Marbury told the bishops, “The Apostle tells Titus they must be able to convince the gainsayers. These [comments of yours] are but evasions.”

Impatient, Lewys remarked, “This fellow would have a preacher in every parish church,” referring to the Puritans’ drive to ordain not only better-educated but also more ministers.

“So would Saint Paul,” Marbury said, referring again to Titus.

“Where wouldst thou have them?” Lewys demanded.

“In Cambridge, in Oxford, in the Inns of Court,” Marbury replied, “yea and some,” he added, in a nod to his jail time and that of many nonconformists who had troubled the state church, “in prison. We doing our part, the Lord would do his part.”