American Jezebel (7 page)

Meetings like Anne’s had been held by Puritans in England also, and while they were not encouraged by church authorities, they were allowed. Known as “conventicles,” these meetings were hard to distinguish from those regularly held by Puritan families and small communities for praying, repeating sermons, reading the catechism, and singing of psalms. While women were not directed to run conventicles, and were officially banned from doing so, the division between mother and preacher blurred in a culture that encouraged daily reading and discussion of Scripture and sermons, both inside and outside the family. In this way, women in England assumed leading public roles at the local level, especially over female servants and children. Beyond that, of course, and officially at all levels, they were barred from public power in the church.

In Boston, Anne at first offered theological counseling and advice to other women only in the privacy of their homes and avoided the regularly scheduled gossipings, for which she felt no need on account of her own strong sense of communion with God. Unlike many of her peers, she was not deeply troubled about her spiritual estate. Day after day, year after year, she prayed, studied Scripture, and felt reasonably confident that her estate was secure. Of course, as she well knew, a Puritan can never completely abandon doubt, for that alone is a sign
that one is not saved. But as much as one could feel confident about her relationship with her Savior, Anne Hutchinson did.

Her initial avoidance of the women’s meetings in Boston prompted public suspicion, a friend had warned her in 1635. “Because I did not go to such meetings,” she told the court, “they said I was proud, and I to prevent such aspersions took it up. But it was in practice before I came,” she added defensively. “Therefore I was not the first” to instruct other women at home, implying that she should not be found guilty of doing what many respectable women did.

While she was not the first woman to share with others her thoughts on Scripture and faith, she was likely the best trained, the brightest, and the most influential to do so. Her magnetism had several sources. It came from her extremely high social status, which her judges acknowledged each time they addressed her as “Mistress,” a term reserved for only the wealthiest and most prominent women. Lower-status women were “Goodwife” or, in many cases, given no such appellation.

Social status was critical in a culture in which even seating in church was determined by wealth: those with more money sat up front. Anne’s husband, William, had brought to New England a purse containing a thousand gold guineas. This vast sum, equal to many millions of dollars today, enabled him to purchase an acre in the best part of Boston—right across the road from the governor’s carefully chosen plot—and to build on it a handsome timber house with a stone foundation and several gables on the second floor. Will Hutchinson was admired by all, including his wife’s many opponents. John Winthrop, for instance, called him “a peaceable man of good estate.” Within six weeks of the Hutchinsons’ arrival, in November 1634, Will was elected a magistrate of the Massachusetts General Court, the highest authority in the colony.

Anne’s power also came from her role as a trusted midwife and nurse, on whom settlers depended at crucial moments of life and death. Many women died in childbirth, and nearly half of their children were dead before their fifth birthday. Even in England, the chance of surviving to age forty was only one in ten. A nurse-midwife with a good record for saving lives was held in high esteem by women and men alike. Anne’s happy and fruitful marriage, as well as her evident success as the mother of a large family, also contributed to her social standing.

Her religious meetings had begun informally, in 1635, with five or six other women present. To her, they seemed a natural outgrowth of the spiritual teaching that she slipped into her visits to women’s bedsides. Week after week, at an appointed hour on an appointed evening, more women came to hear Anne talk about Scripture and salvation. In time, some of these women brought their husbands and sometimes other freemen, such as Sir Henry Vane, the newcomer who became governor in 1636. But Anne never solicited anyone to listen to her, she reminded the court. Her crowd grew of its own accord.

Demand was so great that by 1636 she ran two evening meetings a week in the large parlor of her comfortable house overlooking the sea. She sat behind a table that held her Bible, opened to whatever passage she was discussing. As she talked she skipped from passage to passage; she knew large sections of Scripture from memory. She analyzed the mysteries of God’s grace and salvation, the recent sermons of the ministers (those she admired and those she did not), and her experiences of “revelation,” times when biblical passages directly informed her life, even suggesting future events. Her audiences for these sessions often numbered eighty men and women—estimated as nearly one in five of the adults in Boston—who stood or sat on benches or on the floor. Anne Hutchinson always had a chair, which set her apart. When Governor Vane attended, an extra chair was found, and he sat at her right hand.

Most of the colony’s leaders were unaware of her “preaching” to women until after she began to influence men. But by the spring of 1636 the news was out. A woodworker named Edward Johnson reported with alarm to authorities that upon arriving in Boston he was told by a local man, “I’ll bring you to a woman that preaches better Gospel than any of your blackcoats that have been at the Ninniversity” (perhaps a compound of
ninny
and
university
). Hutchinson was, Johnson said, “a woman of another kind of spirit, who has had many revelations of things to come,” a “masterpiece of woman’s wit” who “drew many disciples after her, and to that end boldly insinuated herself into the favor of none of the meanest,” suggesting she touched society’s highest tiers. Commenting also on Hutchinson, the Reverend Thomas Weld observed that in New England “the weaker sex prevailed so far, that they set up a Priest of their profession and sex.” In Weld’s view, women
are “the weaker to resist; the more flexible, tender, and ready to yield,” and able “as by an Eve, to catch their husbands also,” so that Hutchinson gained advocates “almost in every family.”

She was actively proselytizing, and many of her followers were too, visiting other parishes and encouraging their members to evaluate whether their preachers had the seal of the spirit. At her meetings she remarked that some ministers did not appear to her to have this seal. The biblical seal, described in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 1:13, is a mark placed on a person’s forehead to show he belongs to God. She claimed, it was said, to know whether people were saved, or sealed by God, which understandably angered the orthodox ministers. Her criticisms of them were not unlike her father’s charges, in his London trial, that too many divines were ill educated and uninspired. A few months before the trial, the Massachusetts court had ordered her to stop her meetings. Like her father, who returned to preach in Northampton despite the bishop’s ban, she had ignored the court’s order.

In the courtroom she asked the governor, “If any come to my house to be instructed in the ways of God, what rule have I to put them away? Do you think it not lawful for me to teach women, and”—she couldn’t resist adding—“why do you call
me
to teach the court?”

“We do
not
call you to teach the court,” Winthrop replied angrily, “but to lay open yourself.” Pausing to collect himself, he said women’s meetings were acceptable only if they did not intrude on women’s duties and subservience to men. “I grant you a time for” religious instruction, “but what is the purpose” of bringing women “together from their callings” at home “to be taught of you?” Quoting Corinthians on the need for women to honor and obey their husbands, he added, “You must take [Titus] in this sense, that elder women must instruct the younger about their [domestic] business and to love their husbands and
not
to make them to clash.” This was consistent with Winthrop’s lifelong philosophy that it was always best to reduce conflict. Throughout this troubled period, Winthrop maintained the view that the only colony that would survive was a united colony. People holding dangerously unorthodox views had to be brought into the fold or, if necessary, removed.

A new voice was heard for the first time in the trial. “I am not against all women’s meetings, but do think them to be lawful,” observed
Simon Bradstreet, a thirty-three-year-old assistant who also served as the colony’s secretary. Bradstreet, who sat with the six other assistants on the first bench behind the governor’s desk, had come to Massachusetts in 1630 as part of Winthrop’s group. Before making the transatlantic trip he had married Anne Dudley, who would later gain renown as the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. His wife’s strivings to excel in a profession reserved for men may have prompted in him compassion for Anne Hutchinson. While Anne Bradstreet never commented on Anne Hutchinson in her published work, she no doubt was aware of the trial because her husband and father were members of the General Court. At the time, Anne Bradstreet was a twenty-five-year-old mother too busy with three small children to attend the celebrated event just a block from her house.

Simon Bradstreet seemed to offer Anne Hutchinson her first line of support. Yet he urged her to consider abandoning her course “because,” he explained, “it gives offense.” While not unlawful, in his view, her meetings were dividing the colony and thus should cease. He, like Winthrop, saw conciliation as the best path to stability.

In response to Bradstreet’s display of pragmatism, Hutchinson said, “Sir, in regard of
myself
I could [stop my meetings]. But for
others
I do not yet see light, [although I] shall further consider of it.”

Anne would not be moved until she saw light to do so. At forty-six, she was already a decade older than her father was when he reformed his practices to suit the authorities. Unlike him, though, she would persist in preaching and teaching what she believed, even at the risk of her family’s security. All around her, men like John Wheelwright and Roger Williams were banished for their beliefs, and still they carried on. If worst came to worst, she was confident, she and hers could survive outside Massachusetts.

No one else in the meetinghouse responded to Simon Bradstreet’s remarks, in part because they did not advance the governor’s cause. At the same time, Bradstreet’s opening emboldened other judges to come forward to challenge the defendant.

“I would go a little higher with Mistress Hutchinson,” the deputy governor began, urging a more forceful approach. Thomas Dudley, a stout, energetic man of sixty-one with a gray beard and thick, white hair, had been a soldier in Queen Elizabeth’s army and then steward of the Earl of Lincoln’s estate. In 1630 he had come with Winthrop to Massachusetts as its first deputy governor, accompanied by his wife, Dorothy, several of their children, and their son-in-law, Simon Bradstreet. The Dudleys and Bradstreets had known the Hutchinsons in England, for the families all worshiped in the church at Boston, Lincolnshire, where John Cotton preached. Dudley had been elected governor of the colony for the 1634–35 term and was now serving as deputy governor for the sixth time. He generally disagreed with Winthrop on matters of public policy, and the two men often sparred. But the governor and deputy governor were in complete agreement on the subject of Mistress Hutchinson. Failing to find a way to remove her would risk the health of the colony to which they both had devoted their lives.

“About three years ago we were all in peace,” Dudley said, referring to the length of the Hutchinsons’ stay. Then “Mistress Hutchinson, from that time she came, hath made a disturbance.” She had “vented diverse of her
strange
opinions and had made parties in the country [and] Mistress Hutchinson hath so forestalled the minds of many by their resort to her meetings that now she hath a potent party in the country.” Strange opinions alone were not a crime; many citizens had odd beliefs. What made her dangerous to the government was her “potent party,” or many powerful supporters, throughout the colony. Dudley’s choice of the word
potent
underscores his point, for in the lexicon of a seventeenth-century Englishman this masculine term could not properly be applied to any woman.

“Now,” he continued, “if all these things have endangered us as from that foundation, and if
she
in particular”—he pointed a finger at Hutchinson—“hath disparaged all our ministers in the land that they have preached a covenant of
works,
and only Mr. Cotton a covenant of
grace,
why this is
not
to be suffered.”

A
covenant of works
as against a
covenant of grace.
This simple formulation, opaque to many modern readers, was the crux of the issue between Anne Hutchinson and the orthodox ministers, which had rent the colony. And despite all their efforts to resolve it in 1637, this issue would vex the ministers and the people of New England for well over two centuries.

The argument was over salvation, or redemption by Christ, the subject of greatest concern to the colony’s seven or eight thousand souls. Salvation, which they called “justification,” was the goal of the covenant, or contract, between God and humanity. In the first covenant, outlined in the Old Testament, God gave humanity the gift of perfect and eternal life in exchange for good behavior. Adam broke this covenant with his disobedience, leaving his descendants deprived. In Genesis 17:7 God said to Abraham, “I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee.” God then made a new covenant through Jesus Christ, offering fallen humanity yet another chance at justification. The Puritans believed, with Calvin, that God had to elect a person’s soul before birth in order for that person to be eligible for salvation. Human beings were granted this gift of saving grace, but they had to prove their worthiness by displaying faith and performing works, such as good deeds and socially appropriate behavior. In this view, held by Winthrop and the orthodox ministers, people’s works demonstrate that they are saved.

This Puritan concept of works is a far cry from what they would have considered the Catholic notion that one can attain salvation simply by going through the motions of the sacraments—one of the issues that propelled the Protestant Reformation. To these Puritans, works entailed not mindless repetition of prayers or taking of sacraments, but rather a constant striving to cleanse one’s soul and lead a righteous life, visible and apparent to others. They called this striving “sanctification”—literally, being a saint, which was the standard term of self-description by
members of the early American church. “Sanctification is
evidence of
justification,” the orthodox ministers told their congregations. In other words, if you follow the rules and laws of church and state, then you can have assurance that you are elect and thus saved. This causal link between sanctification (doing good works) and justification (being saved) was not consistent with the writings of Luther and Calvin—they would have considered it heretical in light of their doctrine that people can do nothing to earn or effect their own salvation—but it was for the leaders of Massachusetts an appealing theological conceit. To create their new society, the founders were naturally drawn to a theology that enforces obedience.

Anne Hutchinson openly rejected this view of salvation, deriding it as a covenant of works. In her view, only God’s grace can bring justification; hence her covenant of grace. She saw external works (sanctification) as not irrelevant to salvation but not necessary for it and possibly deceptive in suggesting that someone has been saved. In her view, a hypocrite can go through the motions of good works while lacking true grace, which comes freely—without human effort or intervention—as a gift of the Holy Spirit. She believed the covenant of works dangerously emphasizes a soul’s outward appearance of sanctification, while her covenant of grace depended only on God’s grace, which may be unseen. There is voluminous scriptural support for her view, particularly in the Epistles of Paul, which had deeply influenced Calvin and other Reformation theologians. The apostle Paul repeatedly emphasized this point, as in Ephesians 2:8–9, “For
by grace are ye saved,
through faith,” and “
not [by] works,
lest any man should boast.”

On the theological battlefield, Hutchinson and Wheelwright attacked as “legalists” the clerics who linked works and redemption. They in turn called her and her supporters “opinionists.” As everyone in the courtroom knew, any male freeman who dared to challenge a preacher would soon find himself in court, charged with disrespect and possibly disfranchised or banished. What would happen to a woman who did so was anyone’s guess.

A few months before the trial, Winthrop had written in his journal, “Every occasion [in Massachusetts] increased the contention and caused great alienation of minds, and the [church] members of Boston (frequenting the lectures of other ministers) did make much distur
bance by public questions, and objections to their doctrines, which did in any way disagree from their opinion; and it began to be as common here to distinguish between men, by being under a Covenant of Grace, or a Covenant of Works, as in other countries between Protestants and Papists.”

Anne Hutchinson’s theology arose from her strong sense of communion with the Holy Spirit, which arose early in life. This feeling enabled her to free herself from the orthodox notion that ministers are needed as an intervening means of grace between humans—including women—and God. It also kept her from the worries over assurance—“How do I
know
if I am saved?”—that plagued many of her peers. She believed, according to those who spoke with her, that she had received the Holy Spirit. To her, any striving after signs of grace was a sure sign that grace was not present. This theology, with its immediate, felt sense of God’s presence, offered assurance to others whose experiences at the meetinghouse had left them anxious about their estate. “Seek for better establishment in Christ,” she advised, “not comfort in duties,” or “works,” which are only “sandy foundations” compared to Christ, who is rocklike and secure. When faced with reports of the controversy of grace against works, according to John Winthrop, she replied, “Here is a great stir about graces and looking to hearts, but give me Christ. I seek not for graces, but for Christ. I seek not for promises, but for Christ. I seek not for sanctification, but for Christ. Tell not me of meditation and duties, but tell me of Christ.”

Winthrop and most of the ministers chose to see this Christ-centered view of the world as dangerously nihilistic—as an encouragement to people to “do nothing” and still expect salvation. This doctrine appealed to “many profane persons,” he felt, because “it was a very easy, and acceptable way to heaven—to see nothing, to have nothing, but wait for Christ to do all.” Hutchinson’s teachings, he added, “quench all endeavor.” If people could be convinced that works had no relationship to salvation—if attending church, studying the Bible, and otherwise following the rules had nothing to do with the grace they coveted—then even “many good souls, that had been of long approved godliness, were brought to renounce all the work of grace in them,
and to wait for this immediate revelation.
” His use of the word
revelation
was a direct reference to Hutchinson, who had described receiving signs from God,
sometimes after opening the Bible at random and reading a passage. To the orthodox leaders, revelations came only to ministers, who mediated between God and humans. Cotton, however, encouraged revelations: “Do not be afraid of the word revelation,” he lectured in 1636: “you will feel his grace in your souls.” But Winthrop and the other ministers thought it risky to allow ordinary people to read divine meaning into current events, as if they had the status of clergymen.

Anne Hutchinson’s challenge to the power of Massachusetts’s civil and religious elite was effective in part because her theology arose from a basic tenet of Calvinism, the basis for Puritan belief. Puritanism rejected the Laudian Anglican emphasis on rituals and works, just as the Protestant Reformation was founded on the rejection of Catholicism’s focus on sacraments and works. Calvin’s central message was that salvation is God’s free gift, which humans, in their utter unworthiness and depravity (as encapsulated in the Reverend Thomas Shepard’s last words, “Lord, I am vile, but thou art righteous”), cannot attain by any earthly striving. This is consistent with Hutchinson’s teaching. Calvin and Luther had rejected as heresy any link between sanctification (doing good works) and justification (being saved), and in the late twentieth century it was rejected as well by the Roman Catholic Church.

By remaining true to a fundamental doctrine of the Reformation, Anne Hutchinson’s theology took Puritanism to its farthest reaches. If Puritanism was a seeking after more intimacy with and knowledge of God than Catholicism offered—through reading the Bible in the vernacular, considering Scripture alone and with others, and in some cases even experiencing the revelation of God’s word—then Hutchinson’s theology approached God even closer, to receive his word direct, an idea that the colonial leaders could not abide.

In addition to revelations, her doctrine involved prophecy, the power to know the future, usually as a result of Scripture study. “Wonder stories” similar to Hutchinson’s were common, according to noted colonial historian David Hall. Many people believed in astrology, portents, and prophecy. Queen Elizabeth herself had employed a court astrologer, whom she consulted regularly. Even the theologian John Foxe stated that John Hus in 1416 had prophesied the Protestant Reformation. And in the mid-seventeenth century, on the eve of the English
civil war, both sides—the Parliament and the court—hired astrologers to glean sympathetic readings of the planets and stars.

In early Boston Anne had a reputation as a prophetess. John Winthrop reported in his journal that “her godliness and spiritual gifts” led people to “look at her as a prophetess, raised up of God for some great work now at hand, so she had more resort to her for counsel about matters of conscience and clearing up men’s spiritual estates than any minister (I might say all the elders) in the country.” Even more troubling to him, she took “upon her infallibly to know the election of others, so as she would say that if she had but one half hour’s talk with a man, she would tell whether he were elect or not.” Winthrop could have assurance that he knew God’s will, but she could not. Similarly, her judges believed that the gift of prophecy fell only on ministers, thus only on men.

Hutchinson’s reputation for prophecy arose, apparently, from two predictions she made aboard the
Griffin,
the ship that brought her to America. God had revealed to her the date the ship would arrive in America, and—according to her daughter Faith—Anne had prophesied that “a young man on the ship should be saved, but he must walk in the ways” of God. At the time, many people saw God’s hand in such events as the passing of a comet or even the Sunday drowning of boys playing on the frozen river in winter—God punishes Sabbath breakers. An earthquake that shook England just before Christmas in 1601 was soon the occasion of a London pamphlet,
The Wonders of the World, the Trembling of the Earth, and the Warnings of the World before the Judgment Day.
For colonists, as for Europeans then, supernatural and natural forces operated in the world, and God was the most powerful force of all. His “providence,” David Hall noted, “accounted for everything that happened in everyday life” and was open to interpretation as a sign of God’s judgment or his mercy. There was little, if any, distinction between the moral (sin) and the physical (sickness).

While most ministers preferred the idea that revelation ended with the apostles of Christ, several ministers of Massachusetts claimed visions and prophesied. John Wilson often used prayer to heal the sick and to affect future events. During the Pequot War, for instance, when he was chaplain of the expedition to subdue the natives, he said he had
deflected an arrow from a man’s chest through prayer. He reported that his dreams while sleeping worked as prophecy. John Cotton encouraged his congregations in England and America to open themselves to God and to experience “revelations.” In John Wheelwright’s Fast Day speech, he claimed actually to see the approach of the “terrible day” when all the enemies of Christ “shall be consumed” by fire.