Authors: Eve LaPlante
The Reverend John Wilson, thought by many to be her “chief persecutor,” had a stern face and a nasal voice that irritated some of his parishioners. His devotion was so rigorous, it was said, that he allowed no talking at supper on Sundays except words about God. A minister’s son born in Windsor, England, in December 1588, Wilson had attended Eton and then Christ’s College, Cambridge. In 1609 he took a master’s degree from King’s College, Cambridge, where he excelled in Latin poetry. His heart was “opened to Christ” by noted Cambridge divines Dr. Lawrence Chaderton, Richard Rogers, and William Ames. Wilson’s nonconformist refusal to bow or kneel in chapel cost him his fellowship at King’s College, whose grand sixteenth-century chapel to him reflected pagan idolatry. He served as a minister in Sudbury, Suffolk, during the 1620s but rarely preached. Hutchinson and others saw evidence of this lack of experience whenever Wilson lectured in Boston. In her, in turn, the zealous minister saw the force behind the opinionists, the group determined to oust him. It was she who inspired women to walk out during his sermons, and she who aroused men to fire provocative theological questions at him afterward.
Three weeks before the trial, on a Sunday in October, the Reverend Wilson had stopped in the middle of a sermon to chastise Anne
Hutchinson, who sat silently before him on the women’s side of the Boston meetinghouse, for her “monstrous errors.” He referred to theological errors that he and his brethren had decried at their Religious Synod in Cambridge in August.
“Depart this assembly!” he had commanded her.
Anne Hutchinson had stood up, swung around, and, in the company of her friend Mary Dyer, departed the meetinghouse. She was afraid of no man, only God.
The previous summer, she had inadvertently interfered with his feeling of authority in the Pequot War, where he had served as chaplain. Puritan ministers were given prominent roles in military campaigns and sometimes even asked to relieve officers. At the May meeting of the General Court, Winthrop and Dudley had been elected again partly through Wilson’s strenuous efforts, and in return the minister had been appointed to accompany the troops. A few months later, during the Pequot campaign, Captain John Mason, of Connecticut, had left his command post to Wilson one evening so that the chaplain could “seek divine direction in prayer.” During that long summer night, the Reverend Wilson discovered just how little clout he had among the 150-man Massachusetts contingent, who had been told by the twenty-six Bostonians how much antipathy toward him his congregation felt. The fact that so few men of Boston enlisted was also Hutchinson’s fault, he felt, because she vocally opposed the war against the natives.
The next courtroom witness against Hutchinson was yet another minister with whom she had sparred. Zechariah Symmes was a straitlaced Oxford graduate in his late thirties who had met Hutchinson in July 1634 in a town on the English coast a few days before they both departed for America on the same boat.
Corrupt
and
narrow
were the words that first struck him to describe her. In casual conversation about their destination, he noted, “she did slight the ministers of the word of God.” As the daughter of a minister who considered most ministers poorly trained to preach, she felt little compunction about challenging the erudition of any divine.
The
Griffin
had set sail that July three years earlier with the Reverend Symmes, twelve Hutchinsons, and about 150 other passengers and crew members aboard. This voyage, like the hundred-odd other voyages of “God’s people” to their New Canaan in the 1630s, was tedious
and unpleasant. For passengers in the ship’s cramped, dank hold, the hours ran on endlessly, as they would for more than two months. The ocean swelled, the vessel pitched and yawed, the children whined, and the farm animals crushed in the belly of the boat cried out in confusion. Besides the 100 cows that John Winthrop had ordered from England, the 300-ton ship carried scores of pigs, chickens, and geese; mattresses and furniture; and barrels of bread, cheese, butter, dried beef, peas, oatmeal, beer (45 tons), Spanish wine (“10 gallons a person”), and water (6 tons). It was armed with guns to protect against pirates, who approached once, only to be scared away by gunfire. Despite the crew’s daily washings down of the decks with beer vinegar, the boat stank of excrement, both human and animal.
Each day, as was the custom on ships to the New World, the minister or ministers aboard led services of worship, prayer, and singing. Some, like Symmes, preached on deck for four hours or more. This would have been acceptable to Anne if she had agreed with him. But his preaching was erroneous, she determined after listening closely for several days: he was preaching a covenant of works.
One burning hot afternoon in late August on that ship, as Symmes lectured on love of neighbor “as a means of evidencing a good spiritual estate,” he said, “In our love we will ‘grow in grace,’ for we must strive always to lay up a ‘stock of grace.’” This suggestion that a soul could effect its salvation through its own effort infuriated Anne. She held her tongue until the question period after the sermon. Defying the rule against women speaking during religious services, she said, “Your words bear a legal savor, and they do not correspond with my understanding of the doctrine.”
Symmes, not understanding her point about salvation, replied, “Were not the words of the Apostle John precise and clear on this point: ‘We know that we have passed from death into life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.’ What could possibly be more explicit?” He reminded her that as a woman she had no right to question him. “For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man,” he said, quoting 1 Corinthians 11:8.
Indignant, she threatened to expose him once they reached America. He in turn promised to report her to the authorities. Undeterred, she challenged him to predict what day the ship would arrive in Boston,
a date she knew because it had been revealed to her during her Scripture study. “What would you say if we should be at New England within these three weeks?” she dared him, suggesting a date of arrival much earlier than anticipated.
He denied the veracity of her revelation, and they argued so loudly that many passengers could hear. For the rest of the trip—which apparently ended on the day she had predicted—she ignored the Reverend Symmes. She held women’s meetings, at which she offered up her own interpretation of Scripture, and she urged other women to ignore him too.
Landing in Boston on September 18, 1634, Symmes promptly reported Hutchinson’s offensive behavior and words. Deputy Governor Dudley responded by asking the Reverend Cotton “to enquire of her,” which he did. Cotton subsequently assured Dudley that she was “not of that mind” Symmes had described. “And then,” Dudley recorded, “I was satisfied that she held nothing different from us.”
On Sunday, November 2, Anne was admitted to full membership in the Boston church—a privilege that was granted to fewer than half of the colony’s inhabitants. Because of Symmes’s complaint, she had to wait a week longer than her husband, who had expressed no objectionable views, to join the church.
In court now, the Reverend Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, concurred with his colleagues as to Hutchinson’s stated views: “Also to same.” A thirty-three-year-old graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Shepard had arrived in Massachusetts in October 1635. Like many colonial ministers, Shepard had been silenced in England by Archbishop Laud. “You prating coxcomb!” the archbishop had denounced Shepard: “I charge you that you neither preach, read, marry, bury, or exercise any ministerial function in any part of my diocese, for if you do…I will be upon your back and…everlastingly disable you.” Now a subscriber to orthodoxy, Shepard had spent much of the summer of 1637 in this very building sermonizing about the dangers of Hutchinson’s theology. He had also enjoyed a warm correspondence with his colleague Cotton in which he tried to point out the various ways in which works can evidence grace. Although they were on opposite sides of this doctrinal issue, Cotton had signed off as “your affectionate though weak brother,” and Shepard had called Cotton his “dear
friend.” In a pamphlet Shepard had just composed to refute Antinomianism,
The Parable of the Ten Virgins,
he outlined how God makes room for human striving. God and humans work together, as in Colossians 1:29: “Whereunto I also labor, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily.” Overly emphasizing grace, as he felt Hutchinson and Cotton did, was a way for “slothful” sinners to escape the demands of the law. The answer to spiritual anxiety, he felt, lies in constant striving. He had no patience with the argument that people are helpless to achieve grace, a stance that set Shepard apart from Calvin, Luther, and most other Reformed theologians of the day.
Summarizing the six ministers’ testimony, Thomas Dudley said to Hutchinson, “I called these witnesses, and you deny them. You
see
they have proved this, and you
deny
this, but it is
clear.
You [did] say they preached a covenant of works and that they were not able ministers of the New Testament. Now there are two other things that you did affirm, which were that the scriptures in the letter of them held forth nothing but a covenant of works, and likewise that those that were under a covenant of works cannot be saved.”
“Prove that I said so,” she repeated, as defiant in court as her father. One reason for her unwillingness to answer was, of course, that she was not a minister. All her comments about others’ spiritual estates—made in private, under duress—were not acceptable from anyone but a clergyman.
“
Did
you say so?” Governor Winthrop demanded.
“No, sir, it is your conclusion.”
“What do I do charging of you,” Dudley wondered, “if you deny what is so fully proved?”
Winthrop too was astonished by her effrontery. “Here are six
undeniable
ministers who say it is true,” he said, “and yet you deny that you did say that they preach a covenant of works and that they were not able ministers of the gospel. It appears plainly that you have spoken it, and whereas you say that it was drawn from you in a way of friendship, you did profess then that it was out of conscience that you spoke.”
“They
thought
that I did conceive there was a difference between them and Mr. Cotton,” she replied. In fact, she had been reluctant to speak openly, knowing her answers would offend. But when the Reverend Hugh Peter pressed her to “answer the question directly as fully
and as plainly as you desire we should tell you
our
minds,” she opened up. As a later witness, Thomas Leverett, attested the next day, the Reverend Peter “did with
much
vehemency and entreaty urge her to tell what difference there was between Mr. Cotton and them.” Further urged to elaborate, she had again answered indirectly, saying, “The fear of man is a snare, but they that trust upon the Lord shall be safe.” But still the ministers had pursued the point. “And being asked wherein the difference was, she answered that they did not preach a covenant of grace
so clearly as
Mr. Cotton did. And she gave this reason of it: because that as the apostles were for a time without the spirit so until they had received the witness of the spirit they could not preach a covenant of grace so clearly.”
Pressed by the ministers in private, she had admitted what she believed: that a minister who, in her view, was not sealed with the spirit could not preach a covenant of grace “so clearly as Cotton.” The logic was obvious: How could someone who is not sealed with the spirit—who is not even within the covenant of grace—preach clearly of that covenant?
In court, the two sides had reached yet another stalemate. Outside, dusk was descending over the wooden houses of Cambridge, the farms, the hills, the forest, and the great marsh that extended south to the coiled river named for Charles their king. Even in the windowless meetinghouse, those present could feel the cold of night encroach.
“Mistress Hutchinson,” Governor Winthrop said with perhaps some frustration in his voice. “The court, you see, has labored to bring you to acknowledge the error of your way so you might be reduced [corrected or subdued]. The time now grows late. We shall therefore give you a little more time to consider of it, and therefore desire that you attend the court again in the morning.”
Anne rose to start the long walk home. Joining her husband and his younger brother Edward at the back of the meetinghouse, she talked briefly with supporters. Someone gave her a handwritten transcript of the day’s proceedings and a copy of the Reverend Wilson’s record of their meeting the previous December. It is likely—based on the hour, the season, the distance to her house, and her obvious physical weakness—that she was encouraged to stay the night in Cambridge. Rather than making the dangerous ten-mile round trip to Boston and
back, she might rest before her appearance in court the next morning. Her five youngest children—Zuriel, Susan, William, Katherine, and Mary, ages nineteen months to nine years—were at home in the care of her older daughters, her husband’s two unmarried cousins who lived with them, and her servants. Certainly her neighbor John Winthrop, who had chosen Cambridge for this trial because it was out of her reach and filled with his sympathizers, had no trouble finding a spare mattress on which to rest. His twenty-five-year-old daughter, Mary, and her husband, Thomas Dudley’s son Samuel, lived next door to the Cambridge meetinghouse.
The crowd dispersed quickly, eager to escape the silence and dark of night. As a rule, the settlers went to bed early, often by eight, and rose by daybreak.
That evening, warmed by the fire in the parlor of her temporary lodgings, Anne studied by candlelight the papers she had been given. It appears, based on her testimony the next morning, that someone knowledgeable in the law gave her legal advice. Before allowing herself to rest, she reread the day’s transcript in search of points to strengthen her defense.