The Wordy Shipmates (24 page)

When Cromwell’s weakling son Richard tries to hold on to his father’s title, Vane writes a withering summary of the whole country’s misgivings about Richard’s character, stating:

One could bear a little with Oliver Cromwell, though, contrary to his oath of fidelity to the Parliament, contrary to his duty to the public, contrary to the respect he owed that venerable body from whom he received his authority, he usurped the government. His merit was so extraordinary, that our judgments, our passions might be blinded by it. He made his way to empire by the most illustrious actions; he had under his command an army that had made him conqueror, and a people that had made him their general. But, as for Richard Cromwell, his son, who is he? What are his titles? We have seen that he had a sword by his side; but did he ever draw it? And what is of more importance in this case, is he fit to get obedience from a mighty nation, who could never make a footman obey him? Yet, we must recognize this man as our king, under the style of protector!—a man without birth, without courage, without conduct! For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master!

Such talk paved the way for the return of Charles II, the dead king’s son, from exile in France. After Charles II came home to England and the monarchy was restored, the new king condemned to death a few men he held responsible for the execution of his father, including Henry Vane. Who had argued against the execution! Vane was beheaded. (Cromwell was, too—posthumously. Charles II had Cromwell’s corpse dug up, dragged through the streets of London, hanged on a gallows, taken down, and decapitated. His rotting head was skewered on a pike and displayed at Westminster for over twenty years. Eventually, Cromwell’s skull was buried at his old college in Cambridge.)

Henry Vane’s headless ghost is said to haunt the library of his father’s house, Raby Castle. But I think it’s more accurate to say that Vane’s departure in 1637 haunts American history. I can’t help but wonder what might have been had he stuck around and lived out his years in New England as John Winthrop’s conscience instead of Oliver Cromwell’s. Vane’s later writing has much in common with the Winthrop of “Christian Charity.” In his book
The Retired Man’s Meditations,
Vane describes a good society, in Winthrop-like terms, as “reunited of all good men as one man in a happy union of their spirits, prayers and counsels, to resist all common danger . . . and promote the interest and common welfare of the whole.”

Reading those words, Vane’s abandonment of New England can be seen as the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s loss. Vane was a person—a governor—who possessed Williams’s insistence on religious liberty
and
Winthrop’s beautiful communitarian ideals (but without his totalitarian flaws). Vane was so young in Massachusetts that the disagreements of other men made him cry like a girl. But he matured into a formidable advocate for goodwill and common sense. Considering what happened to his friend Anne Hutchinson right after his exit, Massachusetts could have used him.

I
n September of 1637, one month after Henry Vane sailed away, the freemen meet to decide on matters Hutchinso nian. They resolve, writes Winthrop, “That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another,” assemblies of “sixty or more” as were then taking place in Boston at the home of “one woman” who had had the gall to go about “resolving questions of doctrine and expounding scripture” are not allowed. The Bill of Rights, with its allowance for freedom of assembly, is a long way off.

Also, a member of a church’s congregation “might ask a question publicly, after sermon, for information; yet this ought to be very wisely and sparingly done.” In other words, no heckling the ministers allowed.

In November, Wheelwright appears before the court and, refusing to repent for his Fast Day sermon the previous January, is, Winthrop writes, “disenfranchised and banished.” So are four other supporters of Hutchinson and Wheelwright, including John Underhill, hero of the Mystic Massacre.

“The court also sent for Mrs. Hutchinson,” writes Winthrop, “and charged her with . . . keeping two public lectures every week in her house,” which were attended by “sixty to eighty persons.” She is also accused of “reproaching most of the ministers,” except for Cotton, “for not preaching a covenant of free grace, and that they had not the seal of the spirit.”

Hutchinson’s judges are Winthrop, Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, five assistants, and five deputies. Various ministers, including John Cotton, are also present. As governor, Winthrop presides over the trial, for the most part stu pidly. Hutchinson continually outwits him, even though she is, at the age of forty-six, pregnant yet again.

Winthrop explains to Hutchinson she has been “called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth.” And, as is his policy toward all godly persons who repent their blunders, he offers the court’s corrections, so that she “may become a profitable member here among us.” If not, “the court may take such course that you may trouble us no further.”

Hutchinson points out she has not been charged with anything. Winthrop says he just told her why she’s here.

“What have I said or done?” she asks.

Winthrop answers that she “did harbor . . . parties in this faction that you have heard of.” I.e., she invited troublemakers into her home.

Then he accuses her of being in favor of Wheelwright’s Fast Day sermon, and those in favor of the sermon “do break a law.”

“What law have I broken?” she asks.

“Why the fifth commandment,” answers Winthrop. This is of course the favorite commandment of all ministers and magistrates, the one demanding a person should honor his father and mother, which for Winthrop includes all authority figures. Wheelwright’s sermon was an affront to the fathers of the church and the fathers of the commonwealth.

A Ping-Pong match follows in which Winthrop accuses her of riling up Wheelwright’s faction and she’s, like, “What faction?” And he accuses her of having “counseled” this mysterious faction and she wonders how she did that and he answers, “Why in entertaining them.”

She asks him to cite the law against having people over. And he lamely says she has broken the law of “dishonoring the commonwealth.”

(Genealogy buffs might enjoy learning that this lopsided battle of the wits will be repeated between Winthrop and Hutchinson’s descendants during the presidential debates of 2004. Winthrop’s heir, John Kerry, debates Hutchinson’s great-something grandson, George W. Bush. Only in this instance it’s the Hutchinson who is flummoxed by his opponent’s sensical answers. Bush’s constant blinking appears on television as if he thinks the answers to the questions he’s being asked are tattooed inside his own eyelids.)

Winthrop and Hutchinson go back and forth as to whether or not she’s honoring her parents, and Winthrop is so flummoxed by the way she crushes his shaky arguments, he erupts, “We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex.” Not a particularly good comeback, considering that they’re the ones who have forced her into this discourse.

He then quizzes her on why she holds her commonwealth-dishonoring meetings at her house. She cites Paul’s Epistle to Titus, in the New Testament, which calls for “the elder women” to “instruct the younger.”

He tells her that what she’s supposed to instruct the younger women on is “to love their husbands and not to make them clash.”

She responds, “If any come to my house to be instructed in the ways of God what rule have I to put them away?”

“Your opinions,” Winthrop claims, “may seduce many simple souls that resort unto you.” Furthermore, with all these women at Hutchinson’s house instead of their own, “Families should be neglected for so many neighbors and dames and so much time spent.”

When she presses him once again to point out the Scripture that contradicts the Scripture she has quoted calling for elders to mentor younger women, Winthrop, flustered, barks, “We are your judges, and not you ours.”

Winthrop really is no match for Hutchinson’s logic. Most of his answers to her challenges boil down to “Because I said so.”

In fact, before this trial started, the colony’s elders had agreed to raise four hundred pounds to build a college but hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it. After Hutchinson’s trial, they got cracking immediately and founded Harvard so as to prevent random, home-schooled female maniacs from outwitting magistrates in open court and seducing colonists, even male ones, into strange opinions. Thanks in part to Hutchinson, the young men of Massachusetts will receive a proper, orthodox theological education grounded in the rigorous study of Hebrew and Greek.

Moving along, Winthrop asks her of ministers preaching “a covenant of works, do they preach truth?”

“Yes sir,” she answers, “but when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth.” In other words, it’s fine to exhort people to good behavior, but good behavior is not going to save their souls. Which is in fact, what every person in the room, including Winthrop, believes. They are angry with her because she has accused all the ministers except for Cotton and her brother-in-law, Wheelwright, of preaching
only
a covenant of works, a Puritan put-down. Several ministers then gang up on her to claim that that’s what she’s been going around saying.

The trial resumes the next morning and John Cotton is called to testify. If the court can get the beloved Cotton, Hutchinson’s highest-ranking friend, to rat her out for heresy or sedition, she’s lost. He stands by her, though, more or less. He says he regrets that any comparison has been made between him and his colleagues, calling it “uncomfortable.” But, he adds, “I must say that I did not find her saying that they were under a covenant of works, nor that she said they did preach a covenant of works.”

Cotton has exonerated her. Now the court has to acquit her. And it would have except that one person stands up and gives the testimony that will get Anne Hutchinson banished from Massachusetts. And that person is: Anne Hutchinson.

“If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true,” she says.

Music to John Winthrop’s ears. He was about to step in and silence her. But, while the trial transcript proves that she’s a better debater than he, he’s no idiot. He later recalls, “Perceiving whereabouts she went”—namely, self-incrimination—he “permitted her to proceed.”

I wish I didn’t understand why Hutchinson risks damning herself to exile and excommunication just for the thrill of shooting off her mouth and making other people listen up. But this here book is evidence that I have this confrontational, chatty bent myself. I got my first radio job when I was eighteen years old and I’ve been yakking on air or in print ever since. Hutchinson is about to have her life—and her poor family’s—turned upside down just so she can indulge in the sort of smart-alecky diatribe for which I’ve gotten paid for the last twenty years.

Hutchinson starts by informing the court of her spiritual biography. She recalls that back home, she was disconcerted by the “falseness” of the Church of England and contemplated “turn[ing] Separatist.” But after a “day of solemn humiliation,” she had, like every man in the room, decided against separatism. Unlike every man in the room, she claimed to hear the voice of God, who “let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong.” Ever since, she continues, she has been hearing voices—Moses, John the Baptist, even “the voice of Antichrist.”

To the men before her (and, by the way, to me) this is crazy talk. It might also be devil talk. An assistant asks her, “How do you know that was the spirit?”

Her answer couldn’t be more uppity. She compares herself to the most exalted Hebrew patriarch facing the Bible’s most famous spiritual dilemma: “How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?”

Dudley replies, “By an immediate voice.”

Hutchinson: “So to me by an immediate revelation . . . by the voice of his own spirit to my soul.”

This is blasphemous enough, but she’s on a roll. She then dares them to mess with her, a woman who has the entire Holy Trinity on speed dial. “Look what you do,” she warns. “You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul.” Their lies, she claims, “will bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

Winthrop provokes her further. Since she is shameless enough to compare herself to Abraham, he seems to think it might be fun to find out if she is Daniel in the lion’s den, too. “Daniel was delivered by miracle,” he says. “Do you think to be delievered so too?”

Yep. “I do here speak it before the court,” she responds helpfully, adding, “I look that the Lord should deliver me by his providence.” She claims God told her, “ ‘I am the same God that delivered Daniel out of the lion’s den, I will also deliver thee.’ ”

She was quoting God. Not the Bible. Just something God said to her one day when they were hanging out.