American Jezebel (15 page)

Demonstrating its vast power, which encompassed ecclesiastical as well as civic affairs, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts censured the Reverend John Wheelwright for this lecture at its next meeting, in March. Because of his views expressed while preaching, “Mr. Wheelwright was guilty of contempt [of state] and sedition.” The court delayed punishing the minister, hoping that he might recant before its next meeting. But it did—for the first time—punish a Hutchinsonian for his religious views. Steven Greensmith of Boston was “committed to the marshall” and fined forty pounds “for affirming that all the ministers (except Mr. Cotton, Mr. Wheelwright, and he thought Mr. Hooker) did teach a covenant of works.” In addition, “The Court did approve of [the Reverend] Mr. Wilson’s speech.”

At the general election on May 17, the magistrates and freemen of Massachusetts Bay gathered on the greensward of Cambridge Common. Each side—those who supported Vane (and Hutchinson and Cotton) and those who supported Winthrop and the orthodox divines—hoped to gain control of the colony. Several deputies from Boston were absent because they had not been informed of the meeting, which gave Winthrop an advantage. Governor Vane called the court to order and prepared to read aloud the petition in support of the Reverend Wheelwright, which several men of Boston had brought. Men from both sides began shouting, and some exchanged blows.

The Reverend John Wilson, of Boston, stepped into the fray, climbing a short way up an oak tree and ordering the freemen of Massachusetts to vote for their representatives. Winthrop quickly seconded the motion. Vane persisted in saying that he would now read the petition, but Winthrop stated that this was out of order until after the election of the deputies and magistrates. Winthrop turned to the crowd and asked the men to decide between him and Vane by a show of hands. The hands went up, and Winthrop won.

Still, Henry Vane refused to proceed until the petition was read. Nevertheless, Winthrop called for the election. The men of the colonial towns began choosing their deputies, who then voted for governor and deputy governor. At the conclusion of the voting, Winthrop and Dudley had been chosen to occupy the offices they had held at the colony’s start. They took their oaths of office “for the year ensuing.” They chose the loyal Reverend Wilson to “go forth with the soldiers against the
Pequots,” and Captains John Underhill and Israel Stoughton to lead the troops, alongside the Connecticut troops under Captain John Mason.

The hapless Vane, now only a Boston deputy, finally read out the petition and the signatories’ names. The mob, which was still divided, grew wild. When Winthrop requested Vane’s four volunteer escorts, all men of Boston, to stand for him as the new governor, they all lay down their arms and refused. Not wishing to be upstaged, Governor Winthrop was thenceforth escorted by two male servants in feathered hats bearing halberds.

Over the long summer following the election, the Pequot War was finally won, despite the opposition of Hutchinson and many other Bostonians. By the end of July the Massachusetts and Connecticut forces had killed or left homeless all of the eight hundred inhabitants of the Pequot village near Saybrook, Connecticut. On August 3 a humiliated Henry Vane sailed for England, having stayed in Massachusetts for less than two of his appointed three years and leaving his followers with the empty promise that he would return, perhaps as a royal governor. Later that month the ministers met in Cambridge for a Religious Synod to agree on acceptable doctrine and to denounce the eighty-two errors held by Hutchinson that they had recorded in their meetings with her. The court banned her religious meetings. While women were allowed to meet “to pray and edify one another,” when one woman “in a prophetical way” resolved questions of doctrine and expounded Scripture, the meeting was “disorderly.”

When Hutchinson ignored this order, the General Court began to punish more of her allies and supporters. In response to the arrival of her husband’s younger brother Samuel Hutchinson and other relatives on July 12, 1637, the court instituted the Alien Act—no one could stay in Massachusetts for more than three weeks without the court’s permission—which kept more Hutchinsonians away. The Reverend Wheelwright was ordered before the court on September 26 and dismissed. On November 2, at the start of the General Court meeting that was still in session, the heretical minister, “being formerly convicted of contempt [of state] and sedition,” was “disfranchised and banished, having fourteen days to settle his affairs.”

On the same day—five days before the court called up Mistress Hutchinson—it discharged three Hutchinsonian deputies from Boston
who had signed the “seditious libel called a petition” in support of Wheelwright: William Aspinwall, a notary, court recorder, and surveyor who was in his early thirties; forty-six-year-old John Coggeshall, the silk merchant; and Sergeant John Oliver, twenty-two. The court fined Oliver and Aspinwall and disfranchised Aspinwall and Coggeshall. It warned Coggeshall “not to speak anything to disturb the public peace, upon pain of banishment,” and it banished Aspinwall for “seditious libel” and “for his insolent and turbulent carriage.” Aspinwall had come from Lancashire to Boston in 1630 with Winthrop’s party. He and his wife, Elizabeth, and their five children were friendly with the Hutchinsons and lived on the same side of Cornhill Road, slightly to the west, on land that extended north to the common.

Through it all, John Cotton avoided any censure. It was as though this remarkably even-tempered man was oblivious to the passion that his preaching could ignite. Just as he had not seen, until his church was vandalized, any warning signs among the worshipers at Saint Botolph’s fifteen years before, he seemed unable mentally to register the profound colonial schism that his doctrine had aroused.

In the Cambridge courtroom, where he stood beside Mistress Hutchinson, John Cotton hesitated to respond to Winthrop’s request to address the General Court. “I did not think I should be called to bear witness in this cause, and therefore did not labor to call to remembrance what was done.”

He paused. Winthrop and the court waited. Cotton sought internally to find some place of comfort between the two opposing sides. He had experience of this kind, for he had previously fallen afoul of the authorities. Each time, though, he had slipped through the fingers of the law.

Watching the long-awaited encounter between Winthrop and Hutchinson’s minister, the crowd in the meetinghouse grew still.

Finally Cotton said, “The elders spake that they had heard that she had spoken some condemning words of their ministry. They did first
pray
her to answer wherein she thought their ministry did differ from mine. How the comparison sprang, I am ignorant,” he noted, “but
sorry I was
that any comparison should be between me and my brethren and uncomfortable it was.” Winthrop was impressed, he confided later, that Cotton was “much grieved” at Hutchinson’s comparisons between the ministers.

Cotton recalled her telling the other ministers “that they did not hold forth a covenant of grace as I did. ‘But wherein did we differ?’ [they asked.] Why, she said that ‘they did not hold forth the seal of the spirit as he doth.’ ‘Where is the difference there?’ said they. ‘Why,’ said she, ‘you preach of the seal of the spirit upon a work and he upon free grace without a work or without respect to a work;
he
preaches the seal of the spirit upon
free grace
and
you
upon a
work.
’” At this, Cotton recalled, “I told her I was very sorry that she put comparisons between my ministry and theirs, for she had said more than I could myself, and I had rather that she had put us in fellowship with them and not have made that discrepancy.

“This was the sum of the difference [she found], nor did it seem to be so ill taken as it is,” John Cotton added, “and our brethren did say also that they would not so easily believe reports as they had done, and withal mentioned that they would speak no more of it. And 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.” These words fell on Anne Hutchinson like a balm from heaven.

Desperate for a concession from the esteemed Cotton, the Reverend Hugh Peter urged his colleague to remember more. “Do you not remember that she said we were not sealed with the spirit of grace, therefore we could not preach a covenant of grace?”

Cotton demurred. The orthodox ministers began to argue about who had said what at the December meeting. Cotton begged to stay apart. To all their pleas, he said, “Under favor I do not remember that.” Calmly and tactfully, he stood his ground without offending, as he had so many times before. In the face of his detachment, the other ministers disagreed among themselves.

Unbidden, Anne Hutchinson said, “My name is precious, and you do affirm a thing which I utterly deny.”

Deputy Governor Dudley admonished her for forgetting John Wilson’s notes of the meeting: “You should have brought the book with you.” Hoping to salvage the case against her, he added, “They
affirm
that Mistress Hutchinson did say they were not able ministers of the New Testament.”

“I do not remember it,” the Reverend Cotton said once more.

With this testimony of Cotton’s, the case against Anne Hutchinson could not stand. She had played her hand so well that only minor charges could be made. The judges could admonish her for her first two errors: passively supporting the signers of the Wheelwright petition, which she had not signed because a woman’s signature carried no weight; and running Scripture meetings in a manner not “comely or fitting” for a woman. But without Cotton’s assent, the third and most important charge, of traducing the ministers by usurping their powers without authority, would not hold.

This was Anne Hutchinson’s moment of triumph. The men of power were arrayed before her—against her—yet she had won. Unlike her father, who was convicted of heresy and sent to jail, she stood her ground against the men in charge and won.

The end of her trial was near. It would not be long before she could return home, enjoy the warmth and comfort of her family, and throw herself once more into Scripture.

At this moment, Anne Hutchinson did something entirely in character. Raising her neck and leaning toward her gathered judges, she began to teach the men.

“If you please to give me leave,” the defendant told the assembled judges in the Cambridge meetinghouse, “I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true.” Having denied teaching any men—and argued convincingly that her questionable statements were privileged because they were made in private—Anne Hutchinson began in public to teach.

“When I was in Old England,” she started, leaping back nearly a decade in her journey of faith, “I was much troubled at the falseness of the constitution of the Church there. So far,” she admitted, “as I was ready to have turned Separatist,” like the earlier Plymouth settlers who had split from the English church. In 1607, when she was sixteen, they had come from Scrooby, eighty miles west of Alford, to the coast and tried to flee on ships. Caught by authorities, the Scrooby Separatists were imprisoned in Boston, Lincolnshire, and brought to trial. A year later they were allowed to move to Holland, from where they traveled to the tip of Cape Cod and then on to the more protected harbor at Plymouth.

Hutchinson, like Cotton and most of her audience in the meetinghouse, finally rejected Separatism, but she remained unsettled about the quality of the preaching in the English Church, not unlike her father decades before. “Whereupon,” she explained, “I set apart a day of solemn humiliation and pondering of the thing by myself, to seek direction from God.” Her confidence in her ability “by myself” to solve such a problem was rare in a day when women were universally viewed as men’s inferiors intellectually. As Hutchinson’s younger contemporary Anne Bradstreet wrote,

In the courtroom Governor Winthrop interrupted Hutchinson, noting that she had not been asked a question. There was no call for the defendant to speak her mind.

Hutchinson continued, undeterred, to describe her spiritual career and some of what she had learned when the Spirit of the Lord opened the Bible and thrust certain passages into her mind. “God did discover unto me the unfaithfulness of the churches, and the danger of them, and that none of those ministers could preach the Lord aright.” Quoting 1 John 4:3, she said, “Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: but this is that spirit of Antichrist.” While Puritans generally agreed that the Roman Catholic Church was the Antichrist, they used the term for all enemies of their faith.

Anne Hutchinson could freely quote the Bible in her own defense because she, like many of the men present, knew large portions of it by heart and regularly applied it to her daily life. “I marveled what this [passage] should mean,” she went on, “for I knew that neither Protestants nor Papists did deny that Christ was come in the flesh. Who then was Antichrist?”

This style of tackling problems by analyzing Scripture was entirely familiar to her audience, many of whom employed it themselves in times of trouble or confusion. But her speech was out of order.

Winthrop was about to break in a second time when he thought better of it. A practical and politically astute man, he decided to wait and see where her statement might lead. A lengthy exploration of “God’s dealing with her, and how He revealed himself to her, and made her know what she had to do,” he realized, could achieve what he and the court up to now had been unable to do—convict her of threatening the stability of the state. Indeed, it was essential, in his opinion, that the court remove her from the colony. Years later, recalling this moment, he said that after “perceiving whereabouts she
went, and seeing her very unwilling to be taken off,” he “permitted her to proceed.”

So Anne Hutchinson continued, lost in the moment, untroubled by the possible outcome of her words. She would describe to the court her scriptural method of resolving her spiritual troubles, as she had often been called to do for her followers at the meetings in her house. In a sense, she was pulling open the door to her parlor and inviting in the General Court. By doing this, she voided the very protection she had as a woman in the colony. Moreover, she assumed something not “comely or fit in her sex”: a powerful, public role. She had acknowledged this proscription against women teaching in public when earlier she baited Winthrop, “Do you think it
not
lawful for me to teach women? And why do you call
me
to teach the court?”

Whatever force stole her wit and her caution, enabling her to teach the court, is not known. Surely she was tired. She may have been confused, angry, or even exhilarated by her success, which spurred her to pour out her truth for the world to hear.

Or perhaps she was aware that the world would listen to her as it had never listened before. For two days she had observed Simon Bradstreet and another state secretary scribbling her every word on parchment with a feather pen, an experience unknown to a woman of her time and place. The night before, she had read the transcript of her courtroom testimony. Consciously or not, she must have known these transcripts could be her legacy. Alone among the women of the day, she could leave a record of the workings of her mind.

There was and is no written account of most women’s lives then, save their birth, marriage, and death dates, usually in parish records. Land deeds were signed only by husbands and, eventually, sons. Practically every historical document of the period was written by a man, quoting his or another man’s words. In the paper record of early America, it is almost as though women did not exist.

Most of the words that Anne Hutchinson uttered are lost to history, as are all the words of the vast majority of her female contemporaries. Even Anne Bradstreet, who was then scribbling poems in her house not far from the courthouse, published nothing for another thirteen years, and then only across the ocean. She acknowledged this lack in a prefatory poem to “Short Matters,” addressed to her children:

In a time when a woman’s “living mind” was not considered worthy of public interest, the lure of speaking for posterity may have been too much for Anne Hutchinson to resist.

Hutchinson’s trial transcripts run to roughly twenty thousand words—surely less than 1 percent of the millions of words she spoke to her husband, children, friends, and the many women she assisted in her work, but still a good deal of information by which to acquaint ourselves with her character and bent of mind. That we have this many words of Hutchinson’s is a sort of miracle. It appears to be the result of a tactical error by the men in charge, for whom it would have been better, the historian Edmund Morgan noted, if Anne Hutchinson had never said a recorded word.

In part, Hutchinson felt a righteous generosity in offering her audience “the ground of what she knew to be true”—to share with them who she was and what she could do. A modern mind imagines her wishing, however naively, to be understood and accepted by the men who—she alone could see—were her peers. The literary scholar Lad Tobin described her speech as “a final act of defiance, as a final, definitive criticism of the limits and fallibility of male (and human) speech and understanding” and of our “false [sense of ] personal power and control.” Whatever the reason, she was going to explain to the judges of the General Court of Massachusetts how and why they came to be there.

“Now,” she said confidently, “I had none to open the Scripture to me but the Lord, [who] brought to my mind another Scripture, ‘He that denies the Testament, denies the death of the Testator,’ from whence the Lord did give me to see that those who did not teach the New Covenant had the spirit of Antichrist.”

Every one of her forty judges was silent. Seeing that Winthrop did not stop her, they watched her and listened, amazed. To a man they considered revelation through Scripture acceptable, indeed divinely inspired, but it was not a common occurrence for most of them.
Moreover, they did not expect to hear it recounted by a woman whom they also suspected of being the Antichrist.

Emboldened by the court’s attentiveness, Anne Hutchinson went on. “Upon this [Scripture] he did discover the ministry unto me, and ever since—I bless the Lord—he has let me see which was the
clear
ministry and which was the
wrong.
Since that time, I confess, I have been more choice and more careful whom I heard [preach]. For after our teacher Mr. Cotton and my brother Wheelwright were put down, there was none in England that I durst hear.” During the two years between Cotton and Wheelwright’s departure from preaching in England and her decision to follow them, there were no ministers left from whom she felt she could learn. In her view, Jesus Christ spoke only through those two. She explained, “For the Lord has let me to distinguish between the voice of my beloved” Jesus Christ “and the voice of Moses, the voice of John Baptist, and the voice of the Antichrist, for all those voices are spoken of in Scripture.”

Sensing skepticism in her audience about her claim to hear the actual voices of biblical figures, she added, “Now, if you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth, I must commit myself unto the Lord.”

Out of the stunned silence came the voice of the assistant Increase Nowell, of Charlestown. “How do you
know
that was the Spirit?”

She replied, “How did
Abraham
know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?”—“Thou shalt not murder.”

“By an immediate voice,” Thomas Dudley replied, meaning the direct voice of God, unmediated by Scripture or a minister.

“So to me,” Anne Hutchinson said, “by an immediate revelation.”

At the time, and in the minds of the men of the General Court, the only accepted mode of revelation was through Scripture or through a minister. Some ministers, of course, described hearing the actual voice of God. In 1634 Thomas Hooker, for example, who had led the Religious Synod the previous summer that had condemned Hutchinson’s doctrine, had said, “It was revealed to me yesterday that England should be destroyed” by God unless its people reformed along Puritan lines. But for someone who was not a minister, especially a woman, to claim an immediate revelation was heresy.

“How!” Dudley exclaimed, both delighted at her admission and stunned at the arrogance of a woman who deigned to compare herself to Abraham. “An immediate revelation…”

“By the voice of
his own spirit
to my soul,” Anne Hutchinson went on. She was admitting too much, as she may or may not have been aware. Some scholars see her as oblivious. Others sense that she knew there was nothing she could do or say to avoid banishment and that in stating her truth she might leave her voice for posterity. Based on the minor grounds for the banishment of men like Wheelwright, it seems likely that she would have been banished even if she had not taught the men. Colonial historian David Hall, who edited
The Antinomian Controversy,
the compendium of the major documents of these events, speculates that her judges “were just looking for some reason to get rid of her. Her outburst made it easy, but they would have succeeded anyway.”

“I will give you another Scripture,” Anne Hutchinson offered, moved by the spirit of the moment, “Jeremiah 46:27–28!”

“Out of which,” she cried, “the Lord showed me what he would do for me and the rest of his servants! And after that he did let me see the atheism of my own heart, for which I begged of the Lord that it might not remain in my heart.”

In this speech she threw off the shield of her gender, which had protected her the day before, by acting as though she and her judges were equal. While a modern reader may see them as equal, this trial occurred nearly three centuries before women in America were permitted to vote.

Her feelings of anger and righteousness spilled over into apocalyptic language. “Therefore, I desire you to look to it, for you see this
Scripture fulfilled this day! And therefore I desire you, as you tender the Lord and the church and commonwealth, to consider and look what you do. You have power over my body, but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul.”

Revelation—receiving messages from God—was the issue in the courtroom, but the word is apt in its modern meaning too. In giving the court “the ground of what [she knew] to be true,” Hutchinson shone a spotlight on her mind. Forgetting who and where she was—a defendant in a criminal proceeding—she lectured to her enemies and thus revealed herself.

“Then the Lord did reveal himself to me, sitting upon a throne of justice,” she said, her anger rising, “and all the world appearing before him, and [He said that] though I must come to New England, yet I must not fear nor be dismayed. Then the Lord brought another scripture to me, Isaiah 8:9. The Lord spake this to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people.

“I will give you one place more which the Lord brought to me by immediate revelations, and that doth concern
you all.
It is in Daniel 6,” in which Daniel’s godly worship and belief save him from certain death. “When the president [king] and princes could find nothing against Daniel, because he was faithful, they fought against him concerning the law of his God, to cast him into the lions’ den. So it was revealed to me that they should plot against me,” she prophesied. “But the Lord bid me not to fear, for he that delivered Daniel and the three children, his hand was not shortened. And see! This scripture [is] fulfilled this day in mine eyes!” Listening, the Reverend Thomas Weld found her “so fierce,” he wrote later, that “instead of being like Daniel in the lion’s den, she was rather like an antitype of the
lions
after they were let loose.”