American Jezebel (3 page)

John Winthrop’s large white ceremonial ruff stood out against the black of his coat. He had a long, somber face, a trim gray beard, and arched eyebrows that looked as though they had been penciled on. The son of a successful lawyer who had served in Parliament and a grandson of the wealthy Adam Winthrop—who had received a large grant of monastic lands, including the manor of Groton, in Norfolk, as a result of Henry VIII’s split from Rome—Winthrop had a prim, aristocratic air. Glancing toward the rear of the meetinghouse, where the rabble stood, he called out, “Mistress Hutchinson.” A roar of support for her rose. Winthrop banged his gavel on his desk, silencing the crowd. “Mistress Hutchinson,” he repeated.

Emerging from the crowd, Anne Hutchinson walked slowly toward his desk, looking straight ahead. At her throat a brass fastener held the corners of her cloak. She stopped at the center of the room, where she was expected to stand throughout the trial, and faced the governor.

“Mistress Hutchinson,” he began, looking around to ensure that he had the attention of all, “you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here.”
Massachusetts was now split between his supporters and hers. Most of her support came from Boston, where both Hutchinson and Winthrop lived. His support came from the freemen of certain outlying towns, such as Cambridge, and most of the clergy. Only two ministers backed her, and one of them—her brother-in-law John Wheelwright—had already been censured and now, only four days before, banished. She also had the support of most colonial merchants and businessmen, who resented the alien exclusion law that Winthrop had imposed earlier that year to prevent more Hutchinsonians from immigrating (“such persons as might be dangerous to the commonwealth” could not stay longer than three weeks without the court’s permission), and the wage and price controls recently imposed by the court and ministers. Not surprisingly, these early settlers were as likely to rebel against the authoritarianism of state and church here in New England as they had been in Old.

“You are known to be a woman that hath had a great share in the promoting and divulging of those opinions that are the cause of this trouble,” the governor said to Anne Hutchinson, “and to be nearly joined not only in affinity and affection with some of those the court had…passed censure upon.” He meant her many allies—such respected men of the colony as the town assessor, William Colburn; William Aspinwall, who was a notary, court recorder, and surveyor; William Coddington, the richest man in Boston; the prominent silk merchant John Coggeshall; the innkeeper William Baulston; William Dyer, the milliner; and the Pequot War hero Captain John Underhill—all of whom faced disfranchisement on account of their recent petition in support of her brother-in-law John Wheelwright.

The Reverend Wheelwright, the forty-five-year-old husband of Anne’s husband Will’s youngest sister, Mary, had arrived in Massachusetts with Mary, her mother, and their five children seventeen months earlier, in May 1636, the month that many considered the start of the current crisis. Around this time other ministers had begun warning Winthrop that they feared Hutchinson’s activities and views, and they wondered if her minister, John Cotton, one of the two preachers at the First Church of Boston, might also be tainted. That summer, in 1636, Winthrop had lost the governorship to Vane, a twenty-three-year-old aristocrat who lodged in Boston with the Reverend Cotton and attended Anne Hutchinson’s meetings. The most highly placed
immigrant to Massachusetts, Vane at first, in 1635, had been warmly received by colonial leaders because, as Winthrop noted, he was the “son and heir to Sir Henry Vane,” comptroller of the king’s household, a privy councilor, and a chief adviser to King Charles. Royal authorities had allowed the younger Vane to venture to Massachusetts for three years in hopes that the hardships of the New World would drive some sense into the charming but irresponsible youth who had been alienated from them by his conversion to Puritanism. Largely on account of Vane’s social status and his eagerness, he had quickly assumed a role in Massachusetts as an adviser and mediator between magistrates more than twice his age.

In the fall of 1636, with Vane in power, the congregation of the Boston church had invited Wheelwright to serve there alongside their pastor, John Wilson, a Winthrop ally whose theology they disliked, and their beloved first teacher, John Cotton. Winthrop was deeply offended by this move by his own congregation. Using a little-known rule that required all actions of the church to be unanimous, Winthrop thwarted the move and assigned Wheelwright to a church ten miles to the south, in Mount Wollaston. Allowing Hutchinson’s brother-in-law to preach in Boston, noted Winthrop in his journal, would “raise doubtful disputations.” It would also strengthen Mistress Hutchinson.

But removing Wheelwright did not solve Winthrop’s problem. The majority of the congregation continued to oppose Wilson, even more openly than before. On at least one occasion Anne Hutchinson stood up and walked out during his sermon, which she felt interpreted Scripture wrongly. Other women followed her out of the meetinghouse, wishing also to show their displeasure. The court could not ban such leave-takings, though, which could always be attributed to feminine distress or “infirmities.” Meanwhile, male Hutchinsonians began to query Wilson provocatively during the question period after his sermons. Wilson’s colleague the Reverend Thomas Weld, listing the congregation’s derisive terms for its senior pastor, reported, “Now the faithful ministers of Christ must have dung cast on their faces, and be no better than Legal Preachers, Baal’s Priests, Popish Factors, Scribes, Pharisees, and Opposers of Christ Himself.”

In this conflict, as in most if not all battles in early Massachusetts, each side identified with the ancient Jews, God’s chosen people, and
identified the other side with the pagan worshipers of Baal. These settlers, all of them Puritans, were conscious of themselves as the successors of ancient Israel, the people with whom God made a covenant. The Antichrist—the Catholic Church, which they also called the Great Whore of Babylon—had triumphed in Europe and was trying to conquer England under Charles and Laud by moving its church back toward Rome. While these Puritans had felt united in England, where they shared the common enemy of the “papist” hierarchies of church and state, in New England they were reduced to fighting among themselves.

The crisis had reached its peak in early December 1636, eleven months before Anne Hutchinson’s trial. The ministers held a conference with Cotton, Hutchinson, and several members of the Boston church who supported her. To his colleagues’ dismay, Cotton did not completely agree with the others on doctrine, and Hutchinson “did conceive that we were not able ministers of the gospel,” the Salem minister Hugh Peter lamented. In sum, “she was a woman not only difficult in her opinions, but also of an intemperate spirit.”

A few days later, at the General Court meeting, it was suggested that Vane was to blame for this conflict as well as for the colonists’ growing fears over external threats such as the Indians and the French. A distraught Vane, still only twenty-three years old, burst into tears and resigned, saying he had been called back to England on business. Winthrop and his allies would have accepted his resignation happily had not a group of Hutchinsonians succeeded in convincing Vane to stay through the end of his term the following May. He consented, but his power was sorely compromised.

At the same time, on December 7, 1636, the General Court dismissed from its members the person in the colony most closely linked to Anne Hutchinson. “Upon the churches’ request,” the court record states, “Mr. William Hutchinson was discharged from assisting at the particular courts.”

In hopes of reconciliation and unity in the colony, the court proclaimed a Fast Day to be held on January 19, 1637. Fast Days—the reverse of Thanksgiving Days, when people feasted—were a central civic ritual in the colonial world, imported from Europe. The entire community ceased its daily work and went to church to repent and pray collec
tively for peace and order, civic health, and an end to sin and dissension. Believing that God protects those who obey his rules, they fasted as a way of avoiding God’s terrible judgment on those who do evil.

Even on the Fast Day, Wheelwright continued to oppose other ministers openly. Asked by Cotton to prophesy in public, Wheelwright accused Wilson and most of his brethren of failing to maintain Christ properly in doctrine and worship. The orthodox ministers, Wheelwright said, were leading their flocks to damnation. Those among us who wish to return Christ to our presence, he said, “must prepare for a spiritual combat,” “put on the armor of God,” and “show themselves valiant. They should have their swords ready,” and “fight with spiritual weapons.” Further fueling the fires of dissent, Wheelwright addressed his congregation as “brothers and sisters” rather than just “brethren” and used as examples of valor not only David and Barak but also the women Deborah and Jael. To the court and the other ministers, it was unthinkable to credit a woman with public power.

The General Court ordered Wheelwright to appear before it in March, as it had called up Roger Williams for reproach a year and a half before. Wheelwright, a tall man with large features, curly hair, a mustache, and a goatee, told the court he would answer no questions because the hearing was unfair. Promptly found guilty of sedition and “contempt of the civil authority,” he was silenced, for the second time in his career, for in 1632 the Church of England had censured him, prompting his eventual exile to Massachusetts. The court delayed Wheelwright’s sentencing until May, when a new governor would be elected to replace Vane.

In a chaotic annual election that May, which was held in Cambridge because Hutchinson enjoyed little support there, Winthrop was returned to the governor’s chair. In the meantime, fifty-eight freemen who supported Hutchinson—respected citizens of Boston, Charlestown, Ipswich, Salem, and Newbury—signed a petition remonstrating against her brother-in-law Wheelwright’s conviction. Over that summer, for the first time ever, church membership in Boston began to decline. Winthrop saw the country he had built tipping toward disaster.

Late that summer Winthrop set out to rectify the situation. The General Court banished Wheelwright and gave him two weeks to leave. Roger Williams offered him a place in Providence Plantation, but
Wheelwright decided to flee north, where he camped beside a waterfall on the Squamscott River and eventually founded Exeter, New Hampshire. The court called up all the men who had signed the petition, accused them of sedition, and warned them that if they did not desist they would lose the right to vote. In early November the General Court under Winthrop’s leadership banished several prominent Hutchinsonians. The men who had signed the petition were disfranchised and disarmed. Now, with the trial of Mistress Hutchinson, Winthrop hoped to settle the problem once and for all. The men they had removed were “but young branches” of the problem, in Winthrop’s view. Anne Hutchinson was its roots and trunk.

“You have spoken diverse things, as we have been informed, very prejudicial [damaging] to the honor of the churches and ministers thereof,” Governor Winthrop continued, according to transcripts that were made that day of the trial. “And you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.” One of her greatest crimes, in his view, was her criticism of the ministers with whom she disagreed. At her meetings, he had been told, she said only two ministers in the colony preached the truth. One was her brother-in-law Wheelwright. The other was John Cotton, formerly England’s most influential Puritan preacher, whom Winthrop and other leaders had wooed to Massachusetts. Wooing him, they had inadvertently wooed Anne too. In the summer of 1634, a year after Cotton departed England to avoid imprisonment for his nonconformity, the Hutchinsons had followed him. Their journey was one of many that had led to the current face-off in the Cambridge meetinghouse.

Anne Hutchinson stood silently before the governor, listening closely but mindful of God. She did not yet know the nature of the charge against her. Indeed, even Winthrop himself was not yet sure what charge to use against the first female defendant in the New World. He couldn’t accuse her of contempt against the state or of sedition because as a woman she had no public role. She could not be silenced or punished with disfranchisement because as a woman she had no voice or vote.

Winthrop concluded his opening remarks with two threats. “If you
be in an erroneous way we may reduce you,” and “If you be obstinate in your course then the court may take such course that you may trouble us no further.”

Still omitting any specific charge against the defendant, he prompted her to speak by asking, “Do you not assent and hold in practice to those opinions and factions that have been handled in court already, that is to say, do you not justify Mr. Wheelwright’s sermon and the petition?”

Anne replied, “I am called here to answer before you, but I hear no things laid to my charge.” These words, transcribed by two observers in the courtroom, are her first-ever recorded words. They show her as she was, clever and undeterred. She was calling the governor’s bluff, exploiting his failure to charge her with any crime.

“I have told you some already,” Winthrop sputtered, “and more I can tell you.”

“Name one, sir,” she replied. Anne, with no lawyer or adviser, would have to speak for herself throughout the trial. By colonial decree—in contrast to English common law—she had no right to counsel, and even her husband could not testify on her behalf. Ministers and deputies of the Massachusetts court were present as witnesses and to advise the prosecution, but the defendant was allowed no legal assistance or advice.

“Have I not named some already?” the governor said to her.

“What have I said or done?” she repeated. As they both knew, she had done nothing criminal. As a woman, she had no publicly sanctioned role. Her actions were invisible.