Mistress Bradstreet (26 page)

Between Hutchinson’s notoriety and Ward’s misogyny, it may have seemed to this twenty-four-year-old woman that the curtains were drawing closed on her aspirations as a female intellectual. She could not fully disagree with Ward’s attacks on the frivolity of women. She had once resisted her father’s dream of a pilgrimage to America, for reasons Ward would have deemed shallow if he knew. On a deeper level, she would later record that her “flesh” and her “spirit” were often at war, with her “fleshy” lusts all too frequently triumphing over her soul’s desire to spurn material concerns.
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She often felt far away from God, and so probably the minister was right: There was nothing more frail than a woman. But what Anne did not realize was that Ward valued nothing more than an inquiring mind and a pious soul, even if these were located inside a female body.

Ward was a writer with a huge library of books, and there was little chance that Anne could let such a resource go untapped in her new wilderness home. Books were prized possessions, and the settlers passed them around to one another in order to defray the costs of importing new volumes to America. Given Anne’s insatiable hunger for reading and for knowledge in all of its various forms, from science to history, it was likely that she had already read the books her father and husband had brought to Ipswich. She also probably had access to John Winthrop Jr.’s collection. But with her father and husband away so frequently, it was likely she longed to have someone to talk to about the heavy tomes of history and theology. Since she was used to learning from men, and was well equipped to discuss religion, politics, and literature with Ward, in hindsight it seems inevitable that this young woman parishioner and her minister would join forces.

How these two intellectuals actually began to meet and talk is unknown. Perhaps Anne summoned up her nerve and sought him out. Or possibly they fell into conversation after services when Simon was away. Whatever prompted them to find each other, it was a fruitful and inspirational relationship for both. Suffering from ill health and often lonely, having been a widower for twelve long years, at age fifty-six Ward loved nothing more than intelligent conversation. As a young man, he had immersed himself in the most glamorous circles, practicing law in Europe, where he spent most of his time in the royal court of Heidelberg, conversing with princes and princesses. He came to Puritanism relatively late in life and did not become a minister until he was in his thirties. He had always been famous for his wit, and he once said, “I have only two comforts to live upon: the one is in the perfections of Christ; the other is in the imperfections of Christians.”
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Of course, the Ipswich minister was also a very pious man. Engraved above his mantle were the Latin words
SOBRIE, JUSTE, PIE, LAETE
(prudently, justly, piously, and gladly).
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To Ward, laughter and joy were as important to his religion as these more sober qualities, and it must have been far more pleasant to talk to a pretty young woman who looked at him admiringly than to the hoary old men who came by occasionally to quarrel. Anne, too, undoubtedly felt fortunate to listen to Ward, who, when he pulled out all the stops, was irresistibly charming.

Ward’s passionate engagement with the unfolding political events back in England and his vast knowledge of English law and history were particularly compelling. To his credit, as the months passed, Ward grew increasingly impressed with Anne’s intelligence, despite his prejudices against women. Indeed, over the years his admiration would grow to such an extent that he would lend his support to the publication of Anne’s verse, signing his name to an important introductory poem. Of course, he still managed to criticize women in general even as he praised his female disciple. “It half revives my chill frost-bitten blood, / To see a woman once do ought that’s good,” he grumbled.
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Despite the old minister’s gruff exterior, to Anne it was men like him who made living in Ipswich bearable; her education could continue. In fact, over the next years she would immerse herself in her studies with an astonishing energy, given the demands of the rest of her life. What better way to contradict the pernicious events in Boston than to be reading English history, Scripture, science, and theology? Even as Hutchinson’s prominence was giving powerful and intelligent women a bad name, Anne was equipping herself with more ammunition to write learned poetry, a territory that was considered exclusively male. Before long she would be fueling her work with an encyclopedic knowledge that would surpass that of most of her male contemporaries.

As for Ward, he basked in Anne’s admiration, and it was during the most intense period of their intimacy that he wrote his two most important works, a body of laws for the colony and his best-seller,
The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America,
a compilation of aphorisms and pious sermons that Puritans everywhere devoured. Anne’s intelligence astounded Ward, and he was beginning to see that the education of women was so urgent an aspect of life in the New World that he would allude to this idea in his drafts of the laws for New England and in his sermons.
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Anne must have been thrilled to find that he respected her ideas. The two lonely writers needed each other; they fostered each other’s creativity. Indeed, it seems likely that neither Anne nor Ward could have produced such important work during this period without the sustaining force of their relationship.

And so if Simon was kept away from Ipswich by snow, ice, and treacherous roads, Anne’s loneliness seemed less oppressive now. She had found herself a companion far more literary than her husband and more attuned to her work. This was a heady new experience; though Dudley had prized her acumen, he had never rid himself of his authoritarian stance as her father.

Not that Anne ever lost sight of her other duties. That Dudley and the rest of Ipswich did not criticize Anne for spending so much time alone with the crusty old minister and lavishing her energy on scholarship was a testimony to how well she played her part. She was clearly a pious, devoted mother and showed no inclination to follow in Anne Hutchinson’s footsteps by flaunting her erudition in public. And no one could suspect Ward of impropriety. He was a man who took religion too seriously to be challenged. At any rate, probably no one realized how close a friendship was developing between the young woman and older man; Ward offered Anne the brilliant conversation and political insight that her husband could not, and she undoubtedly gave him that “gladness” of heart which he believed was an intrinsic part of daily living.

FINALLY, IN THE FALL OF
1636, after the heat of the first August in Ipswich had passed, news came to Anne and her family that Boston had reached a boiling point. Hutchinson’s followers had tried to push the Boston church into accepting her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, as one of its appointed ministers. Although Winthrop, as a member of the church, had used all of his political pull to prevent the appointment and Wheelwright had retreated to Maine, the congregation muttered and complained, and the town itself was up in arms. Even Cotton seemed moved by Hutchinson, although ultimately he would join his fellow ministers and condemn her with vehemence.

Sulkily, the Bostonians declared that they had been victimized by the colonial establishment. Although there were a few dissenting voices, most people believed that they were unique among the other settlements. What they meant, of course, was that they were more holy and more “chosen” than any of the other towns. If the leaders of this movement were not squelched soon, Winthrop feared Boston would try to head out on her own and split off from the rest of Massachusetts, ruining the founders’ idea of a unified Puritan New England and demoralizing the other communities.

By January 1637 the colony had deteriorated into two enemy factions: Boston versus everyone else. The General Court ordered a day of fasting and penitence to try to resolve the differences between the outraged leaders of each group. But on this day of supposed reconciliation, Wheelwright returned from Maine to preach a sermon announcing that those who opposed Hutchinson’s ideas were “enemies . . . to Christ,” and that those who were truly pious “must kill them with the worde of the Lorde.”
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Ominous though this declaration was, Wheelwright did not mean that the people of Boston should actually slay their opponents, but he did intend to foment protest against the magistrates’ power.

That fall, the synod of Massachusetts ministers met and for twenty-four days carved out what they believed were the defining attributes of Puritan orthodoxy to help them take a united stand against Hutchinson and her followers. The only minister who disagreed with their tenets was Wheelwright, and this sealed his fate. In November the General Court banished Mistress Hutchinson’s brother-in-law for refusing to surrender his “heresies.” Momentous though this decree was, everyone knew that Wheelwright’s exile was only a prelude to the real showdown. It was time for the magistrates to confront Mistress Hutchinson. Desperately they trumped up some claims against her.

First they charged her with threatening the social system of the colony. This made sense to Hutchinson’s accusers, since the familial, legal, and theological lives of the settlers were so intertwined. In the eyes of Dudley, Simon, and their colleagues, Hutchinson had not only betrayed the magistrates of the colony by “countenancing and encouraging” those who had plotted against the New England government, but she had also broken the fifth commandment, dishonoring the settlement’s officials, who were “the parents” of the colony; Hutchinson had stepped out of bounds as a “child” of New England.

The severity of this charge is perhaps not readily apparent; but in New England, children could face legal action for disobedience to their parents if anyone observed their behavior. When rebellious sons and daughters had reached the age of sixteen, they could face the death penalty simply for cursing or hitting a parent. Although no child was ever executed, plenty were prosecuted for insubordination. One young man, for example, was convicted for calling his father a “Liar & Drunkard & holding up [his] fist against him,” and a girl was dragged into court for shouting at her mother, “a pockes of the devill what ayles this madd woman.”
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The court’s stance was similar on conflicts between husbands and wives. A woman’s defiance of her husband was not a purely personal matter but a legal offense. At the time of the Hutchinson trial, husbands in New England still possessed the English legal right of “correction” of their wives, that is, using corporal punishment to enforce obedience. In a dramatic move, only three years later, the Massachusetts court would claim this right for itself, declaring that “if there be any just cause of correction complaint” it should “be made to Authorities assembled in some Court,” so that the magistrates would become, in effect, not only parents of the settlers but the symbolic “husbands” of Massachusetts wives.
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The second charge against Hutchinson was even more convoluted than the first. Since the court could not claim that she had committed any criminal act, the magistrates could only fall back on the accusation that she had “entertained” seditious individuals. The third accusation was perhaps the most serious of all, as it was based on Hutchinson’s claims against the ministers. In Massachusetts Bay you were not allowed to insult the colony’s preachers or undermine their authority in any way. Hutchinson had accused them of preaching the erroneous “covenant of works”: that you could get to heaven by virtue of your own efforts. A truly pious individual understood that only through God’s grace could you be saved, and so Hutchinson’s accusations were considered shockingly libelous.

As the days grew bitter and short, both sides prepared for the trial. Simon and Dudley removed to New Towne, where business ground to a halt as deputies and delegates piled into the rectangular meetinghouse, the only structure big enough to hold such a gathering. For Anne, who was well advanced in her third pregnancy, it was out of the question to travel such a long distance simply to be a spectator. And she was not alone. For most women living in remote towns, it must have been frustrating to know that such momentous events were occurring out of their immediate reach. They would have to wait for the men to return home to tell them what had happened.

It would be difficult, though, for most observers, including Simon and Dudley, to describe with any real accuracy the drama to come or the woman at its center. Dudley declared, “Mistress Hutchinson, from that time she came, hath made a disturbance.”
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Winthrop, who had been reelected governor that spring, now called Mistress Hutchinson “the breeder and nourisher of all these distempers,” illustrating his conviction that she was a woman gone wrong, having misused her maternal abilities so grievously.
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On that opening day in November, however, Mrs. Hutchinson appeared fearless and easily overturned the magistrates’ reasoning with her own biblical references. When Winthrop demanded to know the reason behind the large meetings at her house, she asked with cutting politeness, “May not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me leave?”
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Understanding the system in which she lived, Hutchinson did not contest the paternal authority of the court directly. Instead, her use of the double negative suggested that there was a higher law than that of the court and she was simply adhering to God’s commandments.

Her flustered listeners could not come up with a scriptural refutation of her point, and so Winthrop attempted to smooth this over by exclaiming, “We do not mean to discourse [argue] with those of your sex,” in the hopes that a reminder of her subordinate status as a woman would lessen the power of her logic. Still, her point hung in the air, unrefuted.
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Winthrop’s spluttering retort notwithstanding, this was exactly what the trial was predicated on, formal and public debate with a female—a radical event, since women were by definition not meant to inhabit the realm of governmental or church authority. The very proceedings, then, threatened to upset colonial definitions of the proper code of behavior, particularly if the magistrates did not win.
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