Mistress Bradstreet (27 page)

The pressure was on for both sides, therefore, although there was little chance that the magistrates would lose their case, since they significantly outnumbered the Boston contingent of Hutchinson supporters. Still, the Bostonians were powerful and vociferous and would certainly kick up even more chaos if they felt that injustice had been perpetrated. As for Anne Hutchinson, she knew she was fighting not only for her dignity and integrity but for her life. The prospect of exile hung in the air like a death sentence.

With such high stakes, the opponents were vigilantly attuned to any sign of weakness on the part of the other. Of course, the magistrates had the advantage because they could spell each other and lend their colleagues moral support, whereas the forty-six-year-old Hutchinson stood in isolation, facing them on her own and arguing her case out of sheer willpower, intelligence, and faith. Her strength was all the more astonishing as she was pregnant and would, in fact, collapse at the end of this first day of questioning.

As the trial ensued, it seemed she had carefully prepared her arguments before the trial, or else she was so conversant with the Bible that her answers flew off the tip of her tongue. She rarely hesitated, and spoke quickly, without the need to consult notes. For example, when the court asked her to justify the meetings at her house, she replied promptly and used the Bible to support her actions, citing Titus 2:3-5, which spoke of the godliness of elder women preaching to younger ones, and a story in Acts, where a godly woman named Priscilla, accompanied by her husband, instructed a young man in the ways of Christ.

The court could not refute these passages, and Winthrop could only bluster angrily: “You show us not a rule.” Hutchinson responded with admirable calm, “I have given you two places of Scripture.” To this the discomfited governor exclaimed, “But neither of them will suit your practise.” With what might have been an audible snort, Hutchinson said in a mockery of their literal mindedness, “Must I show my name written therein?”
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But although the mistress was triumphing in this battle of wits, her successes were only further alienating her enemies. Each of her competent references to Scripture and her very confidence only made it more evident to her enemies that she was trespassing in male territory. She should not be so well versed. She should not be so adept at debate. Clearly she was attempting to usurp the role of the ministers—a direct assault on the powers of the court. Thus the magistrates ended the first day’s arguments by growling, “We see no rule of God for [your behavior], we see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercises besides what authority hath already set up, and so what hurt comes of this you will be guilty of and we for suffering you.”
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The real issue at hand (one that also applied to Anne Bradstreet and her writerly ambitions) was how much room there was in New England for two systems: a male and a female one. Convinced of her own righteousness and impelled, apparently, to teach those who came to her door, Hutchinson had had no alternative but to operate outside the existing conventions. She could not stand up and preach in church, so she preached in her own home, sitting in her own chair. Now, on the first day of the trial, the magistrates had drawn the line. Theirs was the only acceptable authority, and any “preaching,” “prophesying,” or teaching other than that by court-sponsored individuals—the ministers—was prohibited.

On the second day of the trial, the magistrates confronted Mistress Hutchinson with her “insults” to the preachers. Attacking the colony’s officially sanctioned ministers amounted to blasphemy and even sedition. Hutchinson remained undaunted and responded by demanding that each preacher swear to the truth of his statements. This raised the ante of the debate, and the ministers balked. If any of them swore and then could be proved wrong, they would be guilty not only of lying under oath but also of violating the law of God.
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Into this breach strode John Cotton, Hutchinson’s original advocate. He declared that Hutchinson had never, as far as he recalled, definitively claimed that the other ministers were in error or “under a covenant of works.” The Bostonians in the audience must have uttered a silent cheer at this point, because the case against Hutchinson was beginning to unravel. That she had supported those who were seditious—that is, her brother-in-law—was not a serious enough charge to condemn her, and now it seemed that her most serious offense—libel against the ministers—could not be proven by the court.

Hutchinson capitalized on this moment by asserting that the ministers had no right to testify against her anyway, as they had gained their information in a “private” session with her. She said that she had assumed that her interviews with each preacher were confidential, as was the general rule in New England.

This was a disturbing new development in the case, as no one in the colony relished the idea of ministers publicizing the information they gained under the minister-congregant pact of confidentiality. For a moment it appeared that Hutchinson would be victorious—and perhaps she would have been if she had not suddenly stepped forward: God had spoken directly to her, she cried. Her brilliance in the court was because the Lord had “put” the scriptural passages she had cited into her mind. In fact, she declared that He spoke with “the voice of his spirit to my soul” in precisely the same way that he had spoken to Abraham, by an “immediate revelation.”
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Even Cotton could not stand by her now. Puritans believed that God no longer communicated directly to His flock. The age of revelation was over. Hutchinson had uttered shocking words that proved she was in the grip of the devil. The court hastily sentenced exile, eager to separate themselves from this sinner as quickly as possible. Winthrop rejoiced that it was from “her own mouth” that her guilt was determined.
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Even Hutchinson’s supporters were aghast at her declaration that she was a prophet and had experienced miracles on the scale of the biblical patriarchs.

At this point, most of Hutchinson’s followers fell away, although some of the most loyal adherents struggled to defend her for a few more months. Her civil trial was at an end, although she still had to face a church trial the following March. When she presented herself at these proceedings, she seemed a broken woman. Pregnant, ill, and exhausted, she publicly recanted, but the ministers still voted to excommunicate her. An apologetic, weakened Hutchinson was still a dangerous woman. They did not want her near their congregants.

After this rather anticlimactic finale, all resistance to the court’s edict appeared to die. The Boston church returned to the fold of the other New England congregations, and Boston residents even seemed to make peace with their neighbor and governor, Winthrop, who was glad that they no longer regarded him as “their greatest enem[y].” He wrote, “The Lord brought about the hearts of all the people to love and esteem [Him and their pastor] more than ever before, and the church was saved from ruin beyond all expectation.”
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That spring the magistrates forced Hutchinson, her husband, and her children out of the Bay colony and into the wilds of the unknown territories. The Hutchinsons found refuge in Rhode Island and later moved on to New York. For all the settlers, including Anne and her neighbors in Ipswich, it seemed that quiet might now return to Massachusetts Bay. They had cleansed the colony. Even the formidable John Cotton was reprimanded for his role in supporting Anne Hutchinson, and he hastily distanced himself from the former superstar. The Hutchinson trial had made it clear that in order to survive in Massachusetts Bay, you had to abide by the rules. There was no room for renegades.
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Chapter Fourteen

Old England and New

H
UTCHINSON’S METEORIC CRASH
rang a warning bell to all ambitious women in New England. You had to toe the theological line if you wanted to survive, and you could not stray from your prescribed role as a female in Puritan society. If a woman dared to write verse, therefore, she would have to compose lines that would not compromise her station in life. She would have to assume the role of an obedient wife and daughter, not a preacher, and certainly not a prophet.

It was a dangerous business, then, that Anne had embarked on in the midnight hours. Although she would never condone Hutchinson’s actions, she would never condemn them either. Whether for good or evil, Hutchinson was an example of the kind of power an intelligent female could wield.

During the turmoil of this period, Anne wrote her second poem, “An Elegy upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney,” a work obsessed with the idea of women and power. There was an avalanche of ambition behind this poem. The great English poet had been dead for almost two generations and held little claim on the consciousness of those who were not literary aspirants. But to Anne, Sidney was an important avenue toward being considered a poet herself. She knew that the most famous poet of the last generation, Edmund Spenser, had elegized Sidney and thereby claimed the mantle of the greatest living English poet for himself. In the same way, Keats would immortalize Homer, Shelley would immortalize Milton, and Eliot would link himself to the Metaphysicals. One day Anne herself would be claimed by the great American poet John Berryman as his stepping-stone to greatness in his 1951 poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.”

If you were a male aspirant to the laurels of poetic fame, you wrote elegies to the dead poets you admired as a way of asserting your own literary identity. As far as Sidney was concerned, Anne had perhaps more right than any other living writer to invoke the legacy of her predecessor, since Dudley had always told her she was related to the celebrated Sidney by blood.

With her “Elegy,” therefore, Anne claimed the right to be considered the next great English poet, although for Anne to aspire to any kind of poetic fame was a profoundly ambitious dream. The English reading public loved poetry. From Shakespeare to Herrick, from Quarles to Milton, they devoured new books of verse as though they were starving for meter and rhyme, regarding the best collections as page-turners as well as instructive examples in beauty and faith. Poets were important people and writing poetry was regarded as a supremely impressive vocation, but, of course, it was a vocation reserved entirely for men. Hutchinson had demonstrated the trouble women could get into if they trespassed into male territory, and so, whether or not Anne made a conscious decision to distance herself from Hutchinson’s boldness, she took an entirely different approach from the older woman; she masked her ambition behind twenty-two lines of apparent self-denunciation.

She imagined that the nine classical Muses of art and literature who lived on Mount Parnassus, according to Greek mythology “took from me the scribbling pen I had . . . And drave me from Parnassus in a rage.”
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In Anne’s version of the Muses, the famous damsels of inspiration do not have it in them to help another woman and are infuriated by the female poet’s presumption.

But Anne counters this apparent blow to her skill by asking the reader to “wonder not if I no better sped.”
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On first reading, she seems to mean we should not be surprised that her efforts were not very successful. But according to Puritan theology, it was only logical that the Muses would kick a Christian poet off the Greek mountain. As a Puritan poet, Anne believed she was destined to travel another sort of path with a different source of inspiration, the Holy Ghost, or the Muse of the Christian God.

That she was anxious about the idea of venturing into the male literary world was still evident three years later when she would write a poem on another one of her literary heroes, Du Bartas, who had dazzled her back in Sempringham. Again she considered the theme of female inadequacy compared with the prowess of men, asking the same implicit question: Was it possible for a woman writer to achieve any kind of excellence?

At first it seems that she has acquiesced in this poem and is asserting that only men can be great poets. Never, Anne writes, could she aspire to such heights as Du Bartas, the pinnacle of piety, learning, and skill. She bemoans her “faltering tongue”; her muse is “a child” who “finds too soon his want of eloquence”; she is “weak brained,” “sightless,” and “mute.” If only, she laments, she could have his “pen” (and, earthy woman that she was, she would have enjoyed the play on the word
penis
). It is not until the final line of the poem that she makes her own claim for “Fame.” Flawed though she is, it is she who will resuscitate the male writer from death with her words. She ends the poem with the proud statement, “He is revived.”
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By whom? By Anne Bradstreet, of course.

For Anne the problem of poetic greatness and lineage was far more complicated than for her male counterparts: Where could a woman fit into the tidy line of male inheritance? Two years later, in 1643, Anne would at last offer her answer by turning to her father’s great heroine, Elizabeth I, the warrior queen.

Now say, have women worth? Or have they none?

Or had they some, but with our Queen, is’t gone?

Nay masculines, you have thus taxed us long,

But she though dead, will vindicate our wrong.

Let such as say our sex is void of reason,

Know tis a slander now but once was treason.
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Anne was becoming bolder. She had dropped the self-deprecation of the two earlier tributes and, with the Hutchinson debacle still in recent memory, declared that Elizabeth was not just equal to male rulers but was in fact the “pattern of kings.” “Was ever people better ruled than hers?” she demanded. “Did ever wealth in England more abound?” Anne was proud that Elizabeth was a fighting queen, one who had “wracked,” “sacked,” and “sunk” the Spanish Armada. She had put on armor and commanded the troops at Tilbury like an “Amazon.”
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