Mistress Bradstreet (4 page)

Dudley fought his own fear of eternal damnation by striving for perfection. Driven by his compulsion for self-improvement and by his urge to create a better, more “godly” world sooner rather than later, he was prone to utopian visions, an inclination he shared with John Cotton. But Dudley was never content to let these visions remain unrealized. Eager to risk everything for the sake of his God, he saw himself as a kind of Puritan knight ready to do battle for his cause. An adventurer at heart, one of his first impulses as a young man was to dash off to France to captain troops in a fight against Catholic Spain.

Dudley held his children to the same high standards he demanded from himself. But he was also capable of being “mild and wise,” as Anne once wrote. Having recognized in Anne a powerful intellect and a spiritual intensity that might one day match his own, Dudley had chosen her as his favorite from the beginning. He took a keen interest in her education, instructing her in English history and literature as well as in theology and the Scriptures. Anne, in turn, rewarded her father with her abiding love, declaring he was her “guide” and praying she would one day emulate his unshakable faith.
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Watching Anne brood over her conscience and strive to master her lessons, Dudley realized that his daughter had fallen heir to his heroic perfectionism. Although he had managed to channel his zeal into an energetic commitment to Puritanism, Anne would wrestle with this irrepressible legacy throughout her life. She yearned, as she wrote, to “tast[e] of that hidden manna that the world knows not . . . and have resolved with myself that against such a promise, such tastes of sweetness, the gates of hell shall never prevail; yet have I many times sinkings and droopings.” But since Puritanism held that there was no possibility of ever attaining complete union with God—human beings were inherently sinful and God was a mystery—she knew that her desires for what she termed “the witness of His holy spirit” often came from insecurity and vanity.
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In a society where a woman was expected to be docile, humble, and quietly submissive, there was little opportunity for Anne to voice these doubts and ambitions. Her brother, Samuel, who was four years older, sat next to Dudley on the journeys to Boston and had the chance to engage their father in important theological discussions. As the eldest girl in the family, Anne had other tasks she had to perform.

For Anne’s mother, Dorothy, the idle hours in the wagon offered the opportunity to teach her daughter how to be a good wife and mother. Descended from a “substantial yeoman,” Dorothy was the embodiment of the virtuous Puritan woman.
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She was, Anne wrote, “religious in all her words and ways,” devoting “constant hours” to private meditation and prayer at the same time that she was “an obedient wife” and a “loving mother.” She was also a stern taskmaster, ruled the household with an iron will, and was regarded by both her servants and her children as so “wisely aweful,” or awe inspiring, that she merited their utmost obedience.
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Because Dorothy had no other ambition than to support her husband and provide her children with a good religious education, she took it upon herself to tame her precocious daughter’s spirit, to teach her womanly virtues—restraint, modesty, and selflessness—that Anne would struggle with for the rest of her life.

On the long Saturday journeys toward Botolph’s, the family could see windmills turning while sheep grazed on the low smooth hills and the clouds rolled by overhead. It was a vista not unlike those painted by the Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael, and in fact, the fen country, wedged between East Anglia to the south and Yorkshire to the north, was so similar to the Netherlands that it was often called the Holland of England.

When Anne and her family moved to Lincolnshire, its rushes and swampy reed beds were being transformed into farmland, and the Dudleys could see the beginnings of rich, fertile pastures along their route, as well as innumerable church steeples.
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Unlike St. Botolph’s, which was the spiritual landmark of Lincolnshire and therefore the largest church in the county, these village churches were small, constructed of roughly hewn stone, with simple designs carved on the doors and on the columns inside. That the landscape was dotted with these abundant but unpretentious structures was gratifying to Anne and her family. The Dudleys did not have a particularly romantic view of nature and preferred to see signs of Christian civilization; each steeple that pointed up to the sky was a kind of triumph over the wilderness.

Eventually, the calm of the countryside gave way to the crowds, shouts, and smells of the boisterous city. As the center of the busy wool trade, Boston was the second-largest port in England, with a chaotic web of crisscrossing lanes and alleys, and redbrick buildings with brightly painted doors and windows.

To the Dudleys, however, Boston was much more than a bustling market town. It was a sacred location imbued with prophetic importance, starting with its name, which came from the phrase “Botolph’s stone,” after the Christian martyr who in the ninth century converted the savage Anglo-Saxons. Tradition had it that he had used one of the pale stones from the countryside to convince the locals of the truth of the Gospels. For those as steeped in Scripture as Anne and her family, this story was believable, since the chalky boulders that surrounded Boston did indeed seem to recall the white stone of the apocalypse described in the book of Revelation.

The town itself often seemed in danger of a watery disaster on a biblical scale. Boston was bordered by the Witham, an estuary too shallow to sustain the frequent surges of the tide; when the sea was high, the waves rolled in and out of the town with such frequency that most residents had built flood steps to protect their homes. The Dudley children had come to expect that they might be forced to wade to the church door, but a little floodwater could not deter them from their goal; wet feet were a small price to pay for the opportunity to hear Cotton speak.

Puritans from every corner of Lincolnshire joined Anne’s family at St. Botolph’s. When the Dudleys had moved to Sempringham, ministers like Cotton, who disagreed with many of the state’s policies regarding the governance of the church, were just beginning to be persecuted. By the end of the decade, the king’s bishops would sweep through the country, removing hundreds of these dissenting Puritan ministers from their pulpits and replacing them with their enemies, Anglican divines whom the dissenters called “Dumme Dogges,” “Destroyeing Drones,” or “Caterpillars of the Word.”
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Handsome and charismatic, Cotton was the kind of man who was able to circumvent this royal system until 1633. Instead of challenging the bishops and the king directly, he quietly protested the ecclesiastical dictates of the Stuart kings—first James, who was crowned in 1603, and later Charles, who acceded in 1625. He refused to read from the newly issued Book of Common Prayer, kneel at Communion, use the sign of the cross, wear surplices, or allow the unsanctified to participate in the rites of the church.

Fortunately for Cotton, he was somewhat insulated from the Anglican authorities, because Lincolnshire was geographically secluded from the rest of England.
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Surrounded by the fens and a great watery inlet known as the Wash, this protected enclave had long been a refuge for renegades; the conquered Britons retreated here after the Saxons invaded in the fifth century, and later the Saxons themselves fled to the fen country after the Normans invaded England in 1066. The earls of London had been remarkably sympathetic to the Puritan cause ever since the early sixteenth century, when King Henry VIII dissolved Lincoln’s monasteries and granted the monastic lands to the first earl. By 1620 the county had a Puritan community fifteen thousand strong, and Boston, its central gathering place, was a cauldron of dissent.

Dudley made sure all of his children, especially Anne, understood the bracing history of their new home; because of its isolation, Lincolnshire had long fostered independent thinkers. Reputedly, Henry VIII had once complained that the people of Lincoln were “presumptuous” and “the most brute and beastly of the whole realm,” though this was probably due to the fact that it was here that he discovered his wife Catherine Howard’s adulterous affair. The county seems to have bred unorthodox souls—Captain John Smith, the famous explorer; John Wesley, the Methodist evangelist; Sir Isaac Newton, the eccentric mathematician and theologian; and most important to Dudley, John Foxe, the Protestant author of
The Book of Martyrs,
from which Anne could probably recite by heart.

Thus, while dissenters in other counties faced increasing discrimination and persecution, Cotton was protected by Lincolnshire’s politically astute Puritans. He managed to remain on the pulpit of Botolph’s throughout this dangerous decade, much to the relief and gratitude of Anne and her family, who looked to him for guidance as England seemed to crumble around them.

AFTER THE DUDLEYS ARRIVED
in Boston on Saturday evenings, they often spent a festive night eating “ribs of beef and many a pie” or “hot sheeps feet and mackerel” and drinking ale and hard cider in the earl’s town residence.
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These were lively evenings, but in the mornings there was church to face. Each Sunday Anne waited outside St. Botolph’s, alongside her family, Cotton, and the other like-minded parishioners, sometimes for hours, until the town’s new Anglican chaplain, Edward Wright, had performed the rites that Cotton and his followers deemed blasphemous. John Cotton was calmly insistent about not going inside because even being in the same room with Wright, who genuflected, wore elaborate vestments, made the sign of the cross, bowed toward the altar, and altogether behaved like a Catholic priest, was dangerous for the souls of “true believers.” He had handpicked the members of Botolph’s whom he considered the elect, including Anne and her family. This “tighter inner group [of] saints” excluded the individuals Cotton deemed unworthy, such as Anglicans, so that his special souls would not learn any bad habits. To reinforce this point, he preached that his chosen ones, the Puritans, were as “a lily among thorns,” the thorns being the “notorious wicked ones” among whom the faithful were forced to live.
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Over time, as more Puritan preachers were “ferrited” out of their pulpits and Botolph’s became one of the few places left where one could go to hear a true dissenter preach, Cotton’s fame increased, as did the prestige of his followers, at least in Puritan circles.
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But it was not easy to be one of Cotton’s saints. Anne was not always sure she deserved such an honor. Insecurity and self-doubt besieged her; she wondered if she could ever live up to her father’s ideals or abide by the kind of humble resignation her mother required of her. All too often she was tempted to “neglect [her] . . . duties,” though she was sure that if she failed in any of her responsibilities, a terrible fate awaited her, and she feared she would be visited by Satan. At night, when her parents instructed her to review her spiritual condition and to make her peace with God in case she died before waking, Anne felt profoundly discouraged by her moral weaknesses. The blessings most Puritan children had to learn by heart had little solace to offer: “At night, lye down prepar’d to have / Thy sleep, thy death, thy bed, thy grave” or “From Death’s arrest no Age is free, Young children too may die.”
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According to Puritan theology, desolation was evidence of God’s great love; it kept one from the even graver sins of self-deception and hypocrisy and encouraged one to seek help from God. For her own protection, Dudley instructed his daughter that “inward peace” was always to be distrusted, as it might have been sent by Satan himself to tempt the poor Puritan into a slothful state.

Given this paradoxical theology and her parents’ impossible strictures, John Cotton’s words were indispensable salves. If Anne did confess her fears to her minister, he would have listened carefully and, instead of chastising her, would have selected appropriate passages to read from Scripture, such as “upon this rock Christ Jesus will I build my faith,” a phrase that, she reported years later, never failed to quiet her “heart.”
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Anne was fortunate to sit near the pulpit, where she could closely observe her beloved minister. As one of the more prominent Puritan families, the Dudleys were given pews up front. The women and children sat on one side, the men on the other, and the peasants crowded in back, three or four hundred people deep. One of the most famous orators of his generation, Cotton used what the Puritans called the “plaine style” of preaching, avoiding learned allusions and fanciful metaphors in order to reach the hearts of his listeners. His parishioners often felt that he entered their innermost thoughts, heard their fears, hopes, and jealousies. In his “melting way,” he assured them that there was godliness in every one of their daily acts, from sweeping the house to carving meat for dinner.
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Each quotidian moment of their seemingly unimportant lives was really a sacred drama in the battle between Satan and God, evil and good, chaos and order.

Sitting with her mother and sisters, Anne could also observe the other women, and there was one in particular whom she could not help but admire. Her name was Anne Hutchinson, and at age thirty-two, she was already a legend. Hutchinson was notable for her “nimble wit” and “active spirit,” as well as for being warm and outgoing, with “a very voluble tongue.”
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Hutchinson’s unconventional behavior contrasted sharply with that of Anne’s mother. Like the Dudleys, Hutchinson was devoted to Cotton, and she and her wealthy merchant husband traveled many miles to attend St. Botolph’s. Whether she was talking earnestly about Cotton’s sermons or sitting quietly with a group of women discussing the state of their souls, Hutchinson had a dazzling presence that always placed her at the center of things. No one seemed to mind her confidence or her outspokenness. Instead, famously devout, she was held in high esteem by women for her midwifery skills and her spiritual counsel, and she was equally respected by the men. To the young Anne, whose own intellectual life was beginning to bloom, Hutchinson’s accomplishments and intelligence must have been inspiring. Certainly, her forthright behavior suggested that there was more than one way to be a good Puritan woman.