9
Anne Hutchinson
The Perseverance of a Puritan Preacher
The judges filed silently into the crowded meetinghouse on a chilly Tuesday in 1637 and sat knee to knee on wooden benches at the front of the hall. They were followed by eight somber, black-robed ministers who would serve as witnesses in the trial. The last judge to enter the hall, Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop, sat primly in the cushioned chair before the benches, and with a sharp rap of his gavel on the desk, he quieted the unruly crowd as he called the defendant forward.
Dressed in a long black cloak, a white linen smock laid over her black dress and petticoat, and a white coif covering her neatly plaited hair, the forty-six-year-old mother stood alone, without an attorney or an advisor. In the early stages of pregnancy with her sixteenth child, she might have been any other Puritan woman in seventeenth-century New England. But despite her pious, maternal appearance, Anne Hutchinson was considered by many on that dank November day to be an imminent danger to the Massachusetts Bay Colony: a witch, an instrument of Satan, and a heretic. And forty male judges were poised to put her back in her place.
A Puritan Preacher Is Born (Who Just So Happens to Be a Woman)
Anne Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, in 1591, the daughter of Francis Marbury and Bridget Dryden. An Anglican pastor with strong Puritan leanings, Francis was imprisoned for two years and placed under house arrest for his outspoken criticism of what he considered the clergy’s lack of suitable education. During his years of house arrest, Francis taught his children, including his daughters, despite the fact that education was almost exclusively offered only to boys and men during that time. Although he died suddenly at the age of fifty-five, Francis Marbury left an indelible mark on his nineteen-year-old daughter, Anne. She would carry on her father’s questioning nature, his contempt for authority, his deep faith, and his desire to share that faith with others.
The year after her father’s death, Anne married childhood friend William Hutchinson, and not long after, the couple heard the young Puritan minister John Cotton preach for the first time. Captivated by Cotton’s dynamic preaching, Anne and William routinely traveled six uncomfortable hours on horseback to hear him in person. Anne was particularly drawn to Cotton’s theology of absolute grace, which would serve as the foundation for her own teachings years later in Massachusetts. The problem, of course, was that Cotton was much too radical for the Church of England, and after many complaints against his nonconformist preaching, he was forced to flee to New England.
Anne was devastated, and from that moment on, she pursued one goal with fervor: to follow her minister and mentor to Boston. No matter that she had a husband and eleven children, ages eight months to nineteen years old. No matter that it would require an arduous, two-month journey of more than three thousand miles across a tumultuous sea to settle in a new and unfamiliar land. Anne was determined.
One year later, in 1634, Anne, William, ten of their children, and William’s elderly mother, Susanna, set sail from England aboard the Griffin, the same ship that had carried Cotton and the Hutchinsons’ eldest son to Boston the year before. As Winnifred King Rugg said in her biography Unafraid, “Always Anne led and William followed.”1
From Midwife to Preacher
Anne launched a midwife practice soon after arriving in Massachusetts, but that role quickly blossomed into one of spiritual advisor. Soon she was hosting gatherings of women in her home for Bible studies, and it wasn’t long before word reached the husbands, who began to attend Anne’s meetings too. This behavior was definitively un-Puritan, but that didn’t stop Anne. Not only did she discuss and elaborate on Cotton’s sermons, but she also began to offer her own views on religion, arguing that an “intuition of the Spirit,” rather than good works, was the only valid evidence that one was chosen by God for eternal salvation.
Anne’s Puritan theology had its foundation in the basic tenets of Calvinism, which maintained that salvation is God’s free gift, a gift that humans cannot attain through rituals or good works. But in advocating the practice of reading the Bible in the vernacular, meditating on Scripture alone and with others, and, in some cases, experiencing the revelation of God’s Word through the Holy Spirit, Anne took Puritanism to the extreme. Her theology suggested that one could receive the word of God directly from the Holy Spirit, an idea that the colonial leaders found not only threatening but also heretical. The Puritan leaders saw Anne leading her followers away from the church, toward an existence in which the church and ministers would no longer be needed, when believers would commune with and be moved directly by the Holy Spirit. “You have stepped out of your place,” said Reverend Hugh Peter of Salem, and “have rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject.”2
So there Anne stood, in a frigid Cambridge church, before forty judges and a room packed with both antagonists and supporters. Yet John Winthrop was hard-pressed to specify a charge. As biographer Eve LaPlante notes in American Jezebel, both Anne and Winthrop “knew she had done nothing criminal. As a woman, she had no publicly sanctioned role. Her actions were invisible.”3 In fact, Anne’s first-ever recorded words are contained in the first sentence she spoke in court: “I am called here to answer to you, but I hear no things laid to my charge.”4
In the end, Winthrop accused Anne of publicly criticizing local ministers in comparing them unfavorably with Cotton and suggesting that they were not “sealed with the spirit of grace.” But even after insisting that the eight ministers testify against her, he could not prove his case. It actually looked like Anne might escape with only minor charges against her; that is, until she made a bold—and some would say gravely unwise—move: she began to lecture the men right there in the meetinghouse courtroom. It was as if she couldn’t help herself; once Anne began to preach, she couldn’t stop. For several minutes she detailed exactly how and when she heard directly from God, not only through Cotton and her brother-in-law, the minister John Wheelwright, but also from God himself in what she called “immediate revelation.”
“How do you know it was the Spirit?” an incredulous voice shouted from the benches. “By the voice of his own spirit to my soul,” Anne answered, calmly sealing her fate.5 As she went on to cite how the Holy Spirit was revealed to her through verses in Isaiah and Daniel, Anne gathered steam, concluding her testimonial with this emphatic declaration:
Therefore, take heed how you proceed against me, for you have no power over my body. Neither can you do me harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah my Savior. I am at his appointment. The bounds of my habitation are cast in Heaven. No further do I esteem of any moral man than creatures in his hand. I fear none but the great Jehovah, which hath foretold me of these things. And I do verily believe that he will deliver me out of your hands. I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity and this whole state!6
The men were exuberant, especially Winthrop, who knew he had finally uncovered a charge that would hold against her: Anne had claimed a direct revelation from God, which was considered heresy. Most Protestants at the time viewed ministers as necessary interpreters of God’s Word and believed that no man, and certainly no woman, could claim that direct connection and communion. “This has been the ground of all these tumults and troubles. This is the thing that has been the root of all the mischief,” Winthrop exclaimed, pointing at Anne triumphantly.7
At that, judge Thomas Dudley pronounced, “I am fully persuaded that Mistress Hutchinson is deluded by the Devil, because the Spirit of God speaks truth in all his servants.”8 More than thirty judges agreed, and Anne Hutchinson, in what came to be known as the Antinomian Controversy, was deemed “a woman not fit for society” and banished from Massachusetts. In a subsequent church trial led by her beloved minister John Cotton, who accused her not only of lying but also of licentious behavior, she was also excommunicated from the Puritan church.
Moving and the Massacre
Shortly after her move to Rhode Island with her family, Anne, who had been ill throughout her pregnancy, went into labor and delivered not an infant but a mass of tissue. Her late miscarriage was fodder for much gossip in Boston, and Cotton even sermonized on her misfortune, connecting the circumstances of her “unnatural birth” with her heretical ideas.
Anne, however, did not let tragedy subdue her for long and was soon hosting Scripture meetings and preaching to groups of men and women in her Rhode Island home. However, with rumors circulating that Massachusetts would absorb the Rhode Island colony, she was forced to move again. Shortly after the unexpected death of her husband in 1641, the widowed Anne, now fifty years old, moved her family 130 miles away to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (what is now northern Bronx, New York). She was eager for a fresh start, especially for her youngest children, and was relieved to find that she and her extended family were the only English settlers in the newly formed Dutch colony.
The Hutchinsons and the Dutch families lived side by side but culturally distanced from one another. They didn’t speak the same language or share the same customs, and while Anne’s neighbors viewed her as harmless—they were not threatened by her religious convictions—they considered her ways bizarre, especially her refusal to keep guns in her house. Anne had always been supportive of Native Americans and wasn’t worried. As it turned out, her nonchalance toward her Siwanoy Indian neighbors was a grave error.
On a clear-skied autumn day in September 1643, Anne’s Dutch neighbors frantically warned her of a coming attack, begging her to flee from the house with her family. Insisting that she had good relations with the natives, she refused to arm herself. Not long after, a band of Siwanoy warriors invaded the Hutchinson property and seized and scalped sixteen people, including Anne, seven of her children, her son-in-law, and several servants. They then dragged the bodies into the house along with the cattle and set it on fire. There was only one survivor of the massacre: Anne’s nine-year-old daughter, Susanna, who had been picking blueberries away from the house. She lived with the tribe for about eight years, adopted by the chief, Wampage, who changed his name to “Ann-Hoeck,” after his most famous victim.
Back in Boston, Anne’s detractors proclaimed the massacre the work of God’s hand. “The Lord heard our groans to heaven, and freed us from this great and sore affliction,” wrote the Reverend Thomas Weld from London. Winthrop deemed the church “sweetly repaired” by the death of Hutchinson, whom he named “this American Jezebel,” after the infamous Old Testament pagan queen.9
Civil Liberty, Religious Toleration
Imagine for a moment how isolated and abandoned Anne must have felt when she was betrayed by some of her closest confidants, including her own friend and spiritual mentor, John Cotton. Imagine how crushed she was when she heard how Cotton railed against her in his sermons. Imagine the fear and isolation she felt after she was banished from Massachusetts and excommunicated from her church. Yet even after she was publicly shamed, convicted of heresy, forced to flee her home, and mocked in the midst of suffering and grief, she stayed steadfast in her faith and convictions, convinced that she had the right and the authority as a believer to communicate directly with God.
Today a bronze statue of Anne Hutchinson, her eyes lifted toward heaven, her arm encircling a young girl, stands in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston. “Courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration,” reads the inscription on the marble pediment. A number of other memorials in Rhode Island and New York, as well as the Hutchinson River and Hutchinson River Parkway in New York, are named in her honor and testify to her legacy and contributions. Yet the most telling testimony of Anne’s legacy isn’t inscribed on a memorial or echoed in the name of a busy highway or a meandering river. It’s in the example of her steadfast conviction, her determination, and her unwavering faith in God. Anne Hutchinson sacrificed her own life for the right of religious freedom, a right most of us take for granted today.