American Jezebel (10 page)

All in all, she had acquitted herself well before the court. John Winthrop appeared to have no specific charge with which to snare her. Her teacher John Cotton had not yet spoken, and if he would she was sure of his support.

Her success before the court may have astonished her judges, but it was no surprise to her. She was confident of herself and her intellectual tools, largely because of the intimacy she felt with God, her faith in his love and protection. Over and over, in Bible verse after Bible verse, God had shown her she had nothing to fear.

Some years before, in Alford, England, she had had a vision of the events that were occurring now. In a dream vision, she had seen herself travel to a distant land where she would find adversity and be persecuted. Like her father, she would be put to trial. With Christ’s help, she would endure.

In her vision she had assumed the role of the biblical prophet Daniel, a Jew who faithfully served the royal family of Babylon. The Babylonian king loved Daniel. Envying him for this, princes in the palace told the king that Daniel prayed to the one Jewish God rather
than to the Babylonian king or his many gods. Horrified, the king ordered that Daniel be thrown into the lions’ den, a standard form of execution. Daniel spent six days there, during which the lions’ mouths remained shut. Emerging without injury, he told the king, “The lions have not hurt me because I was innocent in the sight of God and of my king.” The king, amazed, converted to Judaism and threw the princes who accused Daniel to the lions, who devoured them.

“It was revealed to me,” Anne recalled, “that [some] should plot against me, and I should meet with affliction. But the Lord bid me not to fear.” Like Daniel, she prayed rightly, she was despised for it, and she would triumph. God assured her, “I am the same God that delivered Daniel out of the lions’ den. I will also deliver thee.”

In another of the prophetic visions that came to her while studying Scripture, the Lord “did reveal himself to me, sitting upon a throne of justice, and all the world appearing before him.” He said to her that “though I must come to New England, yet I must not fear nor be dismayed. The Lord spake this to me with a strong hand, and instructed me that I should not walk in the way of this people here.”

These revelations, which she experienced as divine gifts, must have given her strength as she approached sleep on that harrowing Tuesday night in November 1637. “No man has any power over my body, neither can he do me any harm, for I am in the hands of the eternal Jehovah, my savior,” she believed, according to her remarks in court the next day. “I am at his appointment. The bounds of my habitation are cast in heaven. No further do I esteem of any mortal 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.”

The next morning the sun rose over Massachusetts Bay Colony at about twenty to seven. It came, like the ships that bore the settlers from England, from over the ocean. Winter stars lingered in the night sky even as the sun approached. Migrating geese lined the ice on the river named for the Catholic-leaning monarch from whom the Puritans had run. Deer and coyote roamed the forest, which spread north, west, and south. Wolves slept in caves in the snow. With the sun’s arrival on Wednesday, November 8, 1637, the sky over the house where Anne slept—if indeed she did sleep—went from black of night to indigo blue to pale gray and then to the almost white light of a late fall New England day.

Stepping out the door of a house in Cambridge that morning, Anne would have been reminded at once that she was not at home. The streets of Cambridge, unlike the crooked roads of Boston, were neat and perpendicular. There were no seagulls cawing, as there were on the Shawmut Peninsula. From here she could not see the ocean to which she now awoke every dawn, the three hills of Boston, and her warm house with her beloved children in it. They were several miles to the east, where the still-dark sky glowed yellow.

At the time, coastal Massachusetts was a wilderness of forest, meadow, and swamp. Much of the swamp has been filled in to expand the land, and in our day the forests are different from the ones Anne saw. Then they were virgin forests of first-growth hardwoods, so lacking in undergrowth that a horse and rider could gallop through. The arable land near the ocean was inhabited by small groups of Algonquian-speaking natives—of the Wampanoag, Massachuset, Pawtucket, Neponset, and Nauset tribes—whose encampments tended to move with the
seasons, in contrast to the fixed settlements of Europeans. Many of the native Indians, who had cleared much land for planting, had died in recent years of smallpox, which English fishermen had imported to America earlier in the century. Some later English émigrés saw this double “clearing” of the land as a benefice. In the words of the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston, “The woods were almost cleared of these pernicious creatures to make room for a better growth.”

On June 22, 1630, the eleven English ships of the Massachusetts Bay Company had landed in Salem (Nahumkeck) harbor, eager to impose on this wilderness a familiar sense of order and civilization. The ships carried 1000 men, women, and children; 240 head of cattle; 60 horses; and the supplies and materials needed to clear and plant land and build houses. That included 10,000 bricks, a ton of iron nails, a musket and bandolier for each man, hundreds of swords and pikes, one seine net per vessel for fishing, 400 pairs of shoes, dozens of pewter pots, and hundreds of sheets and bolsters of linen cloth.

As John Winthrop’s ship, the
Arbella,
approached land, he observed that “there came a smell off the shore like the smell of a garden.” A wild pigeon landed on the boat’s deck just before the passengers rowed ashore, as if the Holy Spirit were blessing the fleet and its mission. Winthrop and Dudley led the settlers south from Salem along the coast to the mouth of the Charles and Mystic Rivers, where on July 1 they declared Charlestown their first town.

Charlestown seemed at first the perfect setting for the “city on a hill” that Winthrop had described before they arrived. This town—Mishawum to the natives—is on the northern bank of the Charles River where the river meets the ocean. It was the principal settlement of the Pawtucket, or Mystic, tribe, whose territory encompassed the Charles and Mystic Rivers, their estuaries, and several harbor islands. Nevertheless, King Charles had chartered to “the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay in New England” the land from just above the Merrimac River, some thirty miles to the north, to just below the Charles River, “from sea to sea.” (No one suspected the next sea was three thousand miles away.) “Together, also, with all the firm lands,” the company owned the “soils, grounds, havens, ports, rivers, waters, fishing, mines, and minerals, as well as royal mines of gold and silver.” Delighted with these newfound holdings, the settlers, many of whom were now landed
gentry in a way they could never have imagined in England, built temporary wigwams of bent saplings and bark panels. Their “meeting-place,” Governor Winthrop noted, was “abroad under a tree.” They laid the stone foundation for several houses, including one for him. By the end of August, Charlestown was the site of the First Church of Christ in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, Charlestown offered little fresh spring water, which was a necessity, so the settlers considered other locales. Looking south, they saw a large swamp dotted with islands. One island was known as Shawmut, a corruption of the Algonquian word
nashauwamuk,
or “he goes by boat.” Winthrop called the island Trimountaine because of its three prominent hills, which would soon be known as Pemberton Hill, Mount Vernon, and Beacon Hill. (The last and tallest, at an elevation of two hundred feet, was soon to be the site of a warning beacon sixty-five feet high.) Exploring the marshy area around Shawmut by boat, the men discovered that it was not an island but a peninsula, connected to the mainland by a slender strip of land. Thinking this peninsula a more auspicious location because of the fine spring flowing from its hills, Winthrop sought and was granted permission from the peninsula’s sole English inhabitant, an eremitic clergyman named William Blackstone who lived on Beacon Hill, to move there.

On September 17 the company moved a half mile south to Shawmut, which they henceforth called Boston in honor of the Lincolnshire cathedral town. This name is said to have been chosen to entice the Puritan celebrity John Cotton, who preached at Lincolnshire’s Boston, to join them there. While scattered groups of settlers put down roots in surrounding regions to which they gave English place-names such as Watertown, Medford, Roxbury, Lynn, and Dorchester, it was the Shawmut Peninsula that would be the Massachusetts Bay Company’s home.

Within days, though, Dudley doubted this decision. He feared the peninsula was too exposed to attack from the sea by the French or, as was always possible, their own king. Thinking of making yet another move, he and Winthrop and their assistants rowed up the Charles River on September 30 in search of what Winthrop termed “a fit place for a fortified town.” The first high ground near the river channel was at a bend roughly two miles in, near today’s Larz Anderson Bridge. Landing on the northern bank, the men ascended a broad, flat hill. At a spot
that is now at the southwest corner of the intersection of Mount Auburn and John F. Kennedy Streets in Harvard Square, Thomas Dudley put his cane in the ground and declared, “This is the place.”

The company camped out on Shawmut that fall, living in wigwams made of reeds and bent branches, in caves, or in burrows covered with branches. During that first winter, two hundred settlers died as a result of illness, the cold (temperatures were generally twenty degrees lower than in England), and a lack of food. A desperate Governor Winthrop sent to England for supplies, but the next ship, the
Lyon,
did not arrive until February. Eighty settlers promptly boarded it and sailed back home.

Meanwhile, the company’s leaders negotiated among themselves an agreement to create a central town on the high ground along the river. This town, which they initially called Newtown, was at the founding of Harvard College renamed Cambridge in honor of the alma mater of many of these men. They laid out a gridiron plan of eight streets, creating the first town plan in the American English colonies. The streets—named Creek, Wood, Water, Crooked, Braintree, Spring, Long, and Marsh—radiated from a fenced common area for grazing cattle, which is now Cambridge Common. The settlers began building houses the following spring. In July 1631 eight families, including the Dudleys and the Bradstreets, moved into Newtown’s first eight houses.

Dudley expected Winthrop to follow, but the governor chose instead to stay in Boston, where he had a large timber-frame house built for himself and his wife, Margaret, who was still in England with their younger children. In twenty years of marriage, Margaret Winthrop had borne four sons. Winthrop’s older boys, John Jr. and Henry, had come the same year as their father. Twenty-two-year-old Henry, who had spent two years on Barbados acquiring “expensive habits and no fortune,” according to the historian Edmund Morgan, had drowned in Massachusetts that first summer. The rest of the family was scheduled to arrive at the end of 1631.

Winthrop’s decision to stay in Boston triggered a feud with Dudley that would last throughout their lives. As a result of this split, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts met alternately in Boston and Newtown during the 1630s, when it convened four times a year. Despite this rift, Winthrop chose in 1637 to wait to try Hutchinson
until the court met in Newtown because he enjoyed far more support there than in Boston. Winthrop’s support came largely from those who had been among the landed gentry or the aristocracy in England, who tended to be the first to arrive in Massachusetts, to be conservative, and to have fewer mercantile concerns than the newer émigrés.

By the time of Hutchinson’s trial, Cambridge—still called Newtown for one more week—consisted of a market square, a mud-and-thatch meetinghouse, and slightly more than a hundred houses of wood, with clay mortar and thatched roofs. The meetinghouse, built in 1633, was the town’s largest building, measuring roughly forty feet square. Cow fields and oyster beds lay outside the town center. There was not yet any college operating here or, for that matter, elsewhere on the continent.

An hour or so after daybreak, Anne and Will Hutchinson trod the icy roads back to the windowless meetinghouse, where the judges were gathering. As before, Anne waited in the back of the hall until the governor called her forward.

Governor Winthrop began by summarizing the previous day’s events. “There were diverse things laid to [Mistress Hutchinson’s] charge,” he said: “her ordinary meetings about religious exercises; her speeches in derogation of the ministers among us; and the weakening of the hands and hearts of the people towards them. Here was
sufficient proof made
of that which she was accused of, in that point concerning the ministers and their ministry, as that they did preach a covenant of works when others did preach a covenant of grace, and that they were not able ministers of the New Testament, and that they had not the seal of the spirit. And this was spoken not, as was
pretended,
out of private conference, but out of conscience. And warrant from Scripture alleged the fear of man is a snare, and seeing God had given her a calling to it, she would freely speak.”

Following this opening statement, he offered the defendant a chance to respond. Without hesitation, she took the legal advice of the night before and asked that the witnesses all be recalled and asked to swear an oath that their testimony was true. “The Lord hath said that an oath is the end of all controversy,” she explained.

If the ministers were lying, as she suspected, it would likely appear in the form of inconsistencies or contradictions between their
testimony yesterday and today. And if they were shown to be lying under oath, then they would be guilty not only of perjury but also of blasphemy—taking the Lord’s name in vain, a crime against God.

Assistant Bradstreet pointed this out to her. If the ministers “should mistake you in your speeches, you would make them to
sin
if you urge them to swear.”

“That is not the thing,” she said. “If they accuse me, I desire it may be upon oath.” She added that the ministers were not reliable because “they are witnesses of their own cause.”

“It is not their cause, but the cause of the
whole country,
” Winthrop observed ominously.

The ministers knew as well as anyone the risk they took in testifying again, under oath, and were not eager to do so. They could damn themselves if they obliged Hutchinson. This, they believed, was a trap. They could not remember perfectly what she or they had said at their meeting eleven months before. They took seriously the third commandment—“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain”—and considered an oath a solemn avowal of absolute truth.

Winthrop said supportively, “I see no necessity of an oath in this thing, seeing it is true.” The ministers are “men of long approved godliness and sincerity in their course.” Aiming for balance, he added, “Yet that all may be satisfied, if the elders will take an oath they shall have it given them.”

“After they have taken an oath,” Hutchinson insisted, “I will make good what I say.”

Winthrop said, “Let those who are not satisfied in the court speak.”

“We are not satisfied!” the crowd called out, delighted to have a chance to proclaim their support for Mistress Hutchinson and their distress over the court’s mistreatment of her.

Winthrop quietly considered his options. “Let us state the case, and then we may know what to do. That which is laid to Mistress Hutchinson’s charge is that she hath traduced the magistrates and ministers of this jurisdiction, that she hath said the ministers preached a covenant of works and Mr. Cotton a covenant of grace, and that they were not able ministers of the gospel. And she excuses it that she made it a private conference and with a promise of secrecy. Now, this is charged upon her, and they therefore sent for her seeing she made it her table talk,” or
casual conversation. “And then she said, ‘The fear of man was a snare,’ and therefore she would not be afraid of them.”