Authors: Eve LaPlante
In the early 1620s, as a natural extension of her nursing and her efforts to educate her children in Scripture and theology, she began running meetings similar to those she would run in Massachusetts. She gained wide respect among local women for her thoughtful analysis of Ecclesiastes, the letters of the apostle Paul, and the book of Revelation, as well as of recent sermons. She brought to these conventicles some of the exegetical skills her father had used while composing sermons. While a woman could never climb to a pulpit and preach, she could teach the Bible at home, to her children or an audience of her female neighbors. Will was happy to go along with these meetings. While Anne found her greatest solace in the company of Christ Jesus, Will was most comfortable with her.
Throughout their marriage, Will and Anne had children at a remarkable rate. Roughly every eighteen months for the twenty-two years following her wedding, Anne gave birth. In a time when one in two infants did not survive his or her first year, the Hutchinsons had fifteen sons and daughters who lived well past infancy. In the same parish record book that contains her birth—“1591, July, Anna filia Francesci Meurberi bapt. 20th day,” on a page notably faded by multiple examinations over four centuries—are the records of the births of her first fourteen children:
Edward, “filius Gulielmi Hutchinson,” baptized June 28, 1613
“Susanna, filia Gulielmi Hutchinson”—Susan—baptized September 4, 1614
Son Richard on January 8, 1616
Daughter Faith on August 14, 1617
Bridget on January 15, 1619
Francis on December 24, 1620
Elizabeth on February 17, 1622
William on June 22, 1623
Samuel on December 17, 1624
Anne on May 5, 1626
Mary on February 22, 1628
Katherine on February 7, 1630
William on September 28, 1631
1
Susan on November 15, 1633
2
Anne’s fertility did not go unnoticed by her peers, who saw it as a sign of good health and hygiene and also of a sexually fulfilling marital relationship. In seventeenth-century England, it was a truth universally acknowledged that conception cannot occur if the woman does not “delight in the acting thereof.” In England and most of Europe at the time, a “properly consummated sexual relationship was deemed crucial to successful matrimony, and the birth of children confirmed the existence of such a relationship,” according to the historian Mary Beth Norton. Conversely, “the absence of children called into question the character of a marriage and, in particular, the husband’s ability to satisfy his wife sexually.”
The couple’s days were taken up with chores. For Anne, there was always a baby on the way, a baby just born, or a toddler still nursing. Instead of diapers, she wrapped a cloth around a baby’s waist or, in warm weather, left it naked until it learned to sit on a chamber pot. Will grew food for the family and livestock, and Anne took charge of feeding and clothing the family. As her mother had done, she assigned chores to her children over the age of three or four. The cows had to be milked and the butter churned. The exterior of the house needed to be whitewashed yearly and the reeds in the roof occasionally tightened or replaced. The fields needed to be planted and tended and the crops harvested. The sheep had to be fed, moved (to shine up their coats), shorn, and eventually slaughtered.
On free afternoons Anne and Will took the children on long walks to neighboring villages, churches, or up into the Wolds. On gray days the clouds often parted to reveal a blue and gold sky like those that Dutch painters were capturing in oils. A favorite destination of the Hutchinsons was Rigsby Wood, two miles above Alford to the west. In May, when the bluebells bloomed, the wood provided a carpet of purple for the family’s picnics. The village of Rigsby—now a tiny Norman church in a churchyard of battered gravestones and, in spring, daffodils and rabbits—was in 1086 the site of the first church in this region. From this hillside on the edge of the Wolds one can see Alford amid the flat farmland that extends to the North Sea. Beside this churchyard a sign, “Public footpath to Alford,” marks the Hutchinsons’ route. Beyond such local trips, the Hutchinsons did not travel, except to Saint Botolph’s to hear John Cotton preach.
During the 1620s they also grew close to the Reverend John Wheelwright, who served at the village of Bilsby, one mile northeast of Alford. Wheelwright married Mary Hutchinson, William’s youngest sister, in 1629, when he was thirty-seven and she was twenty-three. The two couples shared not only kinship but also the religious conviction that humans depend only on God’s free grace, not on their own works. Wheelwright, known for his godly, “modest” sermons, was Anne’s favorite preacher after Cotton, who was far less accessible at twenty-four miles away. Even in winter weather the Hutchinsons could travel the mile up the Bilsby road to the medieval church in which their brother-in-law preached.
Wheelwright, the only son of a farmer and his wife in Cumberworth, several miles east of Alford, had likely attended the Reverend Marbury’s grammar school around the turn of the seventeenth century. At age nineteen Wheelwright went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he became a close friend and wrestling buddy of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan who led England after its civil war. Before being presented to Bilsby in April 1623, Wheelwright received his master’s degree, served as a deacon in Peterborough, and took Holy Orders. He had four children with his first wife, Mary Storre, a minister’s daughter, who died in May 1629. The first child of his second marriage, a girl he baptized Katherine on November 4, 1630, would grow up to become Katherine Nanny Naylor, of Boston, Massachusetts, whose backyard privy—a stone-lined chamber dug into the ground for use as an outhouse and for trash disposal—was in the late twentieth century excavated by archeologists as part of Boston’s Big Dig, the modernization of its downtown highways.
The contents of this privy, on display at the Massachusetts Commonwealth Museum, or the “Big Dig Museum,” in Dorchester, provide detailed information about the lifestyle of early Boston settlers such as the Hutchinsons and Wheelwrights. Finds include imported ceramic tableware, good English pottery, keys made of iron, belt buckles, a candle sconce, early-seventeenth-century fireplace tiles decorated in a Chinese style, pewter spoons and knife blades (forks were not used for eating until 1690), leather shoes, a sewing kit, and a tiny brass bucket used as a pincushion. The privy contained more than a quarter of a mil
lion pits and seeds (mostly from cherries, some of them preserved, and including thirty-two varieties of plums), the skull of a pig and other animal bones, the wings of granary weevils (flour-eating bugs), coriander and other herbs, pollen from corn and wheat, and parasite eggs. The people who used this privy ate pulpy stews and pottages, fruit pies in abundance, fresh eggs, salted or pickled fish, and freshly killed game (duck, pigeon, chicken, squirrel, hare, venison, beef, and mutton), and they sometimes—based on the evidence of the parasite eggs—suffered from gastrointestinal distress.
Katherine Wheelwright Nanny Naylor’s birth in Bilsby, England, in November 1630, happened during the darkest days that neighboring Alford had known. The town was quarantined; one-fourth of its inhabitants were dead or dying of the bubonic plague. This bacterial infection (by the organism
Yersinia pestis
), spread by way of flea-infested rats, was also known as the Black Death because of the dark hemorrhages it caused under the skin. It killed nearly one in three Europeans between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries—more than thirty million people.
The plague had arrived in Alford in June 1630, when the Hutchinsons felt blessed to have eleven healthy children, from seventeen-year-old Edward down to their own little Katherine, age four months. In July, to prevent the disease from spreading outside Alford, the market was canceled and the town isolated. This was standard procedure during epidemics. In London, for instance, the Black Death shut down every theater and stopped all construction for three miles outside the city walls.
Treatments for the plague—all ineffectual until the advent of antibiotic drugs—included refraining from bathing (on the theory that this shrinks pores, rendering one less susceptible); breathing pleasant odors (posies or incense of juniper, laurel, pine, beech, lemon leaves, and rosemary), and loud noises. So the people of Alford bathed less often than their usual few times a year. (Even the most privileged Queen Elizabeth said that her habit was to take a bath once a month whether she needed it or not.) And the ringers of Saint Wilfrid’s spent hours every day in the bell tower pulling the cords of its bells, which were usually rung only before church services, drowning the townspeople in sound.
Anne Hutchinson threw herself into the care of the sick. No family in town could avoid exposure, and several of her children contracted the plague. Those who remained healthy shared in the regular two-mile pilgrimage up to Miles Cross Hill to collect the bread and other food that inhabitants of neighboring villages left for them at the plague stone. The base of a medieval high cross, the stone is about two feet square, with rounded edges and a shallow indentation on top, into which the people of Alford poured vinegar, their only disinfectant. In exchange for goods they received there, the people left money at the stone, which was taken away by their neighbors when they next came. This way, the affected and unaffected towns could assist each other while avoiding physical contact. The plague stone, which was later moved into the village of Alford, remains there today, in the garden of Tothby House, as a sort of monument.
The Alford parish register starkly outlines the disease’s effect. During the 1620s, before the scourge struck, the average annual number of deaths in Alford was 19. In 1630 there were 131 burials, and 19 more deaths occurred in just the first two months of 1631. In a period of eight months, the plague had killed nearly one in four of Alford’s 600 inhabitants. Thirty-five years later, the Great Plague of London wiped out a somewhat lower proportion of the population—69,000 of the city’s 460,000.
The first victim of Alford’s “Incipit pestis,” as Vicar Scortreth defined the cause of death, was Mary Brown, buried on July 22, 1630. A family named Brader suffered six deaths in twelve midsummer days: two daughters on July 24, the father the next day, and then three sons, on July 29, August 3, and August 4. The disease reached its height in mid-August. On the twentieth of the month, the vicar presided over five funerals at Saint Wilfrid’s Church. Two weeks later he had to bury his own daughter Rebecca. Twenty-five other Alfordians died in September, and nine more the next month.
The Hutchinsons lost two daughters, sixteen-year-old Susan on September 8, and Elizabeth, who was eight, on October 4. Like the rest of the victims, the Hutchinson girls were cremated and their remains buried in the churchyard without headstones. The outbreak finally ended in February and the quarantine was lifted in March.
Following this great loss, according to a local history, “For twelve months Anne withdrew from her neighbors seeking solace from her religious beliefs.” The following autumn she gave birth to a boy whom they baptized William on September 28, 1631. The birth of this second William is evidence that the family had also lost a son, the William born in 1623. There is no record in Alford of this child’s death, which occurred between the ages of three and six. (Six weeks before Anne delivered the second William, a first cousin of hers in Aldwinkle, Northampton, had a son, John Dryden, who would become the poet laureate of England.)
During Anne’s period of isolation, William’s father, Edward Hutchinson, died, on Saint Valentine’s Day 1632, and was survived by his wife, Susan. On June 7 of the same year, in Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, Anne’s youngest sister, twenty-two-year-old Katherine, who had been an infant at their father’s death, married a shoemaker named Richard Scott.
At this point Anne and Will may have thought that their sadness was over. But in 1632 John Wheelwright was silenced and deprived of his living in Bilsby for what the church termed “the irregularity of simony.” Given that Wheelwright is unlikely to have bought or sold church offices or preferments—the usual definition of simony—a local historian theorized that “he had made himself so unpopular with the authorities that they were glad to get rid of him on any pretext.” Wheelwright went into hiding. He likely served Puritans privately as a “bootleg” preacher, but his whereabouts were unknown until early 1636, when he sailed to Massachusetts with his wife, children, and mother-in-law, Susan Hutchinson, and moved temporarily into Anne and Will’s Boston house.
Cotton, who had ceased to preach when he contracted malaria in 1631, also went underground in the spring of 1632 when he learned that Laud was summoning him to London. Cotton decided late that year to emigrate, although he did not resign at Saint Botolph’s until the following May. During that winter or spring he may have invited the Hutchinsons to join his pilgrimage. Whether or not he did, they were in no position to move. They had recently lost three children, and Anne was pregnant with their fourteenth child, due in November 1633. Their
oldest son, Edward, just twenty, and Will’s youngest brother, twenty-six-year-old Edward, and his wife, Sarah, did sail to America on the same ship as the Cottons, but it is not clear if they knew of Cotton’s plans until they encountered him on board. Unlike Anne’s mother and most of her siblings, who remained in England, many of Will’s siblings and even his widowed mother emigrated.
During the “much troubled” period after Cotton’s departure, Anne Hutchinson recalled later, “The Lord did discover to me all sorts of ministers, and how they taught,” and “thenceforth I was the more careful whom I heard” preach. “For after our teacher Mr. Cotton and my brother Wheelwright were put down,” she would tell the Massachusetts court, “there was none in England that I durst hear.” To a woman like Anne, the lack of a spiritual teacher was a great hole.