Authors: Eve LaPlante
Her fundamentally Calvinist doctrine—that in a sinful world Christ redeems people without their merit and then in some way joins with them—challenged colonial society at its very foundation. According to the literary scholar Amy Schrager Lang, Hutchinson and her followers “rejected the colonists’ view of themselves as a chosen people, bound by covenant to fulfill God’s work in the New World, and offered in its place the notion of a mystical community of the elect. The system of reward and punishment adduced from the Law and embodied in temporal authority” was, for Hutchinson, irrelevant. She was “free of the sometimes productive, sometimes disabling anxiety characteristic of the Puritan saint. Election is, for him, a condition of self-abnegation, his individuality no longer individual, his labors at an end, his destiny secure.” To such a Puritan saint, Hutchinson seemed “to indulge the furthest extremes of self-assertion.” Her claims to “invisible witness, absolute assurance, and exemption from the Law could only seem like
sheer arrogance. Abandoning the social for the teleological, then, the Antinomian elevates the self to a new status precisely by insisting on the dissolution of the self in Christ.” By losing herself in Christ, she became far more powerful than Winthrop, Cotton, and Wilson could abide.
In the meetinghouse of Boston, the hour grew late. “Sister Hutchinson,” the Reverend Wilson cried, “I require you, in the name of the church, to present yourself here again the next lecture day, this day seven-night, to give your answer to such other things as this church or the elders of other churches have to charge you withal concerning your opinions, whether you hold them or no, or will revoke them.”
The prisoner indicated her assent. “The court had ordered that she should return to Roxbury again,” Winthrop observed, “but upon intimation that her spirit began to fall, she was permitted to remain at Mr. Cotton’s house (where Davenport was also kept)” for the following week. Now that her removal from the country was so near, there was no need to return her to Roxbury, but she could not be allowed the freedom to stay at home.
At twilight Anne walked the short, familiar route from the meetinghouse to the house at the foot of Pemberton Hill where John and Sarah Cotton lived with their four children: four-month-old Elizabeth, two-year-old Sarah, four-year-old Seaborn, and Sarah Cotton’s first daughter. Located at modern-day Pemberton Square, facing Government Center, the house overlooked the harbor from a higher vantage point than Hutchinson’s, through the diamond-shaped windowpanes that distinguished it from every other house on Shawmut except the matching house that Vane had built next door.
It was Cotton who, intimating Anne’s falling spirits, had requested her week’s incarceration here. He felt that he and Davenport had much work to do on her soul. He was troubled by her doctrinal questions, her persistence in the face of his reproach, and his own credibility in the eyes of his brother divines. His judgment was sorely compromised in Massachusetts because of his connection with Hutchinson. Looking back on more than twenty years of friendship with her, he recalled that “she did much good in our town,” and “found loving and dear respect both from our church elders and brethren.” But he believed that she had duped him twice. First, she lied in telling him and many others that
her beliefs and his were the same. While at one time true, he felt, this was now false. Her second deceit was that she at some point changed her theological views. “This change of hers,” he explained in defending himself, “was long hid from me.”
In part to cleanse himself of her stain, he hoped still to convince her to recant her views, to repent, to renounce her powers of prophecy, to try persuasively to undo everything she’d done, to show submissiveness, and to beg his and the country’s forgiveness. Her banishment now seemed inevitable, but at least she might be shown the error of her ways.
On the morning of Thursday, March 22, 1638, Anne Hutchinson did not arrive late to the lecture-day service, as she had the week before. She filed into the meetinghouse of Boston alongside most of the women of the congregation, who were followed by the men of this church and many other churches of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Unlike most lecture days, elders and men from other towns had traveled to Boston to attend the conclusion of the trial of Anne Hutchinson by her church. It was essential, in the opinion of the leaders, that “the face of the country” be present at such an important event.
The Reverend John Cotton began the second day of the trial with a brief Scripture reading. Then he nodded to Thomas Leverett, his old friend from Lincolnshire, who rose from his bench.
“Sister Hutchinson,” Leverett said, “an admonition was passed against you, and you are now to make answer to other things laid to your charge. But first, I would have the members of our own church draw near to express their consent or dissent to the things in hand which doth most concern them.” Again there was a shuffling as the Boston congregation clustered together so their raised hands could be seen more easily.
Leverett again read the errors laid to Hutchinson’s charge, most of which she had now rejected, either on the previous lecture day or in discussions with Cotton during the week. In the presence of her congregation and all the ministers, Hutchinson confessed her errors. She listed them one by one, conceding, “I do acknowledge I was deeply deceived; the opinion was very dangerous…. I acknowledge my mistake…. I
acknowledge—and I do thank God—that I better see that Christ is united to our fleshly bodies…. I acknowledge that there is grace created in Christ Jesus as Isaiah 11:2, 2 Peter 4:24, Colossians 3:10…. I do see good warrant that Christ’s mansion is in heaven as well as his body. I have considered some Scriptures that satisfy me that the image of Adam is righteousness and holiness…. I acknowledge that to be a hateful error which openeth a gap to all licentiousness. And I believe if we do anything contrary to the law it is a grievous sin.” Under Cotton’s coaching, she was bowing to the law and to the orthodox authorities. She handed over a paper to this effect, which she had written with Cotton, and signed.
Noting that there were still more errors, Leverett said, “Have you any answer to the rest?”
As Cotton had instructed her, she apologized for her November prophecy of the colony’s doom. “For the Scriptures that I used at the court in censuring the country,” she said, “I confess I did it rashly and out of heat of spirit and unadvisedly, and have cause to be sorry for my unreverent carriage to them, and I am heartily sorry that anything I have said has drawn any from hearing any of the elders of the Bay.”
But to a few errors, she could only say truthfully, “I never held any such thing.”
The Reverend Wilson said, “There is one thing that will be necessary for you to answer to. You denied you held none of those things but since your durance whereas he”—Shepard—“alleged to you that you expressed the contrary.”
“As my sin hath been open,” she said, “so I think it needful to acknowledge how I came first to fall into these errors. Instead of looking upon myself, I looked at men.” This is both a pointed reference to Cotton’s flaws—a nod to how he disappointed one who had trusted him—and also an indication of Hutchinson’s great confidence in herself. She had a pioneering sense of her self and her destiny, which is extraordinary in a woman of the seventeenth century, to whom so little authority was allowed. Hutchinson’s desire to look within for guidance is characteristic of the distinctively American faith in the power of the individual conscience. In this confidence in the power of her own views, she presaged not only the early Quakers but also the nineteenth-
century Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the “oppositional quality” in such classic literature of the American Renaissance as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“I spake rashly and unadvisedly” at court, Hutchinson continued. “I do not allow the slighting of ministers nor of the Scriptures nor anything that is set up by God. If Mr. Shepard doth conceive that I had any of these things in my mind, then he is deceived. It was never in my heart to slight any man, but only that man should be kept in his own place and not set in the room of God.” Instead of seeing the ministers as closer to God than herself, she saw all people as at an equal distance from God. This view was not shared by the magistrates and ministers, who saw themselves as her authorities, as in the fifth commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.”
Thomas Leverett said, “The assembly [of ministers] may know what you have delivered” in the paper she turned in, but “somebody should express what you say to the congregation which heard not.”
Cotton presumed to speak on Hutchinson’s behalf to the congregation: “The sum of what she said [in writing] is this: that she did not fall into these gross and fundamental errors till she came to Roxbury. And she doth utterly disallow herself and condemn herself for her miscarriage and disrespect that she showed to the magistrates when she was before them. And she confesses the root of all was the height and pride of her spirit,” words that he had urged her to add. “So, for her slighting the ministers, she is heartily sorry. She is sorry, and desires all that she hath offended to pray to God for her to give her a heart to be more truly humbled.”
Speaking aloud Cotton’s thoughts, Thomas Shepard questioned the earnestness of her repentance. “I confess I am
wholly
unsatisfied in her expressions to some of these gross and damnable errors. I fear it doth not stand with true repentance. Any heretic may bring a sly interpretation upon any of these errors and yet hold them to their death. Therefore, I am unsatisfied, [though] I should be glad to see
any
repentance in her. That might give me satisfaction.”
In the same spirit, John Eliot said, “Mistress Hutchinson did affirm to me, as she did to Mr. Shepard, that if we had come to her
before
her restraint or imprisonment, she could and would have told me many
things, but now we had shut and debarred ourselves from that help by proceeding against her…. We are not satisfied.”
“Two things [need] to be cleared,” Cotton ordered her. “What you do now hold, and what you did hold.”
“My judgment is not altered though my expression alters,” she replied.
“This you say is most dangerous!” the Reverend Wilson cried. “For if your judgment all this while be not altered, but only your expressions—when your expressions are so contrary to the truth!”
“I should be glad to see
any
humiliation in Mistress Hutchinson,” the Reverend Symmes said. “I fear these are no new things but she hath anciently held them, and had need to be humbled for her former doctrines and for her abuse of diverse Scriptures.”
The Reverend Peter added, in a voice amazed, “We did think she would have humbled herself, for her opinions are dangerous and fundamental and such as takes down the Articles of Religion”—the thirty-nine statements of doctrine of the Church of England—“as denying the resurrection and faith and all sanctification.”
Thomas Dudley, the deputy governor, who had listened without comment until now—perhaps because as neither a clergyman nor a member of this church he had no role in this proceeding—decided to insert his canny logic, whether or not it was called for. “Mistress Hutchinson’s repentance is only for opinions held
since
her imprisonment, but [she is saying that] before her imprisonment she was in a good condition and held no error, but did a great deal of good to many. Now, I know no harm that Mistress Hutchinson hath done
since
her confinement. Therefore I think her repentance will be worse than her errors, for if by this means she shall get a party [of supporters] to herself—and what can any heretic in the world desire more? And for her form of recantation, her repentance is in a paper, whether it was drawn up by herself or whether she had any help in it, I know not and will not now inquire to. But sure her repentance is not in her countenance. None can see it there, I think.”
The Reverend Peter added to the chorus of Hutchinson’s defamers, recalling “once speaking with her about the Woman of Ely,” a woman in England who was said to preach weekly to men and women and possibly also to baptize. This woman’s ministry was in the cathedral town of
Ely, near Cambridge, about sixty miles south of Alford. At the time Ely was home to many Familists, merchants like Will and strong-minded women like Anne who sought more autonomy and power than English village life allowed. According to the Reverend Peter, Hutchinson “did exceedingly magnify her [the Woman of Ely] to be a ‘woman of a thousand, hardly any like to her.’ And yet we know that the Woman of Ely is a dangerous woman, and holds forth grievous things and fearful errors.”
Hutchinson defended herself, “I said of the Woman of Ely but what I heard, for I knew her not nor never saw her.”
The Reverend Wilson, whose resentment was fueled by his memories of being so often humiliated by Hutchinson, addressed her directly. “You
say
that the cause or root of these your errors was your slighting and disrespect of the magistrates and your unreverent carriage to them…but that is not all, for I fear and believe there was another and a greater cause, and that is the slighting of God’s faithful ministers and condemning and crying down them as ‘Nobodies.’” Flushing at the recollection of that term applied to him, he went on, “Yet I think it was to set up
yourself
in the room of God above others, that you might be extolled and admired and followed after, that you might be a great
prophetess,
and undertake to expound Scriptures and to interpret other men’s sayings and sermons after your mind. And therefore, I believe, your iniquity hath found you out! And whereas before, if any dealt with you about anything, you called for witnesses and for your accusers,…[but] now God hath left you to yourself, and you have here confessed that which before you have called for witnesses to prove. Therefore, it grieves me that you should so mince your dangerous soul and damnable heresies, whereby you have so wickedly departed from God and done so much hurt!”
Before Anne Hutchinson could reply, the Reverend Shepard said, “It is needless for any other now to speak, and useless, for the case is plain.”
In desperation, she clung to her one link to orthodoxy. “Our teacher knows my judgment, for I never kept my judgment from him.” Cotton remained silent, according to the transcript, but his writings suggest that he did not agree. In his view, while her statement may have been true at one time, it was no longer. He felt she had changed
her doctrine and that he had not noticed it until later, when pressed by others to suspect her.
“In the ship,” the Reverend Symmes again reminded the assembled, “she was often offended at the expression of ‘growing in grace’ and ‘laying up a stock of grace’ and that ‘all grace is in Christ Jesus’”—suggesting that her “change” had occurred at least as long ago as 1634, before her ship landed in Boston.
“I know she hath said it and affirmed it dogmatically,” Wilson stated, “that the grace of God is
not
in us, and we have
no
grace in us but only the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and if there be
any
acting in us it is Christ only that acts. 53 Isaiah. Galatians 2.”
“Mistress Hutchinson may remember that in her speaking with me,” added the Reverend Richard Mather, of Dorchester, who had visited her in Roxbury, “that she denied all grace to be in us, [saying] that there was neither faith, nor knowledge, nor gifts and grace, no, nor life itself, but all is in Christ Jesus. And she brought some Scriptures to prove her opinions. I wonder that Mistress Hutchinson doth so far forget herself as to deny that she did not formerly hold this opinion of denying gifts and grace to be in us.” The Reverend Mather was presently writing the
Bay Psalm Book,
which in 1640 would become the first book published in North America.
The Reverend Peter looked at her, his face set in anger. “I fear you are not well principled and grounded in your Catechism. I would commend
this
to your consideration—that you have stepped out of your place” as a woman. “You have rather been a husband than a wife; and a preacher than a hearer; and a magistrate than a subject. And so you have thought to carry [in yourself ] all things in church and commonwealth, as you would, and [you] have
not
been humbled for this.”
The Reverend Shepard added, “This day she hath showed herself to be a notorious imposter. She
never
had any true grace in her heart.” This remark contradicted the Calvinist doctrine of the perseverance of the saints—that if a soul is elect, its election is eternal—and the notion, generally accepted then, that no one can detect for sure the status of another’s soul. It is also akin to one of the errors that Anne Hutchinson was accused of holding—the presumption that she could tell who was or was not saved. The magistrates and ministers charged her with, in the words of David Hall, “brushing aside any doubts about [her] ca
pacity for spiritual discernment” and urging “New England congregations to draw the strictest possible line between the sacred and the profane.” This, ironically, is what the men were doing when they cast her out for her beliefs.
The Reverend Shepard continued, “It is a trick of as notorious subtlety as ever was held in the church to say there is no grace in the saints, and now to say” there is, “and that she all this while has not altered her judgment but only her expressions. I would have the congregation judge whether
ever
there was any grace in her heart or no, whether ever she was in a good estate, because the ground of her opinions hath been built upon feigned and fantastical revelations as she held forth two in the court—one for the certain destruction of old England”—her shipboard prophecy, recounted by Symmes—“and another for the ruin of this country and the people thereof for their proceeding against her,” which she had related in the Cambridge courtroom.