Authors: Eve LaPlante
Hutchinson’s collective doctrines are now termed Antinomianism, a label Winthrop first attached to her that her nineteenth-century critics adopted and that historians today use without a sense of condemnation. Literally “against or opposed to law,” Antinomianism means in theology that “the moral law is not binding upon Christians, who are under the law of grace,” in the words of David Hall. Had Anne heard this term applied to her, she would have rejected it because of its association with licentious behavior and religious heterodoxy, both of which she opposed.
At the time of her trial, her brother-in-law Wheelwright was banished for promulgating this doctrine, and most of its other prominent adherents were disfranchised and censured, and still Anne Hutchinson was not the only influential settler proclaiming its truth. John Cotton, a minister at the colony’s largest and most influential church, often reminded his congregation that good behavior alone is but a work that any hypocrite can perform. He warned against undue confidence in works, stating that a “true saint”—every Puritan’s personal goal—was overcome with a sense of his own helplessness. Rather than counting on duties for assurance, Cotton lectured, the sinner must look to God. The person who waited for Christ, whose heart was “emptied of every thing besides,” could be judged elect and hence eligible to join the church. No sanctification, Cotton emphasized, can help “evidence to us” our justification. This was in clear conflict with the orthodox view of salvation, and it is where Anne Hutchinson found much of her support.
Fifty-two-year-old John Cotton was seated in the courtroom, listening silently, as Thomas Dudley rebuked the defendant with whom the minister had a long and close connection. Cotton had spent years nourishing Anne’s spiritual development in Lincolnshire, he had invited her to follow him to New England, and he had supported—perhaps passively—her insurrection against his brethren. At repeated
meetings with Winthrop and other ministers, Cotton had vouched for Hutchinson’s character and beliefs. In his view, “Mistress Hutchinson was well beloved, and all the faithful embraced her conference, and blessed God for her fruitful discourses,” both at her meetings and in her work as a midwife and nurse. The previous August, at the Religious Synod intended to address the conflict over salvation, he had carefully chosen his words. “The Spirit doth evidence our justification in
both
ways,” he said, conceding the validity of the other side without compromising his own. A pious and magnetic man who seemed to enjoy the admiration of all, Cotton was skilled at balancing opposing views. He had avoided any notice by the court. While someone else in his position might have been in a quandary, John Cotton enjoyed a preternatural calm.
In the courtroom Thomas Dudley, who towered over his fellow magistrates, lumbered toward his conclusion. “And therefore,” he cried, “being driven to the foundation [of our troubles], and it being found that Mistress Hutchinson is she that hath
depraved
all the ministers and hath been the cause of what is fallen out, why we must
take away the foundation
and the building will fall.”
Summoning her intellectual and physical resources, the wan defendant rose again to defend herself.
“I pray, sir, prove it,” Hutchinson said. If the magistrates could prove she had slandered the ministers of the colony, they could justify banishing her. The charge would be fomenting sedition—threatening the state’s stability, or breaching the peace—the same crime they had pinned on Wheelwright. To avoid the charge of sedition, Anne had decided to try a new approach. Rather than arguing with the magistrates over biblical interpretation, as she had done before, she would contest their charges. She would deny the allegations, as her father had done in his heresy trial, and if that were not possible because the charges were true, she would challenge her judges to provide evidence.
She also employed linguistic subterfuge. “Prove it that I said they preached nothing but a covenant of works,” she told Dudley, adding the
nothing
to make the charge more comprehensive, thus easier to deny.
Dudley caught this, showing more wile than the governor had. “
Nothing
but a covenant of works!” he retorted. Of course she had said
other things, including some with which he might agree. “Why a
Jesuit
may preach truth sometimes!”
“Did I ever say they preached a covenant of works, then?” she relented.
“If they do not preach a covenant of grace clearly, then they preach a covenant of works,” Dudley replied, quoting what he had been told she said.
“No, sir,” she corrected him. “One may preach a covenant of grace
more clearly
than another, so I said.”
“When they do preach a covenant of works, do they preach truth?” he persisted, trying to corner her into admitting she had traduced, or maligned, the ministers.
“Yes, sir,” she said, evading his trap. “But when they preach a covenant of works
for salvation,
that is not truth.” Works have value, she suggested, but they alone cannot bring salvation. Only God can do that.
Frustrated, Dudley continued, “I do but ask you this: when the ministers do preach a covenant of works, do they preach a
way
of salvation?”
Unable to agree, she refused to answer: “I did not come hither to answer questions of that sort.”
“Because you will deny the thing,” he persisted.
“But that is to be
proved
first,” she said, fending off Dudley as well as she had Winthrop.
“I will make it plain that you
did
say that the ministers did preach a covenant of works—”
“I deny that.”
“—and that you said they were not able ministers of the New Testament, but Mr. Cotton only.”
“If ever I spake that, I
proved
it by God’s word,” she retorted, implying that the court proved nothing.
Taking her remark as an admission of guilt, a chorus of judges murmured, “Very well, very well.”
She raised her head and declared, “If one shall come unto me in
private,
and desire me seriously to tell them what I thought of such a one, I must either speak false or true in my answer.”
Colonial society distinguished between private and public acts and
considered only the latter actionable in court. Choosing her words carefully, Hutchinson hoped to avoid prosecution by showing that her statements were outside the public domain. Most, if not all, of her comments about ministers had been made in private conversation or in meetings with officials that she considered private. Had ministers been able to use private statements made by members of their flock against them in court, people could never speak in confidence with their ministers, something every Puritan expected to do.
Her gender could also work as a shield. If her activities were not public, none of them could be punished publicly. In addition to protecting her, her gender suggested certain courtroom tactics. If her sarcasm did not work, she affected modesty to try to convince the men. When the court charged her with prophesying, she said, “The women of Berea are commended for examining Paul’s doctrine; we [women at meetings] do not [do more than] read the notes of our teacher’s sermons, and then reason of them by searching the Scriptures.” If a woman has no public power, she suggested, then she cannot be condemned for private opinions and acts. It was a good argument. No one knew if it would succeed.
Ignoring her distinction between her private acts and public, actionable, acts, Dudley continued hotly in the same vein. “Likewise, I will prove this, that you said the gospel in the letter and words holds forth
nothing
but a covenant of works”—implying that she had done the unimaginable act of denying the Holy Bible itself—“and that
all
that do not hold as you do are in a covenant of works.”
“I deny this, for if I should so say, I should speak against my own judgment,” she replied, sounding like her father. Her actual statement, misconstrued in the retelling, had been that the
spirit
of the gospel, rather than the letter and words therein, holds forth the covenant of grace. For her, the spirit was more important than the letter of the Bible, just as the heart was more important than the external appearance.
Like her teacher Cotton, Anne Hutchinson believed herself to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit. For both of them, as for many Puritans, conversion was not intellectual but deeply emotional. Humans are utterly unable to effect their own salvation, Cotton preached. To argue otherwise, he felt, was to open the way for a Roman Catholic covenant of works, that is, to see human beings as actors who can affect God’s
disposition toward them. For Cotton, salvation is a completely inner experience, dependent not on anything you or even your minister does but solely on your relationship with the Holy Spirit. It does not depend on law in any way, even the Law of the New Testament. As Cotton stated, “Even the New Testament is dead to one who has not the Spirit.” He added, in
A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace,
“If there were no revelation but the word, there would be no spiritual grace revealed to the soul…. There is need of greater light than the word of itself is able to give; for it is not all the promises in Scripture that have…wrought any gracious changes in any soul. Without the work of the Spirit, there is no faith….” In an early sermon, in England, he had said that Christians “must never rest in any Scripture they read, or ministers they hear, before they have examined things by the testimony of the Spirit,” that is, in their own hearts. Anne Hutchinson took him at his word.
If we trace the lineage of this doctrine even further, we find Cotton’s mentor at Cambridge, the great Puritan divine William Perkins, preaching that humanity can do nothing to bring about its own conversion and salvation. All is in God’s hands. While “the doctrine of the Papists now is that the [human] will, so it be stirred up by God, can do it”—achieve salvation—“the certain truth is that the will cannot.” Humanity can claim only a “new and fleshy heart,” which is the “gift of God.” Without God’s intervention, we can do “nothing but sin.” These were the words of the Cambridge preacher who, according to Anne’s teacher John Cotton, “laid siege to and beleaguered [my] heart.”
In the courtroom, Hutchinson found support for her argument in 2 Corinthians 3:6: “Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”
Dudley and Winthrop were getting nowhere with her, they both knew. Between her clever parries and her just claim that as a woman she had no public role and thus no boundaries to exceed, they could make no charge stick. Yet the fact remained, she did not act as a woman must. What was not obvious was how to charge and punish her.
Governor Winthrop determined that, in order to bolster the case that she traduced, or maligned, the ministers, the ministers themselves should testify. If they could catch her in a major theological error, then there would be reason to humiliate her publicly. At Winthrop’s request,
the ministers looked around the hall, each hoping another would speak first. None wanted to testify. They did not recall well the details of their meeting with her eleven months before. And, as all were aware, if as a group they gave divergent testimony, that would serve her.
Breaking the silence, the Reverend Hugh Peter, of Salem, said, “Our brethren are very unwilling to answer, unless the court command us to speak.” A short, stocky man with beady eyes and a flushed face, Peter was said to be “demagogic,” “bullying,” and “peculiarly forcible in language and speech.” Born in Cornwall in 1599, he had graduated from Cambridge and preached in London, where Archbishop Laud had briefly imprisoned him for nonconformity. The Reverend Peter’s hatred of the formalism of the English church had driven him to Rotterdam and then, in 1635, from Plymouth, England, to Massachusetts, on the same ship as Sir Henry Vane.
In response to the Reverend Peter, whom the governor considered “a man of a very public spirit and singular activity,” Winthrop commanded the ministers to speak. “This speech [between Hutchinson and you] was not spoken in a corner but in a public assembly, and though
things were spoken in private,
we are to deal with them in public.”
Six ministers who had been at the December 1636 meeting acquiesced. Hugh Peter, Thomas Shepard (of Cambridge), Thomas Weld and John Eliot (both of Roxbury), George Phillips (Watertown), and Zechariah Symmes (Charlestown) all testified that she had indeed spoken critically of them. “Briefly,” the Reverend Peter said crossly, “she told me there was a wide and a broad difference between our brother Mr. Cotton and ourselves. I desired to know the difference. She answered that he preaches the covenant of grace and you the covenant of works, and that you are not able ministers of the New Testament, and know no more than the apostles did before the resurrection of Christ.[I] then put it to her, ‘What do you conceive of such a brother [who preaches the covenant of works]?’ She answered he had not the seal of the spirit,” meaning he was not saved.
Hutchinson replied, “If our pastor would show his writings” about the December meeting, “you should see what I said, and that many things are not so as is reported.”
The Reverend John Wilson, the senior pastor of the Boston church, had taken notes of the December meeting between him, his supportive
brethren Weld and Peter, Hutchinson, and the Reverends Cotton and Wheelwright. “Sister Hutchinson,” Wilson said, “for the writings you speak of, I have them not. And, I must say, I did not write down
all
that was said. Yet I say that what is written [here in previous testimony] I will avouch.” Governor Winthrop asked Hutchinson for her copy of Wilson’s notes, which she had left at home. Neither she nor Wilson produced in court a copy of his notes from the meeting, which both of them considered favorable to their side.
The Reverend Wilson and Mistress Hutchinson knew each other well, rather too well, they would have agreed. A tall, angular man of forty-eight, Wilson had been pastor of her church as long as she had been in Boston. For most of the first year after her September 1634 arrival, though, Wilson had been away in England, leaving her favorite, his associate John Cotton, in charge. Wilson’s absence arose from his long struggle to convince his wife, Elizabeth, to cross the ocean. He had come in 1630, but she did not arrive, with their children, until 1635, on the same ship as Anne’s nemesis Hugh Peter and her ally Henry Vane.