THE THREAT OF ANNE HUTCHINSON BACKGROUND

The story of Anne Hutchinson takes place from 1634-38 in Boston. At this time, Boston was a brand new village, founded only in 1630. This is 10 years after Plymouth had been settled, yet by the time Anne Hutchinson had arrived from England, Boston was already larger than Plymouth, and it was the capital city of the new Massachusetts Bay Colony, which had also been founded in 1630. Anne Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in Alford, England, in 1591. Anne’s father was a deacon at Christ Church, Cambridge. Francis Marbury spoke out earnestly about his convictions that many of the ordained ministers in the Church of England were unfit to guide people’s souls. For this act of defiance, he was put in jail for one year. Undaunted, Francis Marbury continued to voice his radical opinions, including that many ministers were appointed haphazardly by high church officials to preach in any manner they wanted. Eventually, Anne’s father did restrain his verbal attacks on the Church of England, choosing conformity with an imperfect church over constant arrests and inquisitions. Being educated at home, Anne read many of her father’s books on theology and religion. Much of Anne’s later independence and willingness to speak out was due to her father’s example. Anne admired her father for his defiance of traditional church principles. She was always fascinated with theological questions such as the fate of the Indians who had no knowledge of Jesus Christ or salvation. Anne lived in Alford, as a housewife and mother after she married, at the age of 21, William Hutchinson. Anne was drawn to a certain minister, John Cotton, who preached fiery sermons that were originally Protestant in nature, but gradually became more akin to Puritan doctrines in that he preached purification of the church and focused on the corruption of the current establishment. Puritans were a form of Protestants in the sense that they rebelled against the Catholic Church, but they also believed the current system still needed more change. Cotton’s two main beliefs were the destructiveness of continuing Catholic influence in the Church of England, and the opportunities for success and religious freedom in America. In 1633, Cotton moved to Massachusetts Bay. After 20 years of village life, the Hutchinsons decided to follow Cotton to Boston. When this story takes place, Anne Hutchinson was considered to be a relative newcomer, although she had lived in Boston for nearly half its existence. She arrived in town with her family, including her husband and their 11 children. (She had given birth to 14, but three had died.) William had been a successful businessman, and the family arrived in Boston with a good deal of wealth. This, and the fact that Anne was an efficient nurse and midwife, made the family popular from the start. The Boston they settled into is somewhat different from the Boston we know today. It was very small, just a village, with less than 2,000 people. The streets were curving and unpaved, and the homes were mostly built out of logs. Frame houses had only just begun to be built when the Hutchinsons arrived, and there was only one brick

home. The Hutchinsons, interestingly enough, lived across the street from Governor Winthrop and his family. A fundamentally important aspect to Boston was that it was growing very rapidly, and anytime a village or city grows rapidly, there is a certain degree of stress among the inhabitants. Another fundamentally important aspect to understand is that Massachusetts has a drastically different climate than England. It gets hotter and muggier in the summers, which is bad enough when you’re wearing woolen clothing in an atmosphere that strongly frowns on going around with any exposed skin. In the winter, it was an entirely different matter, because survival itself was at stake. Although England is considerably north of Massachusetts, it gets a whole lot colder in Massachusetts. It will snow 60 inches a year in Boston, more or less, and it is not at all uncommon for the temperature to stay below freezing for months on end. So we have this new village, thousands of miles of ocean removed from what the inhabitants known as “civilization,” in an extremely harsh environment, where survival is not a certainty, where wild savages roam, where the soil is poor, and with boatloads of new people coming every year. Could it get any more stressful? Yes, it can, and that is one of the main points of this story. Puritans settled Boston. As you know by now, Puritans were a sect of the Church of England who wanted to “purify” the church of its papishness, of its vestiges of Roman Catholicism. Before we can discuss Puritanism as a religion, however, it is important to remember that Protestantism itself was only 100 years old by this point. Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation only three or four generations earlier, after 1,200 years of uninterrupted Catholicism. What is the main difference between the two religions? The predominant difference is that Catholicism teaches adherants to follow the lead of the priests, including bishops and popes. They, in turn, read the Bible and interpret it for the masses. In Protestantism, in all its various forms, the ministry serves only as a guide for individuals, who should read the Bible on their own and establish their own relationship with God. So, for the first time in anyone’s memory, people began reading the Bible and interpreting what it means, not so much about the life of Jesus but more about how Christians should behave. This individualism naturally led to the development of a lot of different thoughts and beliefs. Puritanism was a part of this new movement, and through this individual reconstruction of religion, the Puritans found areas of differences between what they thought and what the Church of England taught. Despite these differences, they were legally allowed to worship their own special brand of Anglicanism (the Church of England), yet they were often given a hard time by their neighbors. This they considered to be persecution, but it wasn’t a terribly bad form of persecution; no one was burned at the stake for heresy over this. Meanwhile, however, there was a great fear that the persecution would grow worse, or worse yet, that the whole nation would revert to Catholicism. It wasn’t very long before this that Mary I, Queen of England, earned the name Bloody Mary by ordering Protestants killed for their beliefs. This was still in living memory, so the concerns over religious persecution were legitimate. Also at work in the middle of

this was the Thirty Years War, which pitted Catholics against Protestants and which was by far the worst world war Europe had ever known. Boston, then, was a pretty good option for Puritans, for they could escape the whole bag of persecutions, religious wars, and general fears by setting up their own shop in the New World. And so many did, yet they were not able to avoid the continuing questioning of the proper way to be a Christian. Even the very regimented Puritans of Boston allowed for regular weeknight meetings, where the men would debate the finer points of the religion. This was not only tolerated, but also encouraged, as long as it didn’t stand in the way of the church and state, which operated in Boston as one. This was Anne Hutchinson’s problem. The precise religious controversy surrounding Anne Hutchinson is not as germane to the story as the way that the community responded, but the controversy does show the sort of questioning going on at the time. This was the Antimonian Controversy, and it dealt with the nature of salvation as taught by Calvinism, of which Puritanism was a branch. John Calvin had taught that God chose whom would be saved before the person even lived his or her life. This was called predestination. They argued at great length whether people were saved (or not saved) upon birth or 9 months earlier, upon conception, but this was a different controversy. The point here is that through predestination, through what they called the Covenant of Grace, it didn’t matter to the individual how life was led, since salvation was already won or lost. To the Puritans of Boston, however, it mattered a great deal to the community, for if people led bad lives, the whole community could conceivably fall into God’s disfavor. The Puritans poorly understood precisely how this Covenant of Grace worked, and so it was greatly debated. One group of people, the Antinomians (anti-against, nomoslaw) felt that they were above the law, since they were already saved. They were above following the rules of both church and state because of this status. Anne Hutchinson, probably, and John Cotton, certainly, played into this debate -- as Antinomians. They both continued to play important roles in the community and attempted to persuade people of their beliefs, so they didn’t exactly abandon the community, so the extent to which they lived “above the law,” as the name suggest, is somewhat fuzzy. If this all seems confusing, it should. Our best writing about this comes from John Winthrop, who himself confessed to not understand the finer points of the debate. What he did understand, however, was that the church and state in the new colony were as one, and the concept would only work if everyone agreed. This was the most significant position of the Massachusetts Bay Colony – that the laws existed because everyone agreed to obey them. Everyone didn’t agree, however. Beginning a year after she and her family settled in Boston, Anne Hutchinson had begun to hold weekly meetings in their home, at first for the women, but later men began to attend as well. The meetings were served initially to inform people who were unable to attend regular church services of what was said in the services. This sort of meeting was not unusual, and in these days before electricity, before television, and especially in the long, cold winters, these sorts of meetings were quite common. Before long, however, Anne Hutchinson’s meetings began including her own personal

interpretations to the sermons. This, it was later believed, constituted preaching, which was beyond the purview of women. As John Winthrop wrote, “If she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds were stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.” Anne’s meetings became very popular. It seems she was both intelligent and very charismatic. She was, in short, a born leader, and people liked her, and they liked listening to her speak. Before long, her “flock,” as it were, grew to more than 100 people; all squeezed into the Hutchinson home, every week, and her influence spread to most of Boston. At first, the church favored the meetings, for they took on the look of a religious awakening. It was believed that by attending Anne Hutchinson’s lectures, the masses were being brought closer to Christ. As the form of the meetings began to shift, however, as Anne began to add her own thoughts and feelings to the mix, the official attitude began to shift as well. Anne Hutchinson began to criticize the sermons and overall teachings of the church ministers – except for her favorite, John Cotton. It was one thing for the colony to tolerate, and even welcome, a private meeting to discuss religious issues. It was altogether another thing to have meetings of such size, contrasting with the notion of private, which served as schools of criticism or a weekly religious review, as it were. The regular ministers, who were accustomed to having their sermons passed as the unquestioned voice of God, were now being doubted. The first target of Anne Hutchinson’s criticisms was John Wilson, who was the Boston church’s head minister. It seems that Anne simply did not like Wilson, although specifically why is not clear. Her insolence became obvious when Anne would publicly leave the church whenever Wilson took the podium and began to speak. Her followers, still mostly women at this time, followed suit, such that whenever Wilson rose to preach, a group of women turned their backs on him and left the building. Anne’s big bent was the Covenant of Grace, which she felt included the spirit of God entering the souls of saints. While not accusing the various ministers of walking in a Covenant of Works, she proclaimed Rev. John Cotton and John Wheelwright as the only teachers in the colony walking in the Covenant of Grace. By this she meant that God’s seal was on their lips, that when they spoke, they spoke with God’s voice. Her comments, by inference, suggested very strongly that the other ministers were not doing their jobs. John Wheelwright was kinfolk of the Hutchinsons (Anne’s brother-in-law), and when he arrived in 1636, he moved into the Hutchinsons’s home. At this time, the community had already been well divided, with Rev. Wilson fairly alienated on one side and with Anne Hutchinson and most of the community on the other. Included on Anne’s side was Henry Vane, who had been elected governor, leaving John Winthrop with the deputy governorship. Wilson had a few aces in the hole, however, including John Winthrop, who was still powerful and influential, and, except for John Cotton, all the other ministers.

The arrival of John Wheelwright signaled the beginning of the end of the crisis. Shortly after his arrival, there was an effort from Anne Hutchinson’s side of the community to appoint Wheelwright as John Cotton’s assistant, meaning Wheelwright would become a sanctioned religious teacher. Probably, Anne herself spurned this movement, but we are not certain. What is certain is that alongside this movement, Anne accused Wilson of being an inadequate minister and of being under a Covenant of Works. This was a significant step further toward the edge of the cliff than she had yet taken. The Wheelwright appointment and Anne’s’ accusations brought the growing controversy to a head. Ministers from throughout the colony met that fall in an effort to support Wilson and to end the controversy. Wheelwright and Cotton both attended the ministers-only meeting, and there they all hammered out some agreement on basic tenets of the religion, although there was considerable discussion and disagreement on the role the Holy Ghost plays in the Covenant of Grace. Of more significance, the move to formally appoint Wheelwright was made at this meeting. John Winthrop personally rose to oppose the motion, based on the dispute concerning the Holy Ghost, and Governor Henry Vane spoke in Wheelwright’s favor. The meeting went on for two days, and during that time, the topic had the whole community buzzing. On the second day, Winthrop rose, apologized for having spoken in anger the day before, and then went on with a very long dissertation on the difficulties in finding the true meaning in the church. When he finished, no one else spoke, and the whole matter was dropped. Wheelwright, whose appointment failed, then pushed to become a full minister in a new church on the outskirts of Boston, about 12 miles away. His bid was supported by some large landowners in the area, and in an effort to soothe everything over, the church leaders agreed. The settlement of Wheelwright’s ministry soothed things for Wheelwright, but that was the extent of the peace. Amid the discussions surrounding his appointment as minister of the new church, Governor Vane and Deputy Governor Winthrop, supported by John Wilson, got into a tremendous debate concerning the role of the Holy Ghost. Vane, who was supported by Hutchinson and her faction, was not nearly so charismatic as Hutchinson and pushed his novel religious views harshly. Winthrop, then, after having gone through a down period in his popularity, started becoming popular again as it was seen that he was standing up for the true beliefs. Vane, then, became unpopular, and since he was young and fairly inexperienced in politics, wanted to bail out. He tried to flee to England, using the Civil War there as an excuse, but he confessed that he was also trying to avoid the growing religious controversy. The General Court, learning about Vane’s true motives, decided not to let him leave, preferring instead that he wither on the vine while riding out the controversy, of which Vane was an important part. Vane, then, asked to resign, and the Court decided that would be just fine, but Hutchinson’s faction was opposed to losing its political leader, and a new controversy sprung about. Amid this controversy, the Court decided to hold off until the regular election in May and thus required Vane to continue serving. Vane, then, couldn’t resign and couldn’t flee to England.

The ministers then turned their attention to John Cotton, who, while one of them, was also a considerable thorn in their sides. They had a secret meeting with Cotton and demanded to know the areas where his opinions differed from theirs. He took a list of specific questions and told them he would answer them as quickly as possible. Vane, who was Cotton’s ally, was not invited to this church meeting, and in another meeting, accosted the ministers for attempting to settle matters privately by excluding his leadership as governor. Hugh Peters, Salem’s minister and the man who had replaced Roger Williams, then completely undressed Vane for suggesting that they could not meet without him to discuss matters of anything. Vane realized he had opened a can of worms by suggesting they were unable to discuss God’s word without political leadership, and he humbly apologized. John Wilson then rose and spoke at great length on the trouble facing the church. His speech delved into deep theological matters concerning John Cotton and their differences of opinion, but John Winthrop’s account is all that survives of this long meeting, and it is clear from the account that Winthrop couldn’t follow the conversation. Wilson’s speech also touched on issues of politics, however, and these everybody understood. In the end, they all agreed that the town was split, that the split had been caused by Anne Hutchinson, and that at present, all the magistrates except Vane, Coddington and Hough, and all the ministers except Cotton and Wheelwright, supported Wilson. The ministers all then agreed to call Anne Hutchinson to the meetings, so she was summoned and appeared before the assemblage.

The Threat of Anne Hutchinson Place notes into these columns for each section of the trial. Topic: 5th Commandment

Meetings in the Home

Preaching Theology

Cotton’s Defense

Summarize Issue:

Revelations

Identify three reasons why Hutchinson was such a threat to Massachusetts Bay: 1.

2.

3.

NOTEBOOK ESSAY: Carefully think about the arguments used against Anne Hutchinson at her trial. Also think about the lessons of the Puritan community on the issue of community control. 1. To what extent can a community restrict the rights of individuals for the greater good of the community itself? Who determines that greater good? 2. Is freedom of religion a right that should supersede all other freedoms? To what extent does the community have the right to restrict religious freedom when that freedom becomes dangerous to the community itself? Did the Puritans practice freedom of religion, as we know it? If not, why not?