American Jezebel (14 page)

Now, rejected by the hierarchies he despised, Vane was granted royal permission to do as he wished. The New World intrigued him, so he arranged to be sent for three years to New England as a representative of two lords who were Puritan patentees of Connecticut. A courtier observed that Vane “likes not the discipline of the Church of England; none of our ministers would give him the sacrament standing; no persuasions of our bishops nor authority of his parents could prevail with him; let him go.” Vane’s ambitious father hoped the experience would disabuse him of his Puritan fancies. To the Earl of Clarendon, the very notion of a privy counselor sending his son to New England for not kneeling at the Lord’s Supper exemplified the “unnatural antipathy” developing between parents and children in England.

Two years before Anne’s trial, in early October 1635, when Vane’s boat, the
Abigail,
entered Boston harbor, Massachusetts Bay was splintered and anxious—a far cry from Winthrop’s holy city upon a hill. Under Cotton, the Boston congregation had split doctrinally from the rest of the churches. Winthrop was sparring with Dudley, who had been elected governor over Winthrop in 1634 and deputy governor in 1635, when John Haynes became governor. Winthrop had lost power partly because Dudley and others considered him too lenient in enforcing discipline. In the case of the Reverend Roger Williams, who was soon to be banished, Winthrop had delayed action, angering his peers. In the coming years Williams and Vane would become enduring friends.

A distinctive but not handsome young man, Vane had almond-shaped eyes, a prominent nose, and full lips. His wavy brown hair fell to his shoulders, a style that offended not only his father and Laud but also most Puritans, who considered it ungodly. In Boston John Endicott was said to badger Vane to visit a barber. Vane’s dandyish attire also challenged the Puritans of Boston, who in September 1634 had adopted a strict sumptuary code: “No person…shall hereafter make or buy any apparel…with any lace on it, silver, gold, silk or thread, under the penalty of forfeiture of such clothes…. All cutworks, embroidered or needlework caps,…all gold or silver girdles, hatbands, belts, rugs, beaver hats, are prohibited.” And “if any man shall judge the wearing of any…fashions…or hair…to be uncomely, or prejudicial to the common good,…then [he] shall have power to bind the party so offending to answer it at the next court….” As a high-status immigrant to Massachusetts, Vane had much more latitude in this regard than most.

Despite his foppish hair and dress, Vane initially delighted John Winthrop, who described him as “a young gentleman of excellent parts.” If a privy councilor’s son had come to New England, then more courtiers and aristocrats would surely follow, enhancing the colony’s reputation, Winthrop reasoned.

Soon after his arrival, Vane determined to lessen the colonial conflict. Displaying an ambition reminiscent of his father, he assumed the role of guide and adviser. He arranged for a meeting between Dudley and Winthrop to air and resolve their differences. At this meeting, which was also attended by Governor Haynes and the Reverends Peter,
Cotton, and Wilson, Winthrop and Dudley both denied any bad feelings toward the other. Winthrop conceded that he ought to be stricter in the future with troublesome characters like Roger Williams. Vane got the credit for successfully arbitrating their dispute. As a result, the General Court ordered all disagreements in the colony to be submitted for arbitration to Vane and two elders. The next March Vane became not only a freeman but also head of a commission for military affairs, supervising the training and supply of the militia and conducting wars.

On May 25, 1636, at Vane’s first annual election in Massachusetts, the ill-educated twenty-three-year-old aristocrat was chosen governor. Winthrop, who was elected deputy governor, neglected even to mention this election in his journal. Vane, in contrast, had the news of his election heralded by a “volley of great shot” from all fifteen ships at anchor in Boston harbor. Although he had refused to wear the college gown at Oxford, deriding it as needlessly formal, he now embraced the sort of pomp and ceremony that surrounded royalty in London and Vienna. He instituted the practice of having four colorfully uniformed sergeants bearing halberds and wearing plumed hats attend the governor of Massachusetts at all times. (A year later, when Winthrop returned to this position, he felt obliged to continue the habit, even after Vane’s standard-bearers, among them Will’s brother Edward Hutchinson, refused to stand for Winthrop.)

Despite Vane’s glee at his rapid ascent to the zenith of colonial power, he realized that “tumultuous” issues faced Massachusetts. The religious divisions continued to cause irritation and anxiety among the settlers, a situation for which Vane was increasingly blamed, particularly by the orthodox ministers, who saw him as Hutchinson’s friend. Then there were the French, who “continually encroach [and] gain all the trade,” he complained in a letter to his father two months after the election. “The natives themselves are very treacherous, cruel, and cunning and let slip no advantages of killing and pilfering.” And the charter, whose return the crown awaited, worried him. If the charter were to be revoked, he wrote, “much unsettlement is likely to grow amongst ourselves and great discouragement to the whole plantation. For those that are truly sincere, and are come out to advance the kingdom of the Lord Jesus, must either suffer in the cause or else labor for such retreat as God shall direct them to. In either of which cases I do not doubt but
within two years this plantation, which is now flourishing, would become desolate, and either repossessed again with Indians or emptied by pestilence.”

While young Vane worried over the colony’s future, Hutchinson and other congregants of Boston appreciated the merging of church and state that came from having their governor and their favorite minister sharing roof and board. Cotton’s congregation was emboldened to spread his word at military trainings, town meetings, and other gatherings. Members attended other churches, and after the pastor’s sermon they would correct his doctrine in accord with Cotton’s preaching. Proclaiming the error of seeing sanctification as a sign of justification, they warned others that they rested on a false sense of security, thinking they had nothing more to do now that they were in the New Jerusalem. Moral goodness, they warned, is not true godliness. The Holy Spirit must transform the heart to bring real reformation and “saving fellowship with Jesus Christ,” in Cotton’s words. They expounded on his ideas about revelation and the indwelling of the Spirit.

Winthrop and the orthodox ministers seized on this idea—the “indwelling of the Holy Ghost”—and attacked it. They argued that it was dangerous to encourage ordinary people to pursue prophecy and revelation. They feared the notion that the elect, in this union with Christ, could determine who else was saved. In a man, especially a man of the cloth, this could be justified, they felt, but in a woman it was heresy. The issue was of course blurry, as it often is in religion and politics. Indeed, in the fall of 1636, a year before Anne was brought to trial, when Winthrop and Vane engaged in a written debate on this matter, both agreed that the Holy Ghost does dwell in believers, although they could not agree exactly how. What struck Winthrop and the orthodox ministers as most offensive and potentially explosive was the alliance among Cotton—whom they could engage in polite doctrinal arguments—and Governor Vane and Mistress Hutchinson. This alliance, with its “potent party,” was “an early outbreak of radicalism,” according to historian David Hall, and “a frightening example of ideas about the discerning of visible saints carried to an extreme, for the Antinomians proposed that the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the elect enabled them to discern who was truly worthy of church membership.” It is worth noting that in opposing a covenant of works, Hutchinson
actually suggested the opposite: that this life offers no clue to anyone’s eternal prospects.

The orthodox ministers challenged her judgment in statements to the magistrates and to Cotton. They warned Cotton that his disciples, chiefly Hutchinson, were broadcasting outrageous opinions about the Holy Ghost. These doctrines dangerously emphasized a person’s individual experience of God over clerical authority, they said. The Reverends Shepard and Hooker, of Cambridge, and Peter Bulkeley, of Concord, worried that Cotton’s ideas about revelation could invalidate biblical law, and they requested he clarify his views. “All things are turned upside down among us,” Winthrop noted in October. He feared ruptures in church and state and saw Mistress Hutchinson, whose theological errors he listed, as the root cause. He was also troubled that “there joined with her in these opinions a brother of her, one Mr. Wheelwright, a silenced minister sometime in England.” Cotton remained exempt, apparently, from Winthrop’s worry.

On October 25 Cotton, Wheelwright, the orthodox ministers, and Hutchinson met at Cotton’s house for a “conference in private” to discuss the conflicts. Cotton smoothed over the doctrinal differences with his usual aplomb, conceding that sanctification might “help to evidence justification.” On the indwelling issue, which Wheelwright affirmed, Cotton said that while “the person of the Holy Ghost and a believer were united,” this does not imply that the justified person is godlike. The other ministers relaxed. Winthrop reported afterward that Cotton “gave satisfaction to them, so as he agreed with them all in the point of sanctification.”

Five days later the Boston congregation voted to appoint John Wheelwright as its second teacher. Pastor Wilson was affronted, for the church already had two ministers, and Wheelwright was Hutchinson’s brother-in-law. John Cotton naturally supported Wheelwright because they both preached an “unconditional covenant”—that people receive God’s grace unconditionally, apart from their effort or works. But when Wilson objected strongly to Wheelwright, Cotton chose not to endorse the congregation’s choice in public. On Saturday, October 30, at a gathering of the 150-member congregation, John Winthrop argued against adding a minister “whose spirit they knew not and one who seemed to dissent in judgment.” Using the little-known unanimity
rule, he prevented the appointment of Hutchinson’s brother-in-law and had him sent ten miles south to Mount Wollaston, where a few Bostonians, who held farmland there, worshiped occasionally.

Winthrop urged Cotton to send female spies to Hutchinson’s meetings. After doing so, the minister reported, “Some sisters of the church [went] on purpose to her repetitions [of sermons and Scripture] so that I might know the truth. But when she discerned any such present, no speech fell from her that could be excepted against.”

As winter approached, Governor Vane grew more uncomfortable about his perceived role in the crisis. His opponents found him an easy target because he so often attended Hutchinson’s meetings. Some of them whispered that Vane was a heretic. He felt “scandalous imputation brought upon himself, as if he should be the cause of all.”

At the next General Court meeting, in early December, the young governor announced his wish to resign. Letters had come from England calling him home on urgent business. He “burst into tears,” according to the court record, “and professed” he would risk the ruin of his “outward estate” rather than desert his people if he did not fear “the inevitable danger of God’s judgments [that] were coming upon them for the difference and dissensions which he saw amongst them.” Therefore, “he thought it was best for him to give place for a time.”

Several other Hutchinsonians persuaded him to remain for the rest of his one-year term. Vane consented to stay and fight as an “obedient child of the church,” but his power was compromised. In the wake of this shift, several magistrates charged Cotton with responsibility for the outrageous behavior of his congregation. The most noted minister in the colony was now suspect.

“About this time,” Winthrop reported, “the rest of the ministers, taking offence at some doctrines delivered by Mr. Cotton, and especially at some opinions, which some of his church did broach, and for he seemed to have too good an opinion of, and too much familiarity with those persons, drew out sixteen points, and gave them to him, entreating him to deliver his judgment directly in them, which accordingly he did.” In January 1637 Cotton gave “plain and short” answers to all the questions except Question Thirteen: “Whether evidencing justification by sanctification, be…a covenant of works,” which required six pages to explain. He said, “I have spoken the more largely and distinctly” to
this issue so that “I might avoid carefully all suspicion of ambiguity and obscurity.” His answer, which in its defiant obscurity recalls his Latin syllogism of twenty years before, questioned the orthodox view that the pious man is the proper man. “Justifying faith cannot safely build or rest upon any ground, save only upon Christ and righteousness,” Cotton wrote.

Hutchinson had been right, the other ministers realized: Cotton
was
charging them with preaching a covenant of works. This was not the answer that they and Winthrop had hoped to hear. “Dear Sir,” they wrote in dismay to Cotton, “we leave these things with you, hoping that the Lord will honor you, with making you a happy instrument of calming these storms and cooling these hot contentions and paroxysms that have begun to swell and burn in these poor churches.” Cotton replied with an even longer rejoinder denying that sanctification is evidence of justification.

The turmoil continued. At the close of the December court meeting, the Reverend Wilson delivered a “very sad speech” decrying the opinions that were causing the schism. Members of the Boston congregation moved to censure Wilson, but Cotton succeeded in stopping them. As in the old Boston, he seemed hardly touched by the divisions that roiled so many others. At the height of the crisis, in February 1637, Cotton reported in a letter to a friend in England that the two parties were not far apart: one is “advancing the grace of God within man, the other is advancing the grace of God toward man.”

The Fast Day to resolve the conflict was January 18, 1637. The people of the colony sought God’s protection in their various concerns: the difficulties of Protestant churches in Europe, especially England and Germany; the threat of Indian incursions; and the split of Massachusetts’s largest church from all the others. Cotton gave the Fast Day sermon in Boston, on Isaiah 58:4: “Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness: ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard on high.” Then members of the congregation invited the Reverend Wheelwright to prophesy, to which Cotton consented. Wheelwright contradicted Wilson, blaming the troubles on the orthodox ministers’ failure to maintain Christ properly in doctrine and worship. He stated that anyone who held sanctification as ground for salvation was wrong.