American Jezebel (17 page)

The first college building, of timber, clay mortar, and thatch, was erected in the spring of 1638. Meanwhile, a sickly, Cambridge-educated immigrant named John Harvard bequeathed half his estate, roughly seven hundred pounds, and his extensive library to the fledgling Congregationalist college. Harvard, the son of a butcher and tavern owner in London, had arrived in Boston in 1637, at age thirty, and fallen ill. He died at home in Charlestown on September 14, 1638, after which the college was named Harvard in honor of his large gift.

But Anne Hutchinson was the true midwife of Harvard. “As a result of her heresy,” the Reverend Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard, wrote in
Harvard Magazine
in 2002,

Five days after “ordering” the college, the General Court created Harvard’s first board of overseers, or trustees. The first board comprised six politicians (Winthrop, Dudley, Bellingham, Humphrey, Harlackenden, and Stoughton) and six clergymen (Cotton, Weld, Wilson, Davenport, Shepard, and Peter).

In the minds of the ministers, the college allowed them to fulfill their essentially pedagogical role. Puritan worship was in part an attempt to restore the early primitive Christian church of the Acts and Epistles, which followed closely the gatherings of Jews with their rabbi, or teacher. Samuel Eliot Morison described this form of worship in
The Founding of Harvard College:
“Neither the weekday lectures nor the Lord’s Day assemblies of the Puritans were services of worship, as worship is understood by Catholics; they were, literally, meetings of the faithful to offer up prayers in matters of common concern, and to hear the Sacred Scripture read, interpreted, and expounded by an expert.” That description applies also to Anne’s religious meetings—the problem the ministers were struggling to rectify. She functioned as a teacher, rabbi, or minister—something no woman could do. Morison continued,

How much more “dangerous and detestable,” then, if that “unlearned preacher” were a woman.

Before concluding their November 1637 General Court meeting, the men ordered that a summary of the trial just concluded be written in the court record. Omitting her first name, they wrote, “Mrs.——Hutchinson, the wife of Mr. William Hutchinson, being convented [brought into court] for traducing the ministers and their ministry in the country, she declared voluntarily her revelations for her ground, and that she should be delivered and the Court ruined, with their posterity, and thereupon was banished, and in the meanwhile was committed to Mr. Joseph Weld (of Roxbury) until the Court shall dispose of her.”

A few days later Anne was told she could remain in Massachusetts for the winter, under house arrest, in Roxbury, two miles from her home. The court had two reasons for letting her stay. Her innate feminine weakness was one. Williams and Wheelwright could be sent into the woods at any time of year, but a woman could not. The second reason was that she was now a heretic. As such, she had to be dealt with also by her church, the self-acknowledged church of saints.

That church, in communion with all the churches of Massachusetts Bay, would try her on the third lecture day—Thursday—in March 1638, the first month in which winter might be expected to loose its clutch, allowing ministers and elders from outlying towns like Salem and Ipswich to attend. The ministers would admonish her, hoping to cleanse her of her sin. If she could not be cleansed, they would consider excommunication, the process by which the church of saints removed those who were not worthy of membership.

In the meantime, over the winter, the ministers might soften Anne Hutchinson’s heart, convince her to recant, and thus end the matter without having to carry out this dire punishment. Her jailer during the winter would be Joseph Weld, a brother of the Reverend Thomas Weld, one of her most vituperative challengers, who was eager to start convincing her of the errors of her ways. Born in England in 1595, Pastor Weld was a former Separatist who had gone to Holland before coming to Massachusetts in 1632. He and his brother Joseph owned extensive tracts of land in Roxbury, the town just southwest of the Shawmut Peninsula, on the mainland below the slender neck of Boston. The Reverend Weld was accumulating land in Roxbury at such a rate that by 1652, when he was away in Cromwellian England as a colonial emissary, he held “eight parcels” in Roxbury amounting to nearly five hundred acres, including “two acres of land with his dwelling house, barn and other outhouses, as well as yards, gardens and orchards,” fifteen acres of “meadow and marsh,” and thirty-two acres of “upland and marsh.”

During Anne’s stay at the Welds’, her husband was expected to pay for her upkeep. “The town of Roxbury is required to take order for the safe custody of Mrs. Hutchinson,” the court record stated, “and if any charge arise, to be defrayed by her husband.” She could not work, “walk abroad,” or entertain visitors except her immediate family, who in winter could make the two-mile trip only occasionally, with difficulty.

In the long view of history, the just-concluded trial was “the least attractive episode” in John Winthrop’s entire career. “In nearly every exchange of words [Anne Hutchinson] defeated him, and the other members of the General Court with him,” Edmund Morgan concluded in
The Puritan Dilemma,
his study of Winthrop.

Morgan noted that the governor fought Hutchinson “by fair means and foul…. Anne Hutchinson was his intellectual superior in everything
except political judgment, in everything except the sense of what was possible in this world.” This seems apt, for her greatest concern was not this world but the next. At the same time, she and Winthrop both seemed to lack the wisdom that Learned Hand, the great twentieth-century judge, described as “the spirit which is not sure it is right”—a lack that appears to have been endemic among Puritans.

To their credit, both Winthrop and Hutchinson behaved during the trial in a manner consistent with their previous goals and behavior. Winthrop may have been blundering, shortsighted, harsh, and even cruel, but his actions were entirely consistent with his life’s goal—ensuring the security of Massachusetts. Nothing mattered more to him than the colony’s survival. It was, after all, God’s will, and anything that threatened it had to be removed. He had repeatedly compromised in pursuit of this goal, suppressing his differences with politicians such as Dudley and Vane. In Hutchinson’s trial, while he did not serve the goals of fairness or (to use a modern term) civil rights, he showed himself as he was, a man deeply concerned with the practical matter of creating a new country in line with his understanding of the common good.

Anne Hutchinson too proved consistent to her life’s goal. Her focus all along was the salvation of the soul—not the commonwealth, which she now saw as doomed. Throughout her career as nurse, mother, and wife, she aimed straight at God, who was the center of her life. Every day she strove to do his work, studying his words and living in his way, and her behavior in court was entirely consistent with this.

The “saintly” John Cotton was less consistent with his previous goals. He had spent decades encouraging his best pupil to evangelize and explicate for private audiences his radical ideas about grace, and then he hesitated hardly a day before joining the chorus of accusers when she was publicly attacked. At least in the courtroom, John Cotton was a man who served and saved himself.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is said to have modeled the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, in
The Scarlet Letter,
on John Cotton, and the vivid character may illuminate the elusive man. Dimmesdale’s voice, Hawthorne writes, “was in itself a rich endowment; insomuch as that a listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and cadence.
Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.”

Scholars have anguished over Cotton, whom they describe variously as an honorable man, a scoundrel, and finally—David Hall’s word—an “enigmatic” man. Everett Emerson, a biographer of Cotton, noted that many believed “he failed his follower Anne Hutchinson because he was not willing to become a martyr for his dedication to the power of the Holy Spirit.” In contrast, the historian Daniel Boorstin noted that had Cotton and her judges treated her differently, “they might have merited praise as precursors of modern liberalism, but they might never have helped found a nation.” Edith Curtis, a biographer of Hutchinson, concluded that “John Cotton provoked bitterness, for he saw the light, considered the effect, and then deliberately helped to put it out.”

But there is no doubt as to how the defendant acquitted herself. “The record of [Anne Hutchinson’s] trial, if it is proper to dignify the procedure with that name,” Edmund Morgan observed, “is one of the few documents in which her words have been recorded, and it reveals a proud, brilliant woman put down by men who had judged her in advance. The purpose of the trial was doubtless to make her conviction seem to follow due process of law, but it might have been better for the reputation of her judges if they had simply banished her unheard.”

Fortunately for us, they did not. By trying Hutchinson and carefully recording and saving her extensive testimony, the judges inadvertently gave her what few women of her time enjoyed: a lasting voice. The trial that led to her imprisonment also enables her to speak to us, nearly four centuries hence.

The morning after the trial, Anne and William Hutchinson awoke in the second-floor bedchamber of their own house to the normal sounds of a market day. There was the clanking of carts rolling up and down the rutted main road that lay between them and the Winthrops’ front door, the market vendors’ faint shouts, and the raucous caws of the harbor gulls scavenging among the stalls.

Outside was an ordinary Thursday, but inside the house was quieter than ever before. There was none of the usual morning mayhem: the giggles accompanying the games that Mary and Katherine orchestrated for the littler ones in the bedchamber next door; the shouts of young William and Samuel wrestling below; or the thuds as the older boys piled the mattresses that lay each night on the parlor floor. This morning, every member of the family was afraid.

As for Anne, as she faced the day, how much sweeter the innumerable pleasures of her domestic life must have seemed now that they would soon be gone! The excitement and bustle of her children, with their clever questions and their sparkling eyes. The fruits of her gardens, which only now, after three harvests, were taking on a life of their own. The close reading of Scripture and sermon she shared with her followers in the parlor. The luxury of lolling in bed with Will on the rare morning that the little ones left them alone….

There would be no lolling in bed this morning, no wrapping her arms and legs around the sweet man beside her on the two mattresses piled on the floor. Will Hutchinson, now fifty-one, had tousled gray hair and a salty beard, and his efforts to be a loyal follower to her surely showed on his face. The trial had been tiring; exhausting was the prospect of a winter in which to find and create a new home for his
family. Only three years before, he had traversed the ocean for Anne and supervised the construction of this wonderful house. Now he had to do it again, under duress, with an even larger family and an absent wife.

If Anne “had rather been a husband than a wife,” in the words of the Reverend Peter, then Will was in many respects the ideal Puritan wife—kind, devoted, constant, and remarkably fertile. Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined that the husband of “Mrs. Hutchinson” must “have been (like most husbands of celebrated women) a mere insignificant appendage of his mightier wife.” Indeed, colonial leaders sometimes wondered what was lacking in the man. Winthrop described Will Hutchinson as “a man of very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife.” These statements speak more of Winthrop’s and Hawthorne’s mistrust of female power than of anything in Will, who left far fewer recorded words than did his wife. Survived by neither diary nor letters, Will marked his simple, solid signature on a few land deeds and other legal documents. The quotations attributed to him in other men’s journals number fewer than fifty words. Whatever the essence of his character, his marriage to Anne was one of the great pairings in history, sustaining both partners remarkably for more than forty years.

William Hutchinson was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, on August 14, 1586, the first child of a wealthy young textile merchant, Edward Hutchinson, and his wife, Susan. The boy’s paternal grandfather, John Hutchinson, had been mayor of Lincoln, the county’s largest town. A hill town founded by the Romans in the first century
CE
, Lincoln was (and is) overseen by the vast Gothic cathedral that was until 1549 the tallest building in Europe. Saint Hugh’s body and the heart and viscera of Queen Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I, are interred beneath its nave. Mayor John Hutchinson’s son Edward married Susan in 1585 and settled thirty-six miles from Lincoln in her hometown of Alford, then a village of several hundred souls and roughly seventy thatched houses set around a large market square. Edward Hutchinson opened a textile store on the square, where on Tuesdays and Fridays the market was held. A stone’s throw away, across the main road that ran just north of the square, was Saint Wilfrid’s Church, where Francis Marbury preached to the townspeople, including Will and his ten younger siblings.

Will Hutchinson was five years older than Anne Marbury, but they grew up together, meeting at Sunday services, the market, the biannual fair, and the occasional mystery play at her father’s church. With their siblings and friends they explored the fields surrounding Alford and the adjacent Wolds, which are crisscrossed with walking paths. Both families inhabited the thatched mud-and-stud houses that were common in Lincolnshire before brick was widely available. These wood frame houses had walls of wattle and daub—a mixture of the hair of a horse, goat, or cow, lime, and mud plaster. The upright timbers stood on staddle stones, which prevented the earth’s dampness from rising into the wood. Each roof was thatched with marsh reeds and straw, which was always a fire hazard. Most mud-and-stud houses had a chimney lined with brick, one or two fireplaces, two stories (often with dormers on the second floor), and multiple chambers, or rooms. The Marbury house likely had three rooms, and that of the Hutchinsons, several more. Edward Hutchinson made good money importing and selling fine cloth, while Francis Marbury’s income was limited to his church and school salaries and small allowances. Both families kept animals, including chickens, pigs, sheep, and cows, but the Hutchinsons could afford far more, including a large herd of sheep and several horses. Like the Marburys, the Hutchinsons were nonconformist Christians, preferring less adornment and better preaching in church. Around the age of six, William and his younger brothers went to the Reverend Marbury’s grammar school.

An amiable, easygoing youth, Will was apparently drawn to Anne’s fire and light, her mix of virtue and passion. She was the perfect complement to his calm, passive nature. According to local history, the couple was sufficiently close by the time the Marbury family left for London, when Anne was fourteen, that Will was heartbroken. Now nineteen, he had completed grammar school—he knew some Latin and possibly Greek and could write—and was working alongside his father. His position as a clothier enabled him to justify occasional trips to London, the center of trade in a nation whose leading industry was cloth manufacture. As often as possible during Anne’s years away, Will made the 140-mile trip to London on horseback, which took at least three days.

London’s textile market, Cheapside, was a short walk north of the Reverend Marbury’s church. In addition to purchasing fine cloth from the far reaches of the world, Will could escort Anne on a tour of such
pleasures of post-Elizabethan London as street jugglers, tumblers, and balladeers. Will wore the relatively drab attire and plain black felt hat of Puritans, but many men of London preferred leather jerkins with pinked decoration, doublets, and hats with feathers, and they carried daggers and swords in leather scabbards. To country people like Will and Anne, this was a new and fascinating world.

Some of the fascination verged on disgust. The Marburys’ church was so close to the Thames that in certain weather the noises of the sinful south side were audible: the roar of the drunken crowd at the bull run and the bearbaiting ring; the screams emanating from William Shakespeare’s open-air Globe Theatre, which in warm months ran plays every afternoon except Sunday (when the predominant sound was the ringing of hundreds of church bells); and the cries of the vendors at Borough Market. A theater, to a Puritan, was a monument to folly, a den of iniquity, and a hotbed of drunkenness, prostitution, and the heresies uttered on the stage. The Marburys doubtless avoided Shakespeare’s plays, several of which were performed for the first time during the family’s years in London. However, the playwright regularly passed Saint Martin in the Vintry on his daily walk from his apartment on Muggle (now Monkwell) Street, well north of the river, to his work on the south side and back again. In a 1603 sermon at Saint Paul’s cross, during an outbreak of the plague, a Puritan preacher said that “the cause of plague is sin, and the cause of sin are plays, so the cause of plague is plays.”

For the Marburys, pleasure was found in arguing over Scripture. They gathered at the table in the single room of their new home, the vestry extending south from the altar, from which it was separated by a heavy wooden door. This large room contained a fireplace, a privy, a cupboard, and a wooden table, which they pushed aside at night to place mattresses on the floor. Led by the vigorous, demanding Reverend Marbury, who was known as “crusty, disputatious, and strong-willed,” Anne “mastered all the fine points of Anglican and Calvinist theology. She read her father’s books of theology and sharpened her native intellectual ability through regular discussions with her father and siblings,” according to a local Alford history. “She was remarkable for her nimble wit, her strong assertiveness in debate, her bold presentation of her own position, and her genuine compassion in helping other women both by medical care and by psychological and spiritual coun
seling.” She found time to assist her mother in bringing babies into the world and was thus trained as a nurse and midwife. “She had good reason to learn all she could about health care, for the body, she believed, was the temple of the soul, and for the reborn it became the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. Physical birth and spiritual rebirth were logically connected in her thinking.” Now the oldest child at home (her surviving older sisters, Susan and Mary, had moved away), she no doubt assisted at the births of her younger siblings Thomas, in 1607, Anthony, in 1608, and Katherine, in 1610.

While Anne was in London, William entered his twenties and discovered, to everyone’s surprise but his, that there was no one else he wanted to marry. He had to convince his parents, whose reluctance arose from her family’s lack of money. Where the Hutchinsons had wealth in abundance, the Marburys had wit, and for Will and Anne this proved a good match.

Francis Marbury’s death early in 1611, which was heralded by the peculiar tolling of the five (rather than the usual six) bells of Saint Martin in the Vintry, threw his family into disarray. After his burial, Anne and her mother and her ten younger siblings still at home—ranging from sixteen-year-old Francis to baby Katherine, who was less than a year—needed quickly to vacate the vicarage for the new rector’s family. The Marburys spent the following year camping out at Saint Mary Woolchurch Haw and Saint Mary Woolnoth, a combined parish a few blocks north, alongside that church’s minister and his family. This was tight quarters even by London standards. Seven months after Francis’s passing, death struck again. Anne’s nine-year-old brother, Daniel, was buried that September just west of the Vintry parish at Saint Peter, Paul’s Wharf, “in the churchyard at the further end by the bones.”

The family began to disperse, although Bridget remained in London for several years, and then she moved to Hertfordshire. Francis’s will, which he had signed on January 30, 1611, gave each of his surviving children 200 marks—nearly 140 pounds—when they came of age. At age twenty-one, they could remain with their mother or “receive their portions and dwell where they would choose.”

Will Hutchinson soon asked twenty-year-old Anne for her hand. The couple was married at Saint Mary Woolnoth in August 1612, less than a month after her twenty-first birthday. Anne wore a bone corset and her
best dress. After the simple wedding ceremony, the church warden penned in his ornate script, “On the ninth day of the same month were married William Hutchinson of Alford in the country of Lincoln, mercer [merchant], and Anne Marbury daughter of Francis Marbury, minister, per license,” meaning that banns had not been read three times in a church, in this case because the couple presently lacked a home parish.

The Alford to which Anne returned after a seven-year absence was much the same as it had been when she was a child. The preacher at Saint Wilfrid’s Church was now George Scortreth, one of Lincolnshire’s “wonderfully” verbose lecturers, who had been appointed upon Marbury’s move to London. An ordained clergyman with a master’s degree, Scortreth was “a moderate man, and popular with all parties.” In 1617, upon the death of Vicar Joseph Overton (who had served through Marbury’s years there), Scortreth became vicar of Alford, where he remained until his death in 1645. “As early as 1614 many of the [local] lecturers refused to pray for the king, and, like the Reverend John Cotton, had quite disregarded the liturgy of the Church of England.” Scortreth, who would baptize Anne and Will’s children in Alford, was more moderate than Cotton, for he used the orthodox Book of Common Prayer.

Another change in Alford was the grand new manor house rising up alongside the main road just west of the church and the market square. It was Alford’s first building with an exterior of brick. With eight or nine spacious rooms, it was far larger than any other dwelling in the town, including those of well-off gentry like the Hutchinsons. According to local history, a relative of Sir Robert Christopher, the seventeenth-century knight entombed in marble beside the altar of Saint Wilfrid’s church, built the manor house for the combined manors of the tiny towns of Rigsby, Ailby, and Tothby. Its main timbers were felled in 1611, according to modern dendrochronology, so the house was under construction as Anne and Will began their married life.

The couple furnished for themselves a cozy mud-and-stud cottage, in which they anticipated growing old. They had the money for fine carpets, a four-poster bed with feather-stuffed pillows (rather than straw pallets on boards), pewter dishes, Chinese pottery, and silver spoons. Will’s textile business, which he eventually inherited from his father, prospered. Widely respected, he was asked to serve as a governor of the local grammar school. From 1623 until 1632 he appears in
town records as a “prominent resident” and “chief citizen,” as had Francis Marbury for the years 1595 to 1605. Will enjoyed farming and kept a large herd of sheep. He had several house servants and farm laborers, and eventually two unmarried female cousins, Anne and Frances Freiston, moved in to help care for the family.

Anne also earned money working as a midwife and healer, for which she grew a large herb garden. While every woman then grew and distilled herbs for daily use, mostly medicinal, a midwife had more expertise than most. She made syrups, decoctions, lotions, and tonics from the simples (herbs used individually for their curative powers) and worts (those used collectively) in her garden. Among these were betony (to reduce labor pains), columbine (to speed delivery), horehound (to ease labor), tansy (to prevent miscarriage), pennyroyal (to induce abortion), comfrey (to relieve nursing sores), stinging nettle (to increase the flow of breast milk), lady’s mantle (an aid to conception and healthy pregnancy), the towering angelica (to ward off the plague), lemon balm (to “purge melancholy,” making it, along with lavender, gillyflowers, and thyme, an early antidepressant), clary (its seeds were crushed into a paste to extract thorns), borage (to fortify the heart), heartsease (against syphilis and epilepsy), elecampane (for coughs), garlic (to relieve aches and pains), bugle (to cure nightmares), feverfew (to reduce fever), herb Robert (a diuretic), monkshood (to exterminate rats and other vermin), spearmint (“friendly to a weak stomach”), and sage (to quicken the memory). Like Will, Anne spent much of the year outside, planting in spring, weeding in summer, and harvesting in fall.