American Jezebel (20 page)

The first town on the mainland was Roxbury, a cluster of wood houses and a meetinghouse set on a hillside above the intersection of Cornhill Road and the Roxbury road, near modern-day Dudley Square. The cart stopped at the house belonging to Joseph Weld, and she was let out. She was hardly two miles from Boston. But to Anne Hutchinson it seemed far from home.

“The prisoner,” as John Winthrop took to calling Anne Hutchinson that winter, saw little of her children during her house arrest. One-year-old Zuriel; Susan, age four; six-year-old William; seven-year-old Katherine; Mary, nine; ten-year-old Anne; thirteen-year-old Samuel; and Francis, seventeen, stayed in the house on Shawmut with their father, his cousins Anne and Francis Freiston, and several servants. The older siblings—Richard, Edward and his wife, and Faith and Bridget and their husbands—often visited, as did their young aunt Katherine Scott. But the children saw their mother only rarely on account of the winter weather, which that year was particularly harsh.

It was the court’s intention to isolate the prisoner and reduce her support. Winthrop was determined that no one should be inspired by her or spread news of her. Still, she caused the governor to worry. “She began now to discover all her mind to such as came to her,” he wrote of her confinement, “so that her opinions came abroad, and began to take place among her old disciples, and now some of them raised up questions—which the elders, finding to begin to appear in some of their children, they took much pains both in public and private to suppress.”

The ministers, who had agreed among themselves to make the trip to Joseph Weld’s house in Roxbury as often as possible during her imprisonment there, came at least once a week, alone or in pairs. Thomas Weld, one of her strongest opponents, who lived nearby in Roxbury, came frequently. He had suggested his brother as her jailer in order that he might have more access to the prisoner and opportunity to reform her. Another forceful opponent of Antinomianism, Thomas Shepard, came as often as he could manage from Cambridge, and even Hugh
Peter made the trip from Salem every few weeks. John Eliot, who seemed less forceful than the rest, came several times a week because he lived in Roxbury.

The ministers had two purposes in coming. They preached God’s word so she might see the light and recant her obnoxious opinions. In addition, they recorded those “errors, taken from her own mouth,” to present as evidence at her church trial in the spring. After each visit, the ministers dutifully added to the list they were compiling, “proved by four witnesses,” themselves. By the time of the trial in March 1638, this list would contain nearly thirty errors.

When the ministers challenged her doctrine, she repeatedly associated herself with the colony’s most respected minister, saying, they reported, that she “held nothing but what Mr. Cotton held” and “Mr. Cotton and she were both of one mind.” To this, the Reverend Weld, for one, told her she must have changed. He showed her papers written by Cotton “expressly
against
some of the opinions she held,” but “she affirmed still that there was
no
difference between Mr. Cotton and her.”

Apart from these missionary visits, which Hutchinson did not welcome but could not refuse, she spent the winter largely alone. She was isolated from her “scholars,” as Weld mocked her followers, much as her father had been isolated from his students and congregation during his three years of house arrest. Through the short, cold days and long, cold nights of her imprisonment, Anne Hutchinson studied Scripture, sang psalms, meditated on God’s word, and watched her belly swell as it had done fifteen times before. This time, though, she was more tired than ever before, including the awful summer when she had tried to save her daughters from the plague. This sixteenth pregnancy was not like the rest, she was sure. But even the midwife did not know how or why.

In the midst of this late pregnancy, she was welcoming grandchildren. Edward’s firstborn, Elishua, had arrived just before her trial. A month later, without benefit of Anne’s assistance, her eighteen-year-old daughter Bridget delivered her first child, a boy named Eliphal Sanford, who was baptized in Boston on December 9. Bridget’s husband, John Sanford, whom she married in 1636 after his first wife died, was an educated Englishman about ten years her senior who had arrived in Boston in 1631. Prior to that, he was employed by the Winthrop household in England, “often acting as a purchasing agent for John Winthrop.” A re
spected citizen of Boston, Sanford was disarmed along with other prominent Hutchinsonians on November 20, 1637, and relieved of his official duties in Boston, which in his case included serving as a selectman, a member of the committee regulating cattle, a surveyor of ordnance and ammunition, and cannoneer of the fort. But Anne could not see her new grandchildren unless they were brought to her, which in winter was impossible.

Snow and ice closed down Massachusetts Bay before Christmas, which fell on a Monday that year. While many holy days were celebrated with great fanfare in the Church of England, Christmas was largely ignored here, except for a church prayer service and sometimes a Fast Day. Puritans considered decorations, gifts, and parties to be pagan idolatry.

The General Court next convened on January 8, 1638, in Boston, now that most local Hutchinsonians had been dismissed, disfranchised, or otherwise removed. At that meeting, as an apparent award for having removed himself from the continent, Sir Henry Vane was granted in absentia two hundred acres of land at Running Marsh, which is now called Revere. At the same time, Governor Winthrop received one hundred fifty acres bordering Vane’s land—perhaps to keep tabs on Vane should he reappear, as promised. Vane, Winthrop could now write, “showed himself a true friend to New England, and a man of noble and generous mind.”

Governor Winthrop continued during Hutchinson’s internment to gauge her moods, although he no longer could spy her comings and goings from behind the windowpanes of his house. In conversations with the ministers, he took note of her inability to repent and reform. “She thought it now needless to conceal herself any longer,” he observed. It was even clearer to him now that “The root of all [the troubles in the colony] was found to be in Mistress Hutchinson.” She was surely allied with Satan, who never “would lose the opportunity of so fit an instrument.”

The snow was so deep that winter that most settlers rarely ventured outside except to attend church and cut more firewood. One January day, when Boston’s supply of wood had fallen dangerously low, about thirty men set out in fair weather for Spectacle Island to gather and cut more wood. The weather turned—the wind rose, the temperature dropped, the
snow fell, and “the bay was all frozen up, save a little channel,” Winthrop noted in his journal—so the men were stranded for two days on the island without fire or food. Several lost fingers and toes. One man died.

Sometime that winter John Cotton decided to remove himself from Massachusetts. Anne had turned Separatist, he believed, and the Boston church she had so influenced was growing Separatist too. He envisioned feeling more at home among the settlers of New Haven, Connecticut, whom his old friend John Davenport was about to join. The Reverend Davenport was now lodging with the Cottons, as he had since his arrival the previous June from London, where he had preached at St. Stephen’s Church. Born in England in 1597, Davenport had also traveled to Holland. Now he and a wealthy London merchant named Theophilus Eaton planned to purchase land from the Indians in modern-day New Haven and form a settlement named Quinnipiac, or “long water,” in April 1638. Like Cotton, the future minister of New Haven saw himself as part of the Church of England in the New World.

Cotton’s plan instilled terror in John Winthrop’s heart. Should word reach England that the esteemed Cotton was leaving Massachusetts Bay, emigration would surely slow or stop. If King Charles heard of further dissension here, he could send a ship to retrieve the charter, as he had threatened. Winthrop resolved to prevent Cotton from departing the colony. In every discussion of the controversy, the governor took the minister’s side. Winthrop informed people that Hutchinson and her followers had “abused” the Reverend Cotton and made him their “stalking horse,” the creature behind which hunters hide, under cover, while pursuing their prey.

Cotton cooperated by playing down the intimacy that he and Hutchinson had enjoyed. “Mistress Hutchinson seldom resorted to me,” he said of their relationship of two decades, “and when she did come to me, it was seldom or never (that I can tell of ) that she tarried long. I rather think that she was loath to resort much to me, or to confer long with me, lest she might seem to learn somewhat from me.” Whether Cotton stayed or left Massachusetts, he knew that his name could no longer be linked with hers.

Unlike the previous winter, when the conflict between the Hutchinsonians and the orthodox was raging, Massachusetts was now quiet, fearful, and vigilant. In the forced calm the members of the General
Court kept “an uneasy and constant watch” that more Hutchinsonian ideas not arise. Helen Campbell, a biographer of Anne Bradstreet, observed in 1891, “Freedom had ended for any who differed from the faith as laid down by the Cambridge Synod, and but one result could follow. All the more liberal spirits saw that Massachusetts could henceforth be no home for them, and made haste to other points.”

The magistrates continued to consolidate their power. Perhaps as a reward for their work in unifying the colony, the General Court granted its leaders Dudley and Winthrop each a thousand acres of additional land. These grants, first made at the November court session at which Hutchinson was tried, were clarified six months later, on May 2, 1638, when the court convened again in Cambridge. “It was ordered by this present Court that John Winthrop, Esquire, the present Governor, shall have 1200 acres of land, whereof 1000 was formerly granted to him, and Thomas Dudley, Esquire, the Deputy Governor, his 1000 granted to him by a former Court, both of them about six miles from Concord northwards; the said Governor to have his 1200 acres on the southerly side of two great stones standing near together close by the river,” and “the Deputy Governor to have his thousand acres on the northerly side of the said two great stones.”

As for the Hutchinsonian men who were now out of power, they gathered secretly throughout the winter of Anne’s imprisonment to discuss creating a new settlement that might allow them freedom of conscience. Most of these meetings were held in William Coddington’s large house on Shawmut, which was then the only brick structure in the town. In the Coddingtons’ parlor, Will Hutchinson and his wife’s most devoted male followers studied maps of the American coastline. Their requirements were good soil for farming, easy access to fresh water and wood, and an easier climate than Boston’s. They decided to head south to Long Island or New Jersey.

But the banished Reverend Roger Williams, who had settled Providence Plantation two years before, urged them to try Aquidneck Island, which met all their requirements. (Aquidneck was the native name of the island that Europeans, starting with Giovanni da Verrazzano in the early sixteenth century, called Rhode Island, which now contains the towns of Portsmouth, Middletown, and Newport.) Other than Williams’s plantation sixteen miles north by water and the encampment
at modern-day Cumberland, Rhode Island, of the solitary Reverend William Blackstone, who had been forced from Beacon Hill in 1634 by Boston’s rapid population growth, this region had no English settlers. Best of all, from Will Hutchinson’s perspective, the island of Aquidneck was only forty-five miles southwest of Boston. This was a boon to a man who, initially at least, had to leave most of his children and his incarcerated wife in Massachusetts.

February 2 was Candlemas (forerunner of Groundhog Day), a religious festival associated with early spring, although the official start of spring (and of the new year, by the English calendar) would not arrive until Lady Day, on March 25. With the hope of spring in the air, Will and more than a dozen other men prepared to sail to Providence Plantation and then on to their new land. While still in Boston, on March 7, they signed an agreement to become joint proprietors of Rhode Island:

Forty-year-old William Coddington, whom they chose as their sole magistrate, signed first. John Clarke, the twenty-eight-year-old minister who, some believe, penned the document, signed second. Will Hutchinson, whose wife’s ordeal had inspired them, put his name third. Will was not interested in being a magistrate: it was not in his nature to lead a coalition, although by virtue of being her spouse he was a central figure. John Coggeshall signed next, and then the crusty William Aspinwall, who became the new settlement’s first secretary and is the other candidate for transcribing this document, known as the Portsmouth Compact. The names of Anne’s two sons-in-law appear: John Sanford, the husband of Bridget, and Thomas Savage, who had married Faith. “Edward Hutchinson Jr.” was her oldest son, and “Edward Hutchinson Sr.” was Will’s younger brother, who later would move, with his wife and two sons, from Rhode Island back to England, where
he died in 1669. William Dyer, Mary’s husband, and William Baulston also signed. Henry Bull, who was illiterate, signed with an
X,
and someone else wrote, “his mark.” Randall Holden, who would represent these nineteen men at the purchase of the land they would occupy to the south, signed last.

After signing the solemn compact, Will Hutchinson added, to the right of the formal text, in an angled script that made clear this was a gloss,