American Jezebel (34 page)

The Hutchinson house lot was on the western shore of the Great Cove and is today accessible on foot or by boat. It is roughly a half-mile walk north of Flo’s Clam Shop on Park Street, in Island Park, Portsmouth, or a thirty-minute kayak ride from the nearest kayak rental shop, in Tiverton, Rhode Island, beneath the Sakonnet River Bridge. The kayak trip entails paddling west across the Sakonnet River (avoiding the ferries and large pleasure boats in the channel) and under a small bridge into the Great Cove, passing north of Spectacle Island, aiming for the Mount Hope Bridge on the horizon, cutting through the narrow pass beside the boat ramp frequented by pickup trucks and people fishing, heading for the cement plant beside Route 24, passing through the opening in the stone bridge in the water (which was erected in 1971 by the archeologists who directed the local excavation), and turning in to the isolated beach that was owned in 1638 by Will Hutchinson.

Along the dune above the strand are two bare places where shrubs and beach grasses do not grow. In this spot in the early 1970s, a team of archeologists led by Marley Brown of Brown University and James Deetz of Plymouth Plantation uncovered the remains of a midden, or garbage heap, which they dated to the period of earliest settlement: animal bones, clay pottery from early-seventeenth-century England and Germany, nails, thimbles, spoons, and many clay pipes made in Bristol, England, before 1640. Because this beach is on the site of Will Hutchinson’s 1638 house plot, it is reasonable to assume that these objects—now
on display at the Portsmouth Public Library, a few miles to the south—were disposed of by the Hutchinsons themselves, thrown into a trash pile not far from their house. The Portsmouth Historical Society (open from 2 to 4
P.M
. on summer Sundays) has little from the seventeenth century, but the nearby Tiverton Historical Society (open Thursday through Sunday afternoons in summer) has on display a 1690 house, an early privy, and a kitchen garden like those that Hutchinson planted.

Southwest of Rhode Island, in the coastal Connecticut town of Mystic, the Pequot Museum’s impressive collection of artifacts and information about the native culture brings to life the world that existed before the early English settlers arrived. A memorable film of the final battle of the Pequot War depicts many of Anne’s male contemporaries, including most notably the fierce Captain John Endicott.

Anne Hutchinson and six of her children died in the northern reaches of modern-day New York City. No remains of her farmhouse there have been uncovered, but the character of the area in which she lived is well preserved because it is amid the 550-acre Pelham Bay Park, the largest public park in New York City. Miles of trails meander through the protected saltwater marsh and forest of the former Dutch settlement in which she lived. The adjacent Pelham Bay Split Rock Golf Course backs onto what must have been her land. Another modern access point to the sites of her brief stay here is the Hutchinson River, the tributary of Long Island Sound beside which she lived, which later gave the adjacent parkway its name.

The massive Split Rock, in which her daughter Susan Hutchinson hid from the Siwanoy during their July 1643 raid, still stands at the juncture of the Hutchinson River Parkway and the New England Throughway, on the right side of the northbound Hutch at the eastbound exit ramp to the throughway. The rock was scheduled for demolition in the late twentieth century when the throughway was built, but at a local historian’s objection the proposed road was moved ten feet north to save the historic rock. Each week many thousands of drivers pass the Split Rock at roughly sixty-five miles an hour as they head north on the Hutch or take the exit from the Hutch to New England. But these vantage points offer no more than a split-second view, and there is no way on the high-speed road or exit ramp to stop a car, get out, and explore.

Perturbed that the Split Rock was not otherwise accessible, I asked at the Pelham Bay Split Rock Golf Course how to get a closer look at the rock. No one was able to help me. Outside the clubhouse, a bronze historical plaque elaborated on the story, placing Anne’s daughter Susan inside the rock after the massacre but giving no instructions on how to reach the rock. Someone suggested driving south on Shore Drive to the local stable, which might have a map.

At the stable, a young blond woman was standing out front. I introduced myself—her name was Lesli—and said I was looking for the Split Rock, where Anne Hutchinson died. Did the stable have a map, or did Lesli know how to walk to the rock? She didn’t, she said, but an old blacksmith who had ridden here for decades might know. She asked Nick, the blacksmith, who said, “Sure I know the Split Rock. It’s up the bridle path.” She asked him where, he explained it, and she turned to me. “Why don’t I just saddle you up a horse and take you there?”

Lesli, riding bareback, led me, on Strawberry, about a mile along the bridle path that initially skirts Shore Road. To our left, we could hear the distant noise of the cars and trucks on the Hutchinson River Parkway. To our right was the vast protected expanse of the woods and marsh of the Pelham Bay Park and eventually the golf course. The smack of an errant golf ball alarmed Strawberry, who began to buck. I had to dismount.

“Run ahead,” Lesli instructed me, taking the reins of my horse. “From what Nick said, the Split Rock should be right at the top of this hill.” I ran up the bridle path, aware that my family would soon be waiting back at the stable. The road noise indicated that the intersection of the two major highways was close. Then, off to the left, about seventy yards away over brambles and scrub, the Split Rock came into view. Bigger than a minivan, the rock is split through the middle, leaving a gap of about eighteen inches—more than enough space for a nine-year-old to slip inside. If not for the exit ramp, the road noise, and the artificial turf of the golf course, this wooded part of the northern Bronx seems little changed from Anne Hutchinson’s time.

As our horses retraced their steps to the stable, Lesli explained that the bridle path makes a loop past the Split Rock. While the loop trip takes several hours, our round-trip had lasted only an hour.

Across the road from the golf course clubhouse is the beginning of the twelve-mile-long Siwanoy Trail, a rural trail maintained jointly by the Appalachian Mountain Club and the New York City Parks Department. The yellow-blazed trail was designed to view a lagoon, salt marshes, a freshwater pond, large meadows and groves of trees opening into glades, and Long Island Sound. Patches of daylilies mark former doorsteps. Derelict stone walls designate old property lines. The path passes the 1842 Federal-style Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, which is open early afternoons on Wednesdays and weekends.

Moving back in time, one can travel to England, where Anne Hutchinson spent her first forty-three years. Much of the London she knew in the early seventeenth century is gone, either to the Great Fire of 1666 (which destroyed her father’s parish church, Saint Martin in the Vintry, and many other city churches) or to the bombing of World War II. The modern location of the church and vestry in which the Marburys lived from 1605 to 1611 is the northeast corner of Upper Thames and Queen Streets. There is now a park here, and across the street a bronze marker embedded in the sidewalk indicates that this was the Vintry. Among the extant London churches that share the look and feel of medieval churches such as Francis Marbury’s are All Hallows-by-the-Tower, St. Katherine Cree, St. Andrews Undershaft, St. Giles Cripplegate, St. Margaret (Westminster), St. Olave (Hart Street), and St. Helen’s Bishopsgate.

To get a sense of the early-seventeenth-century London neighborhood in which Anne Marbury Hutchinson lived, one can walk from the Guildhall Library (which holds the parish record of her 1612 marriage) south to the Southwark Bridge (a twentieth-century addition) over the Thames, passing the site of her father’s parish church one block shy of the river. The Three Barrel Walk follows the northern side of the Thames, but the river’s south side boasts an even wider, more pleasant walkway from which to imagine the city in its Jacobean incarnation. On this southern side, at the re-creation of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, staffers are well informed about London life in the Marburys’ period. Tours of the Globe provide an excellent sense not only of the architecture but also of the activities of that time.

Slightly west along the river, at the Tate Gallery of modern art, take the elevator to the seventh-floor café for a fine view of the modern
city. If you imagine the square-mile of the city of London surrounded largely by fields, and turn every crane into a steeple, you have some sense of the London of Hutchinson’s day. The most prominent building on the London skyline today, as then, is Saint Paul’s Cathedral. The present cathedral is the late-seventeenth-century successor of the medieval church that Francis Marbury and his family knew. While quite unlike the earlier church, Christopher Wren’s Saint Paul’s still has the consistory hall in its southwest corner, roughly on the spot where the Consistory Court tried Francis Marbury. And Paul’s Cross, at which sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Puritans preached, is still outside the cathedral’s south wall.

To explore the place where Francis Marbury was imprisoned in the late 1570s, visit the Borough neighborhood south of the Thames, near Southwark Cathedral and Guy’s Hospital. Head south on the Borough High Street and turn left into an alley called Mermaid Court to find the original site of the notorious Marshalsea Prison. The jail was moved a bit south in the nineteenth century, when it held for a time the father of Charles Dickens, who later described its inhabitants in
Little Dorrit
.

Among the relatively few London structures that have stood since Anne Marbury Hutchinson’s time are Westminster Abbey, the Henry VII Chapel, Prince Henry’s Room, the Guildhall, Gray’s Inn (whose garden was laid out by Sir Francis Bacon), Staple Inn, Lincoln’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Middle Temple Hall, the Queen’s House at Greenwich, the Tower of London, the Banqueting House on Whitehall, St. James’s Gatehouse and Palace, and the churches mentioned above. To learn more about sixteenth-and seventeenth-century London, visit the Museum of London, which has artifacts and three-dimensional models of the city through the centuries.

Finally, one can drive north from London to Lincolnshire, the county in which Anne Hutchinson spent more than half of her life. Lincolnshire “is a bit of a secret,” according to a local historian, Jean Howard. “Most people in England don’t even know where Lincolnshire is.” It is north-northeast of London, on the country’s east coast, above Cambridgeshire and East Anglia. Anne Hutchinson’s birthplace of Alford, Lincolnshire, is 140 miles—at least a four-hour drive—from London.

En route, about an hour shy of Alford, one passes through the town of Boston, where John Cotton preached for two decades before emigrating. The church of Saint Botolph, still England’s largest parish church, is still entered through the seven-hundred-year-old oak South Door that the Hutchinsons, Dudleys, and Bradstreets used. For a modest fee, a visitor can climb a narrow staircase from the nave up 290 steps to a lookout inside the famous stump, or tower. The elegant, gilded pulpit given to John Cotton in 1612 remains, and a newer chapel honors Cotton at the rear of the church. Glass-covered cases display books from Cotton’s era, including a leather-bound Holy Bible published in 1609, a 1629 Book of Holy Psalms, and a Brevarium Romanum from 1632.

Continuing on to Alford, a town below the eastern edge of the Wolds, one has no trouble finding the Market Square, which is much as it was when Will Hutchinson sold textiles here, and the adjacent green-limestone church, in which the Reverend Francis Marbury preached. A sign on the church lawn says, “A House of Worship and a Place of Prayer for 650 Years: Welcome to St. Wilfrid’s Church.” The second-story room in which Marbury taught is directly above the church’s front door and South Porch, accessed with permission from the vicar or the warden. The schoolroom now has a fireplace, although it did not then, and its large mullioned windows mimic those in the nave.

Inside the church, to the right of the altar, is the impressive marble tomb of Sir Robert Christopher, who died in 1669, probably the son of the man who built the manor house. In effigy, the knight holds a sword and wears armor and a curled periwig, and his wife, Dame Elizabeth Christopher, lies beside him in an elegant dress, coif, and high-heeled boots. The church’s rood screen remains, as does the Jacobean pulpit that was added near the end of the Reverend Marbury’s tenure in the church. The silver chalice that he sipped from during communion is kept in a bank vault in the nearby town of Louth, I was told by the vicar of Alford. Because Alford is the largest town in this part of Lincolnshire, its parish includes many churches besides Saint Wilfrid’s—Holy Trinity at Bilsby, St. James’s at Rigsby, St. Margaret’s at Saleby, St. Andrew’s at Beesby, St. Margaret’s at Well, St. Andrew’s at Hannah, St. Peter’s at Markby, and St. Andrew’s at Farlesthorpe—all of which are pictured on tea towels on sale inside Saint Wilfrid’s.

The early-seventeenth-century manor house that was built during Anne and Will’s early married life is just up the road from the church. Now a folk museum, it underwent a major restoration project in the early twenty-first century, during which its main timbers were exposed and dated to 1611. The manor house museum contains exhibits on Hutchinson and other prominent citizens, Captain John Smith and Thomas Paine. Behind the manor house, at the forefront of its charming rear garden, is a medicinal garden in honor of Hutchinson. Each April 26 the town observes Anne Hutchinson Day, inspired by the citizens of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, who began honoring her annually in April 1996. While the sites of the Marbury and Hutchinson houses are not marked—although a local antiques shop claims, without evidence, to be where Anne Hutchinson lived—there are still nearly two hundred thatched, mud-and-stud cottages around the town, some available for holiday rentals. The plague stone, one of the most vivid reminders of Anne Hutchinson’s time, stands in the garden of Tothby Manor, a private house on a residential street just west of the center of town.