Hutchinson, Anne (1591–1643)

views updated

Hutchinson, Anne (1591–1643)

English-born Puritan, religious leader and teacher, nurse and midwife who resided briefly in the Massachusetts Bay Colony until banished in 1638 following her conviction of heresy. Name variations: Anne Marbury Hutchinson; Mrs. Hutchinson. Pronunciation: HUTCH-in-sun. Born Anne Marbury around July 17, 1591, in Alford, Lincolnshire, England; died at Pelham Bay settlement, Long Island, during an Indian raid in August or September 1643; daughter of Francis (a spiritual divine) and Bridget (Dryden) Marbury; learned reading, writing, and arithmetic at home from her father; married William Hutchinson, on August 9, 1612; children: Edward (b. 1613), Susanna (b.1614), Richard (b. 1615), Faith (b. 1617), Bridget (b.1619), Francis (b. 1620), Elizabeth (b. 1622), William (b. 1623), Samuel (b. 1624), Anne (b. 1626), Mary (b.1628), Katherine (b. 1630), William (b. 1631), Susanna (b. 1633), Zuriel (b. 1636), and miscarried 16th child in 1637.

Family moved to London (1605); moved with husband and children to the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1634); tried for heresy (1637); excommunicated, then publicly recanted her religious views (1638); moved to colony on Rhode Island (1638); following continued religious persecution and death of her husband, moved to Long Island to establish settlement at Pelham Bay (1642).

Anne Hutchinson was born into a family of small gentry status in rural Elizabethan England, only three years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. She grew up in a period that has been characterized as energetic and spontaneous, enthusiastic about meeting life head-on, and even tolerant of moderate religious dissent, but this was largely a propagandistic depiction of late Elizabethan England. The early decades of the 17th century were ones of political and religious tension throughout the country, which prompted much of the emigration to the colonies in America. And while the lives of women at this time have typically been regarded as a constant cycle of pregnancy, birth, and death, these women could, and did, feel persecution on religious grounds as thoroughly as their fathers, husbands, or sons. Just such experience resulted in the moves by Anne Hutchinson and her family from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony, then to Rhode Island and, finally, to Long Island within a span of slightly less than ten years.

Anne's father Francis Marbury was a spiritual English divine who was censured on more than one occasion by the established Church of England. Marbury had strong Puritan leanings, tending to austerity in moral and religious matters, but denied the label of Puritan when he was brought before St. Paul's Consistory Court, London, in 1578. To his personal misfortune, he still continued to preach in the Puritan manner and endured 15 years of enforced silence from preaching. In those years, he was a teacher, and by 1590 he was headmaster of the Grammar School in Alford, Lincolnshire, where all his pupils were boys, since the little education allowed to girls at the time usually occurred within the home.

By 1587, Marbury had married his second wife Bridget Dryden , who came from a strongly Puritan family. Anne was their third child, born in July 1591. Marbury was preaching regularly around this time, at the Church of St. Wilfrid in the small market town of Alford. In sermons that stressed his affiliation with the Church of England, he also denounced certain practices and called for improved training and education for its clergy.

Anne grew up in a large family, which eventually included 12 sisters and brothers, as well as two half-sisters; the household was rife with religious discussion, influenced by her father's relatively liberal beliefs. Few records remain from which to reconstruct Anne's childhood years in Alford. In keeping with the status of the Marbury family, she and her sisters probably received some education from their father at home, with emphasis on "necessary" reading, writing, and arithmetic, that was considered practical and appropriate for women in early 17th-century English society. As an elder daughter, along with her half-sisters, Anne also had nursery duties, helping her mother in the care of the younger children, and probably assisting in their delivery.

The development of Anne's conduct, and many of her social attitudes, were heavily influenced by her father. Some biographers maintain that she modeled herself strongly according to his example. For reading materials, she had the Bible (in the Geneva translation) and her father's sermons and writings, at a time when matters of religion were generally fueled by the religious controversy that coincided with the early reign of England's King James I. In 1605, Anne, her parents, and nine siblings moved to London because her father had been appointed to the Church of St. Martin in the Vintry, perhaps as rector. This move, of approximately 140 miles distance, took the girl in her teens from the simple world of rural Lincolnshire into one of un-heard-of luxuries that included windowed houses, exotic fruits and plants, and books; it also drew the Marbury family into the larger world of religious nonconformity and political plots. Religious nonconformists, also known as Protestant dissenters, who declared their disagreement with the doctrines and practices of the Church of England could face penalties ranging from proscription of worship to disqualification from religious office during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I , and then King James I.

In London, Anne thrived. Her midwifery skills were honed by her attendance at her mother's deliveries of her brothers Thomas and Anthony, in 1606 and 1608, and her sister Katherine Marbury in 1610—at a time of increased royal hostility toward women and midwives. From this experience, she began to form her own "rebellious" ideas concerning what she viewed as the inapplicability of the doctrine of original sin to the innocence of newborns; this was at odds with the then-prevalent notion regarding predestination of all souls. Meanwhile, acquaintances and family friends visited the Marbury family during their tenure in London, including William Hutchinson and his father. Textile merchants who made periodic trips from Alford to London, the Hutchinsons stopped by the rectory at St. Martin's whenever they had the opportunity.

In 1611, the death of Francis Marbury meant the loss for Anne of the intellectual companionship and inspirational support she had always enjoyed from him; now the stubborn independence he had always encouraged in her were called upon in support of her grieving mother. Anne became a surrogate parent to her younger siblings, especially her youngest sister Katherine, who could be regarded in some ways as Anne's "first disciple."

At age 21, Anne wed farmer-merchant William Hutchinson and moved with him back to Alford. This marriage has been evaluated variously by her biographers, but most opinions seem to echo the estimation put forward by Selma Williams , that this was "one of history's all-time great romances—and, rare for the 17th century, a marriage of equals who respected each other's strengths. Several times during the next three decades, husband and wife would take turns sacrificing everything for the other." Their peers, however, were less generous in their comments on the couple, regarding Anne as dominant and authoritarian while regarding William as weak and wholly controlled by his wife.

Returned to Lincolnshire, Anne Hutchinson's cycle of pregnancy began with the birth and baptism of her first child, Edward, in late May 1613. During her married life, Hutchinson was pregnant, on average, every 15 to 23 months, and throughout a total of 16 pregnancies she relied heavily on piety and prayer to sustain and strengthen her. She was both primary caregiver and health provider for her increasing family. She also supervised the work of the few servants (who were frequently at work in the Hutchinsons' textile shop each morning by six o'clock) and ended the day with supper, followed by prayers and Bible reading. Within Alford, Hutchinson and her family seemed the very picture of respectability and prosperity.

One month before Anne's marriage to William, a new preacher, John Cotton, took over the pulpit of St. Botolph's Church, in the English village of Boston, near Alford. Since there was no preacher in Alford for the next few years, the Hutchinson family made semi-frequent trips to Boston to attend services led by Cotton. During Hutchinson's 1616–17 pregnancy with her fourth child, she experienced a period of "intense mental and spiritual conflict," trying to come to an understanding of her scripturalist interpretation of faith. Cotton's preaching at the time, which increasingly de-emphasized the doctrine that humans were born into a sinful condition, accorded with her "rebelliously Puritan" leanings, as she became less and less interested in ceremonies and rituals. Hutchinson began to follow Cotton's example of holding meetings in her own home, where she would sermonize and discuss personal interpretations and re-interpretations of Scripture with her growing, predominantly female, audience.

In the 1620s, as persecution of nonconformists began to increase, Cotton was harassed by Church of England authorities for his notion of an elite group within his congregation who held a special covenant with God. Coincident with this increase in religious tension was the publication of pamphlets in which the nature of women and the issue of female freedom of behavior were debated. Anne and William had already begun to reflect on the expediency of fleeing religious persecution in England, or of becoming nominal conformists, when the churchman William Laud rose to the office of privy councillor in 1627. Knowing Laud's plans to impose strict religious uniformity, with a particular emphasis on targeting Puritans and the Scots, Hutchinson's sense of anguish and personal crisis was intensified, and Cotton's tenure at St. Botolph's Church became increasingly uncertain. Eventually both Cotton and the Hutchinsons chose to remain in England, but not to conceal their Puritanism, and to work for the purification of the Church and the reformation of the government that they considered urgently necessary.

In 1630, following the birth of their 12th child, the Hutchinsons underwent a period of acute personal crisis and grief. In September, their eldest daughter Susanna died within a week of her 16th birthday, and less than a month later 8-year-old Elizabeth died. Illness had prevented Cotton from preaching around that time, and Hutchinson felt the need of more support and inspiration than those around her could provide, especially in the face of accusations that the deaths of her daughters might be a judgment on the parents' sinfulness.

The Lord judgeth not as man judgeth, better to be cast out of the Church than to deny Christ.
—Anne Hutchinson

Laud's persecution of Protestant dissenters continued through the early 1630s, and by 1632 the Hutchinsons were again considering emigration as a means of escape. The death of William's father in the previous year gave the family the money to implement such a decision, and nonconformity charges levied against Cotton only served to strengthen Anne's resolve. The final incentive came when Laud was raised to the office of archbishop of Canterbury, with administrative control of the Church of England. The family decided on New England over Holland and the island of Barbados, and in preparation for departure they tried to become less visible in the village community. Treasured family possessions were given away, and the family business was put in the hands of William's brother John, but then the departure planned for 1633 was delayed because of the advanced stage of Hutchinson's 14th pregnancy. In July of that year, Cotton sailed for New England aboard the Griffin, with Hutchinson's oldest son Edward, who was 21, her brother-in-law Edward, and his wife Sarah.

In the summer of 1634, the Hutchinsons finally sailed from England, also aboard the Griffin, and arrived in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, on September 18. The Atlantic crossing had been spiritually tumultuous. During the voyage, Hutchinson did not hesitate to voice her hope that New England would mean the end of what she perceived to be "the onerus dictum that women should be seen but never heard." After her announcement to the Reverend Zechariah Symmes that she would lead her own meetings once she was settled in the Colony, and that she held to a covenant of grace rather than the one of works, which was traditionally stressed in Puritan doctrine, she and the misogynistic Puritan preacher developed a mutual dislike of each other. Hutchinson also aroused hostility among others, including William Bartholomew, with her claims of receiving revelations, which contradicted the Puritan, gendered hierarchy. Bartholomew increasingly viewed Hutchinson and her daughter Faith as witches, and Reverend Symmes, upon arrival in Boston, advised the Boston church not to accept Hutchinson for membership without first subjecting her to a period of scrutiny. Thus religious controversy had become a significant part of her life by the time Hutchinson first stepped onto New England soil.

Although reunited with her family and her friend Cotton, Hutchinson had many adjustments to make in the strange New World. People around her spoke the same language, but everything from food to living conditions was unfamiliar: people drank water more often than beer, and sweetened foods with maple syrup instead of costly imported sugar. Under the influence of a marked shortage of women in nearly all of the North American colonies, women enjoyed a higher status than their European contemporaries. In early 17th-century colonial Massachusetts, however, marriage was the only acceptable life for women, and those who never married were neither respected nor allowed to exercise any authority over their lives. Women could expect little autonomy in the matter of choosing a potential mate, although they did enjoy some property and contract rights not available in England. Within the Massachusetts colony, however, Protestant dissenter doctrine was firmly opposed to "meddling women," or women who rebelled against their position within political, societal, and religious affairs. Such women were in fact considered subversive to the authority of both church and state.

Initially, Hutchinson and her family seemed valuable additions to the family-based, theocratic farming village of Boston. Small gentry origins gave Hutchinson enhanced social status over what she had known in England, and she had the admiration and regard of colonists whom she nursed through illnesses or helped in the delivery of their babies. She trained her servants well, instructed her children, and in March 1636, at age 44, was delivered of her 15th child. Hutchinson's first two years in the colony were happy ones. People were generally attracted to her, on the basis of her magnetic, forceful personality, as she expressed herself readily and encouraged other women in the village of Boston to do so. Among the colonists who were less kindly disposed toward her, however, were Thomas Dudley and John Winthrop, who was later governor of the colony. Winthrop, in particular, expressed a dislike of "intellectual women."

After a couple of years in Boston, Hutchinson again began to emulate the Reverend Cotton's practice of holding prayer meetings at her house. The gatherings began as a group of five or six women in their late 30s and early 40s who would meet weekly, easing their feelings of loneliness and isolation. Over the months, however, the group increased to an estimated 60 to 80 members, including men as well as women. Then the nature of the gatherings was expanded to include lecture-discussion gatherings on Mondays as well as the original meetings on Thursdays, and Hutchinson found herself rebuked by her friend Cotton for not attending the meetings led by others.

At the core of Hutchinson's religious outlook was a sense of individual initiative, and the worth and responsibility of the person. Boston clergy were initially pleased with her meetings, seeing them as an indication of "a glorious religious revival." But by the autumn of 1636, their concern had begun to shift to her leadership in the meetings. Early in 1637, her brother-in-law John Wheelwright began to preach on the covenants of grace and works; within two months the General Court, meeting in private session, found him guilty of sedition and contempt. By May 1637, opponents to Hutchinson were in political office and ready to act against her.

On August 30, 1637, the first synod ever called in New England, the Newtown Synod, began a nine-day meeting. When it was concluded, 82 of Hutchinson's religious opinions had been found either erroneous or blasphemous. After a two-month delay, Hutchinson faced criminal trial proceedings in Newtown, which was not her town of residence. She received legal counsel neither before nor during the trial and faced as many as 49 inquisitors, with John Winthrop, now governor of the colony, acting as both prosecutor and judge. At the core of the trial proceedings was the question of whether Hutchinson had broken the Fifth Commandment in failing to honor her heavenly Father and his earthly agents, the government of the colony. The inquisitors, led by Winthrop, questioned Hutchinson on her advocacy of a covenant of grace, to which she responded that to "preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth." To these authorities, Hutchinson was presenting herself as a threat to the social and political stability of the colony, on the basis of her claim to leadership as a result of direct revelation from God. Those who desired to give witness on Hutchinson's behalf were bullied into silence, and her husband William was not allowed to testify for her. Hutchinson was being tried not only for her heretical views on matters such as revelation, grace, and predestination, but for her interpretation of the New Testament as preached by Massachusetts Puritan ministers. Personal grievances also came into play, as Governor Winthrop began the hearing with a personalized attack on the accused, condemning her behavior as both ungodly and unfeminine when he referred to her as an "American Jezebel." To her accusers, Hutchinson replied, "If you do condemn me for speaking what in my conscience I know to be truth I must commit myself unto the Lord."

The trial concluded with a sentence of banishment being imposed upon Hutchinson without actually delivering a guilty verdict. It was well into the autumn of 1637, and the court then determined that the weather was too harsh for a woman to leave the colony. She was held under house arrest, with the expectation that she would leave the colony in the spring of 1638. When her 16th pregnancy ended in a miscarriage sometime in the early months of that year, the lost life was rumored to have been "a monster" and the event was seen as an appropriate punishment for her threat to the marital family unit that was the base of Puritan Massachusetts society. In March 1638, Hutchinson made a public recantation of her views, but she had already been excommunicated by the Boston Church.

Hutchinson set out with her husband and children for the colony of Rhode Island, where they settled in the community of Aquidneck. Within a year, she was preaching, which provoked leaders in the Massachusetts colony to send a delegation to Aquidneck in 1640, but they failed to chasten the woman they had banished from their jurisdiction. From this time, she and her followers were declared antinomians, or people who refused to follow the moral laws of the Old Testament. In New England, this religious and social movement held particular appeal for women.

In 1642, with the death of William, Hutchinson lost her "beloved husband, best friend, devoted partner." In an effort to deal with her grief as well as continuing persecution directed from the Massachusetts colony, she decided to relocate with the six children still under her care. The beleaguered family set out for Long Island, a Dutch-held colony at the time, where Hutchinson helped to establish a settlement at Pelham Bay. But sometime in August or September of that year, the community came under Indian attack, and Hutchinson and five of her six children were killed. Her youngest daughter, taken into captivity by the attackers, was ransomed by the Dutch years later.

For as long as Puritan authority continued in New England, no written works discussed Anne Hutchinson, in either a positive or a neutral fashion. The first sympathetic account—which portrayed Hutchinson as a woman possessed of "a restless spirit, [and] a questioning mind"—appeared over 30 years after her death, as part of a general revilement of the Puritans and their tenets.

sources:

Abramowitz, Isidore. The Great Prisoners: The First Anthology of Literature Written in Prison. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.

Battis, Emery. Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962.

Koehler, Lyle. "The Case of the American Jezebels: Anne Hutchinson and Female Agitation during the Years of Antinomian Turmoil, 1636–1640," in William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series, Vol. XXXI, no. 1. January 1974, pp. 55–78.

Rugg, Winnifred King. Unafraid: A Life of Anne Hutchinson. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1930.

Williams, Selma. Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.