American Jezebel (11 page)

The Reverend Shepard interjected, “I know
no
reason of the oath but the importunity of this gentlewoman.”

John Endicott addressed the defendant directly, suggesting she was guilty of deceit: “You lifted up your eyes as if you took God to witness that you came to entrap
none,
and yet you will have them swear?” Fifty-nine-year-old Endicott wore a Vandyke beard, a square collar, and—though not a minister—a skullcap. He was also the only man present who carried a sword. Endicott appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Mrs. Hutchinson” as a choleric mix of bullishness and idealism, “ready to propagate the religion of peace by violence.” Hawthorne writes, “Next came Endicott, who would stand with his drawn sword at the gate of heaven, and resist to the death all pilgrims thither, except they traveled his own path.”

A former soldier, Endicott refused to be separated from the thirty-inch steel blade whose decorated handle protruded from its hilt, at his waist. He had used this sword in May 1628 to hack down a “pagan” maypole and frighten away drunken revelers. Six years later he had used it to slice from every colonial flag and regimental banner that he could find the red cross of Saint George the dragon slayer, a symbol of the English monarchy. His zeal in removing any superstitious and popish “relic of Antichrist” would be celebrated by Hawthorne in his stories “The Maypole of Merry Mount” (1836) and “Endicott and the Red Cross” (1838).

A leader of the troops against the Pequots on Block Island in 1636 and in the more recent Connecticut campaign, Endicott, according to William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Plantation, had provoked the war with the Pequots, a tribe whose name is “destroyers” in Algonquian. This war had its origins in the Pequot killings of two questionable English traders—a Captain John Stone, of Virginia, along with his seven-man crew, in 1634, and John Oldham, a planter of Watertown, in 1636—off the Connecticut coast. After Oldham’s murder, the Massachusetts General Court, under Vane, had sent a volunteer army of ninety men in four ships under Endicott and three other leaders to Block Island to avenge Oldham’s death by killing the native men and capturing their island. On August 1, 1636, Endicott’s ship reached
Block Island in heavy surf and a hard wind. Forty Pequots shot arrows at them and disappeared. Captain Endicott and his troops went ashore and, after searching fruitlessly for the men, plundered their villages. With sixty men Endicott sailed back across the sound to the high rocky shore near the mouth of the Connecticut River, where hundreds of Pequots lived in walled villages. The English were met by three hundred Pequot warriors, who offered to lay down their arms if the English troops would do the same. Endicott ordered his men to charge. The English, whose suits of armor protected them from the natives’ arrows, burned Pequot wigwams, destroyed their canoes, and sailed home. That fall Massachusetts made a treaty with the Narragansett Indians against the Pequots, who attacked English settlements in Connecticut in reprisal. The following summer, just a few months before this trial, the combined armies of Massachusetts and Connecticut had wiped out the Pequot tribe.

In the courtroom Anne Hutchinson replied to Endicott’s suggestion that she was disingenuous in asking the ministers to swear. “They say I said, ‘The fear of man is a snare, why should I be afraid?’ When I came unto them [at the December meeting], they urging many things unto me, and I being backward”—cautious—“to answer at first, at length this Scripture came into my mind, 29th Proverbs 25: ‘The fear of man brings a snare, but who puts his trust in the Lord shall be safe.’”

In her telling, she had been doing nothing more than quoting Scripture to the ministers. They had misunderstood her and seen her words as an attack. But she meant only that if people trusted God, then they would no longer fear men.

Dudley changed the subject. “Mark what a flourish Mistress Hutchinson puts upon the business that she had
witnesses
to disprove what was said, and here is no man to bear witness.”

She retorted, “If you will not call them in, that is nothing to me.”

“We desire to know of her and her witnesses what they deny, and then we shall speak upon oath,” the Reverend Eliot offered. “I know nothing we have spoken of but we may swear to.” Several other ministers nodded.

John Coggeshall, a wealthy silk merchant in his forties who was one of the Boston deputies whom the court had just dismissed for supporting Wheelwright and Hutchinson, called out from the back of the
hall. “I desire to speak a word. It is desired that the elders would confer with Mr. Cotton before they swear.”

Flushed with indignation, Endicott said to Coggeshall, “I think this carriage of yours tends to further casting dirt upon the face of the judges!”

“
Her
carriage does the same,” added a Winthrop supporter, twenty-six-year-old Roger Harlackenden of Cambridge, a patron of the Reverend Shepard.

William Colburn, Boston’s town assessor, who, like Coggeshall, had signed the petition, said, “We desire that our teacher may be called.”

Winthrop indicated his assent, so the Reverend John Cotton rose from his seat behind the judges and walked toward the defendant. Without a word or any change in expression, Cotton stood beside Hutchinson before the court.

The Reverends Eliot and Shepard repeated, “There is no reason for an oath.”

“Because it is the end of all strife,” Israel Stoughton, a Dorchester deputy, explained, “I think you should swear and put an end to the matter.”

“Our oath is not to satisfy Mistress Hutchinson but the court,” the Reverend Peter said.

Endicott drew his sword and waved it at the crowd. “The assembly will be satisfied by it!”

“If the country will be satisfied, you must swear,” Deputy Governor Dudley told the ministers.

“I conceive the country doth not require it,” the Reverend Shepard offered.

“Then let her witnesses be called,” Dudley suggested.

“Who be they?” Winthrop asked, relieved for any diversion from the conflict over the oath.

Anne Hutchinson named three witnesses: John Coggeshall, who had just spoken briefly; Thomas Leverett, a lawyer and alderman originally from Boston in Lincolnshire; and “our teacher,” the Reverend John Cotton.

Winthrop said to her, “Mr. Coggeshall was not present” at the meetings with the ministers.

“Yes, but I was,” Coggeshall countered. He stepped forward and explained, “Only I desired to be silent [on the matter] till I should be called.”

Staring at him, the governor said, “Will you, Mr. Coggeshall, say that she did
not
say so?”

“Yes, I dare say that she did not say all that which they lay against her,” Coggeshall ventured.

Aghast that a Christian man would publicly question a minister, the Reverend Peter rebuked Coggeshall. “How
dare
you look into the court to say such a word?”

Demurring, the wealthy silk merchant said, “Mr. Peter takes upon him to forbid me. I shall be silent.” And he was.

Governor Winthrop moved swiftly to Anne’s second witness. “Well, Mr. Leverett, what were the words [she used]? I pray, speak.”

“To my best remembrance,” Leverett replied cautiously, “when the elders did send for her, Mr. Peter did with much vehemency and entreaty urge her to tell what difference there was between Mr. Cotton and them. And upon his urging of her she said, ‘The fear of man is a snare, but they that trust upon the Lord shall be safe.’ And being asked wherein the difference was, she answered that they did not preach a covenant of grace so clearly as Mr. Cotton did, and she gave this reason of it: because that as the apostles were for a time without the spirit so until they had received the witness of the spirit they could not preach a covenant of grace so clearly.” Leverett, a close friend of Cotton’s from Boston in Lincolnshire, had arrived here with Cotton in 1633 and then been named a ruling elder of the Boston, Massachusetts, church—a sign of widespread respect.

“Don’t you remember,” Winthrop inquired of him, “that she said they were not able ministers of the New Testament?”

Before Leverett could answer, Hutchinson said, “Mr. Weld and I had an hour’s discourse at the window and then I spake that,
if
I spake it.”

The Reverend Weld wondered aloud why she admitted this now, having demanded proof earlier when he had charged her with it: “Was not my answer to you, leave it there, and if I cannot prove it you shall be blameless?”

“This I remember I spoke,” she said to Weld. “Do not you remember that I came afterwards to the window when you were writing?”

“No, truly,” Weld said.

“But I do, very well,” she said.

Frustrated by so many contradictions, denials, and evasions, Governor Winthrop turned to her final witness, the only one with sufficient power to sit among the magistrates. “Mister Cotton,” Winthrop said wearily, “the court desires that you declare what you do remember of the conference.”

All eyes in the hall settled on the solemn visage of Anne’s closest ally. The Reverend John Cotton had deep-set, heavily lidded eyes and a mustache that he combed into two slender, waxed points. Beneath his black skullcap, his curly hair was going gray. In a few weeks he would turn fifty-three. He wore the standard Puritan clerical garb, a black robe with a white bib and collar.

Cotton had a pivotal role in the courtroom that day. Besides being Hutchinson’s confidant, he was the most admired minister in the colony, one of two preachers at its largest and most influential church. He was a studious sort who avoided controversy, observed others without apparent judgment, and let few know what he believed. Now, though, he would be compelled to speak. No one present could say how he would testify, but all sensed that the outcome of the trial depended on his words.

Six and a half years before Anne Hutchinson’s birth, a struggling Derbyshire lawyer, Rowland Cotton, and his wife had their second child, a boy named John, in December 1584. Three and a half years later, when John Cotton was a child, England defeated the Spanish Armada. In Derby, as in most parts of the country, this victory over Catholic Spain prompted a monthlong harrying, or violent persecution, of English Catholics, an occurrence whose “justice” all of the boy’s subsequent education would confirm. For John Cotton, as for most Puritans, the Roman Catholic Church was the reincarnation of the biblical Whore of Babylon. Ironically, years later in Massachusetts it was said that Cotton was “the unmitred pope of a pope-hating commonwealth.”

Just before turning thirteen, John Cotton matriculated as a secondary-level student at Cambridge, the university where he spent the next fifteen years. The Reformation had discounted Thomas Aquinas and the other medieval Catholic scholars so that Cambridge was now a solidly Calvinist “nursery for the Puritan ministry.” Cotton received his bachelor of arts degree following four years of rhetoric, logic, philosophy, and Latin disputation. Five more years of these subjects plus mastery of Greek, astronomy, and perspective led to the master’s degree. During this period, Cotton entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he received a series of honors, being named fellow, dean, lecturer, and, finally, head catechist. The culminating bachelor of divinity degree, which required five years of Hebrew, theology, disputation, and preaching, was granted to him in 1613, when he was twenty-eight.

A few years earlier, in his midtwenties, Cotton was converted to Puritanism and “born again.” As he later recalled this intensely emotional experience, it was a sermon on grace given at Emmanuel College
by the Reverend Richard Sibbes that “opened his heart” to God for the first time. Not long after, when it was his turn to preach at the university, he offered, instead of his usual arch lecture in Ciceronian Latin, a plain, literal sermon on repentance. Most of his peers were horrified, but one, the brilliant John Preston, who himself became a famous Puritan preacher, was “pierced at the heart” and converted to Puritanism. Cotton’s words inflicted a wound that “no cunning in Philosophy, or skill in Physick would suffice to heal,” recalled Preston, who in 1622 succeeded John Donne as the preacher at Lincoln’s Inn, the law school, in London.

The summer before Cotton received his divinity degree, he left the relative security of Cambridge to begin his career. His first job was in Boston, one of Lincolnshire’s largest towns, located near the mouth of the Witham River where it meets the Wash, on the North Sea. Boston is set amid the vast, level, isolated land of the Fens, a marshy area extending over thirteen hundred square miles of the shires of East Anglia, Cambridge, Peterborough, and Lincoln, in eastern England. The parish of Boston was England’s largest, making it a plum assignment for a newly minted vicar. The town’s name is a shortened version of “Botolph’s Stone,” the medieval name for its earliest church, founded by Saint Botolph, an Anglo-Saxon monk, in the seventh century.

The magnificent, fourteenth-century parish church of Saint Botolph’s, also known as the “Boston Stump,” appears from a distance to rise, stumplike and solitary, from the flat land all around. (The nickname may also derive from its truncated perpendicular tower, which seems to lack a steeple, or from the suspicion with which the rugged Fenlanders, who fished and fowled for survival, viewed the townspeople.) The structure of the church, which one enters from the town’s marketplace through the seven-hundred-year-old Gothic-style south door, is today much as it was in the seventeenth century.

In the Middle Ages Boston had been a bustling, international seaport, famous for its fairs, its friars, and its guilds. But by 1612, when John Cotton arrived, the town had endured a half century of economic depression. Though it was now relatively quiet, it had become a center of ecclesiastical nonconformity. One of Cotton’s Puritan predecessors in 1583 pleaded with church authorities to be freed from wearing the surplice, the white vestment that he considered a remnant of Catholicism,
and from using rings in marriage ceremonies. In 1590 a Puritan vicar of Boston ordered the destruction of the rood screen in the church. And in 1604 the Bishop of Lincoln discharged Boston’s vicar, Thomas Wooll, for not using the sign of the cross in baptisms and not wearing the surplice but using it instead as a “cushion to sit on.” Wooll left an assistant in charge in Boston and went to preach in nearby Skirbeck. But it was Wooll who headed the delegation that traveled to Cambridge in 1612 to select a new permanent vicar for Saint Botolph’s. Hearing that Cotton was the best young preacher there, Wooll offered him the job.

As a gift to Cotton, in acknowledgment of the importance of preaching, the church and town presented him on his arrival with a new pulpit, a lovely hexagonal wood box gilded and raised seven steps above the floor and his congregation of about a thousand souls. This carved tribute to his skill eased his adjustment to the demands of parish life. Within a year of arriving he acquired (in the parlance of the day) a wife—Elizabeth Horrocks, of a nonconformist family—something every Puritan preacher was expected to do, in part to distinguish himself from a Catholic priest. John and Elizabeth Cotton lived in the brick vicarage with gardens that adjoined the church and marketplace. Over the years they hosted many Cambridge divinity students, who were especially welcome in the vicarage, as the couple was childless.

Cotton attained a seventeenth-century form of celebrity, gaining renown during his two decades in Boston as England’s preeminent Puritan preacher and intellectual. His calm manner and evident piety appealed universally, even to those who did not share his Reformed theology. In 1614 the bishop’s registrar described him as “a man of great parts for his learning, eloquent and well-spoken,” which explains Cotton’s respectable salary the following year of a hundred pounds. He spent hours every day preparing to preach. “True happiness,” he believed, “was reserved for the man who contemplated the eternal words of God rather than the man who allowed the natural world to impress its fluctuating character on him.” According to the
History of Alford and Rigsby,
“The Reverend John Cotton of Boston is reported on one occasion to have preached three sermons of two hours each in two days, and his usual Sunday afternoon services lasted four hours.” Some parishioners complained of wanting to “wink or nod” during the vicar’s “in
cessant” sermons, which were usually followed by a required hour of catechism instruction. But most parishioners listened, spellbound, and some traveled long distances to hear his extravagant preaching. In response to public demand, “the saintly Cotton” added a Thursday lecture to his weekly obligation, an innovation that would become a central feature of life in New England.

The summer that John Cotton arrived in Boston, Anne Marbury and William Hutchinson were married, in London, at Saint Mary Woolnoth Church. Following their August 9 wedding, the twenty-one-year-old bride and her twenty-six-year-old husband removed to their hometown of Alford, twenty-four miles north of Boston, to furnish a house and start a family. They did not know Cotton but often went on a Sunday pilgrimage to a neighboring parish to “seek after the Lord of Hosts” by hearing a different minister preach. Among nonconformists, who valued skill in preaching over all, this was a common practice, although it defied the 1559 Act of Uniformity, which required all English people to frequent their local parish church.

The region around Alford offered many medieval parish churches within ten miles for the Hutchinsons to visit—Well, Rigsby, Bilsby, Saleby, Cumberworth, and Mumby, to cite just a few. The large market town of Boston was not so near, but someone told the Hutchinsons of Cotton’s gift. One fine Sunday Anne and Will traveled to Boston to stand among the hundreds of worshipers crowding the massive nave of the Church of Saint Botolph’s as John Cotton lectured for hours. From that day on, Anne and Will made the Sunday trip to Boston as often as the weather, her frequent pregnancies, and their many duties allowed.

The twenty-four-mile trip took roughly six hours. Well before dawn, Will mounted one of his horses and helped Anne onto the pillion behind him. The small children stayed home in the care of servants, although as the family grew they would hitch horses to a wagon for the long trip. But in those early days, Anne and Will rode a single horse west from Alford, across their own fields, up into the Wolds. Passing two intersections, Miles Cross and Ulceby Cross, they turned southwest on the Roman road to Boston, which was muddy in spring and fall and impassable during winter. They passed through the villages of Dalby, Partney, Spilsby, and East Keal, a region that is desolate and sparsely populated even today. Hedgerows divide vast fields of arable
land that are punctuated only by occasional groves of trees. “Lincolnshire is not one of the favoured counties of England,” a history of the region observes.

Ten miles south of Alford, just after East Keal, they descended from the Wolds into the Fens, where the land is as flat as Holland. On a clear day they could see the gray Boston Stump rising from the Fens, which were green or brown depending on the season. Portions of the Fens flooded in winter, but in early summer pastures appeared on which to graze cattle and make hay. So vast were these wetlands that, as Isaac Casaubon noted in 1661, the “solitary bittern,” a heron, “and the imitative dotterel,” a kind of plover, gave their booming calls and “sharp, plaintive cries” undisturbed.

The Hutchinsons passed the Fen towns of Keal Cote, Stickney, and Sibsey, each with its own church and lecturers, but it was Boston where Anne—and thus Will—wished to be. She was drawn to Cotton’s “peculiar” theology, which combined two seemingly opposite doctrines—
absolute grace
and
conditional reprobation.
“Absolute grace” means God’s grace is given absolutely to the elect so that neither good works nor faith can bring salvation. “Conditional reprobation” means that human depravity (being damned before birth) is conditional on one’s misbehavior during life, which God decreed in his foreknowledge of human behavior. These two ideas—grace is absolute and controlled by God; damnation is conditional on a person’s behavior—seem contradictory, but they had tremendous appeal to Anne Hutchinson.

To a brilliant, seventeenth-century Puritan woman, Cotton’s theology of unmerited saving grace opened a life of studying and interpreting God’s word that was otherwise denied her. Taking his doctrine of the Holy Ghost dwelling within a justified person even further than he did, she saw herself as a mystic participant in the transcendent power of the Almighty, beyond mere magistrates and ministers, who were not divine but only temporal and human. Thus his doctrine, which extended the female experience of humility to men, created in a woman like her a new feeling of pride.

It is a paradox that Cotton’s theology, which minimized the importance of individual action, also enabled individuals without public power to rebel against the culture. It was the perfect theology to em
power women in a society where women received status, power, and influence only through their husbands and fathers. “Women were denied training for the ministry, and indeed had no assigned roles at all in the religious life of the churches,” the historians Jack Adamson and Harold Folland noted in their biography of Henry Vane. Cotton’s theology enabled “a woman of strong religious sensibility to let the tongue speak something of what the heart felt.” Cotton’s emphasis on the individual’s inability to achieve salvation echoed the pervasive inability of women to achieve public recognition. In this theology, women and men held the same troubled status as inferiors in the hands of a higher being. All power came from God, without respect to gender, rather than from male authority figures interpreting God’s word. While John Cotton’s doctrine excluded some, it gave Anne Hutchinson a voice.

Inspired by him, and by reports of other women who ran conventicles, Anne Hutchinson began holding meetings in her house in Alford, spreading Cotton’s word among women by repeating and explicating his sermons. He was delighted to find her preparing souls for conversion by him. “She did much good in childbirth-travails, and readily fell into good discourse with the women about their spiritual estates,” he remarked. She warned them not to build “their good estate upon their own duties and performances or upon any righteousness of the law.” Their “conscience of sabbaths, reverence of ministers, frequenting of sermons, and diligence in calling” were “legal duties” unrelated to “saving union with Christ.” Many women “were much shaken and humbled thereby, and brought to enquire more seriously after the Lord Jesus Christ.” Hutchinson served to awaken people to “their sandy foundations, and to seek for better establishment in Christ.” She was so skillful, Cotton added, that “she had more resort to her for counsel about matter of conscience and clearing up men’s spiritual estates, than any minister” he knew.

Despite their evangelical collaboration, Hutchinson and Cotton seemed, on the surface, a study in contrasts. Where she was assertive and bold, he was conservative and conciliatory. Where she was zealous and clear, he was cautious and circumspect. Where she was witty, even sarcastic, he was literal and plainspoken. Where she reveled in the excitement and openness of dialogue, he was solitary. Where she could
thrive amid the shrieks and fluids of childbirth, he preferred the intensity of texts in ancient tongues. Yet they developed over twenty years a trusting friendship, which continued in the new Boston.

Only three weeks before her trial, on a balmy October night in 1637, Hutchinson had sought and received private advice from Cotton about a matter that, had the other ministers and magistrates learned of it, would have caused an outcry. The matter was the birth of a deformed stillborn to a Boston couple, an event that most of their neighbors would have seen as evidence of God’s displeasure with the baby’s parents.

On October 17, Mary Dyer, the twenty-six-year-old wife of the milliner, William Dyer, went into labor two months before her due date and lost consciousness. The midwife Jane Hawkins, who was attending her at home, sent a man on horseback to summon Mistress Anne Hutchinson to assist at the birth. Later that evening, with both midwives present, Mary Dyer delivered a stillborn female with extensive deformities of the head, spinal column, and extremities.