American Jezebel (6 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
After Anne, the next Marbury baby was another girl, Bridget, born in 1593. Francis’s first surviving son, also named Francis, did not arrive until Anne was three years old. Ten more children followed—Emma, Erasmus, Anthony (who died at two), Bridget (born after the death of her older sister Bridget at age five), Jeremuth, Daniel and Elizabeth (who both died at nine), Thomas, Anthony, and Katherine, the last, born in 1610. In all, Bridget Marbury bore fifteen live children (just as her daughter Anne would), twelve of whom survived early childhood.
At the time of Anne’s birth, the Reformation had spread across Europe. The continent that a century earlier had been almost entirely Roman Catholic was now split between Rome and various Protestant sects. The Renaissance was in full swing. In 1591, when Anne arrived, Cervantes was forty-four; Francis Bacon was thirty; Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Galileo Galilei were twenty-seven; and Ben Jonson and John Donne were nineteen years old. In the coming two decades René Descartes, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and John Milton would be born.
In tiny Alford in Lincolnshire, the period just preceding Anne’s birth was pivotal for her father. In the summer of 1590, after a decade of relative quiet, according to ecclesiastical court records, Francis Marbury was again in trouble with authorities. In his midthirties, apparently happily married and employed, he felt emboldened to challenge his superiors again. Some suspected him of authoring the Marprelate Tracts, satiric diatribes against Catholic tendencies in the Church of England that were published in London in 1588 and 1589 under the pseudonym “Martin Marprelate.” There is no evidence linking Marbury to these tracts, for which the printer, the only known culprit, was executed in 1593. Nevertheless, in lectures at Saint Wilfrid’s, the Reverend Marbury freely denounced the Church of England
and its head, the queen, for selecting ill-educated bishops, who in turn chose poorly trained ministers. The bishops were “self-seeking soul murderers,” he charged, using the terminology of his trial. Outraged at his renewed defiance, the Bishop of Lincoln forbade this “impudent Puritan” from preaching, stripped him of his living as a teacher, and placed him under house arrest. This punishment was imposed the year Anne was born.
Imprisoned with his family in his modest house in Alford, Francis tended his gardens, revised and published his magnum opus, and tutored his children. He read aloud to the girls from his dialogue, which posed him as the brave hero opposing the bishop, who was clearly a buffoon. To teach the children to read, Francis assigned them portions of his transcript, of Scripture, and of John Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs.
Foxe’s work was a lively account of the “atrocities” and “instruments of torture [such as] the rack, the gridiron, [and] the boiling oil” inflicted on Protestant martyrs, from the scourging and crucifixion of the evangelist Philip in 54
CE
to the burning at the stake of a Puritan named Anne Askew in 1546. During Anne Hutchinson’s childhood, Queen Elizabeth ordered that for her people’s edification a copy of Foxe’s
Martyrs
should be chained to a lectern in every parish in England. This book provided compelling reading to Anne and her siblings, much as the tales of Andersen and Grimm would do for children of later centuries.
Stripped of his students and of his pulpit, Francis Marbury was in an almost unbearable situation. To survive, he turned his prodigious and focused attention on his own little girls, particularly the brilliant, inquisitive Anne, who as the youngest at the time of this incarceration was least burdened by household chores.
Meanwhile, Francis continued to fight for his freedom. He begged each year to be returned to his posts, pleading to church authorities that he was not a Puritan. “I subscribe to the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, and none other,” he wrote to the Bishop of London, John Aylmer, who was now in his seventies. Marbury said he was expelled “for cause to me utterly unknown.” He asked other ministers of the church to vouch for his good character, which they did in letters to the bishop. Finally, after three years of house arrest, in 1594—just months after Bishop Aylmer’s death—Francis recovered his license to teach and to preach.
Now a middle-aged patriarch, the Reverend Marbury decided to make a change. Never again would he openly question the Church of England or its head, the monarch. For the rest of his life he would curb his tongue.
This new, conformist attitude would lead, eleven years later, to a pastoral assignment at a London parish just north of the Thames. The summer Anne turned fourteen, Francis was offered the post of vicar of the Church of Saint Martin’s in the Vintry, in London. Francis was delighted: his move toward the establishment was complete. That fall the Marburys packed all their belongings on wagons and traveled 140 miles south to London, where on October 28 they moved into the vestry attached to the church.
This was a promotion for the Reverend Marbury. The size of a parish was an index of its pastor’s success, and the parish of Saint Martin in the Vintry was relatively large. In 1638, the nearest year in which parish size was recorded, most of London’s ninety-six other parishes had only a few hundred communicants while Saint Martin in the Vintry had 1100, more than the entire population of Alford. Although the Vintry was slightly poorer than most parishes, based on its rents and tithes, its residents included wealthy wine merchants descended from the early-fourteenth-century immigrants from Bordeaux who gave the neighborhood its name.
The timing of the move—not long after the purging of the Puritan preachers by King James I, who succeeded his childless cousin Queen Elizabeth upon her death in March 1603—also indicates that Francis was back within the Anglican fold, at least by outward appearances. Early in his reign King James tried to appease the Puritans but then swung the other way. Now, faced with a shortage of ministers in London, he called on men like Marbury whose troublesomeness seemed but a memory.
Saint Martin in the Vintry was in central London, almost at the midpoint between Saint Paul’s Cathedral, where Francis had been tried, and the prison in which he had spent two uncomfortable years. To Anne and her siblings, who had grown up in a rural outpost, this neighborhood must have seemed unimaginably vibrant and cosmopolitan. The church and vestry were less than a hundred yards from the great river that was the main highway of the largest city in the world.
Wider and shallower than it is now, Spenser’s “silver-streaming” Thames was the scene of royal pageants and civic ceremonies. In winter, on the rare occasion when it froze, carnivals were set upon its icy surface and fires lit, and vendors sold their wares upon it. The rest of the year it was crowded with small boats and the sails of ships, which had to unload at London Bridge. Barges for the king, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the lord mayor of London plied its muddy waters. Manors along the Thames had private boats and landing places. To cross the river, one could walk across the bridge or cry “eastward ho!” or “westward ho!” to hail a ferry, at the cost of a penny. The east side of the bridge was London’s main port, which throughout this period was the world’s largest.
A quarter mile east of the Vintry along the river was the Tower of London, that symbol of English power serving alternately as fortress, prison, and palace, which had been built in 1078 under William the Conqueror. In the mid-sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth had been imprisoned here during the reign of her half sister, Mary, and then she had been crowned here. James I had ordered in 1603 that the royal jewels be displayed in the Tower.
Adjacent to the Tower was the river’s only bridge, now called London Bridge, a thirteenth-century stone structure cluttered with more than a hundred shops, one of which had been the medieval chapel of St. Thomas à Becket. The severed limbs and heads of criminals were often displayed on spikes on the bridge’s Great Stone Gate, on its southern end, which led to the forbidden Bankside neighborhood where prostitutes, drunkards, rowdy hordes, and playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe roamed. In the very year that the Marburys arrived, William Shakespeare was a short distance away, across the river, creating
Measure for Measure.
Besides the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries, the pleasures of Bankside included bull and bear baiting in ring-shaped theaters, cock fighting, taverns, alehouses, brothels, gambling, and bowling.
The city of London, one square mile situated just north of the river, from the Tower to Saint Paul’s, was an overcrowded clutter of three-and four-story buildings on cobbled, refuse-littered medieval streets, its skyline dominated by the steeples of hundreds of churches, which
served as the community and religious centers of most Londoners’ lives. The bubonic plague occasionally swept through the city, shrinking its population, although the Marburys avoided it. At the turn of the seventeenth century the city had roughly 200,000 residents, twice as many as just fifty years before. In 1603, according to the historian John Stowe, London “consisteth of diverse streets, ways, and winding lanes, all full of buildings, on the bank of the River Thames…. There is now a continued building of tenements, about half a mile in length of the bridge.” Vast, open fields surrounded the urban chaos. The late Queen Elizabeth and her successor, King James, hunted in the remote woods that are now Hyde Park.
On November 5, 1605, just a week after the Marburys arrived, London buzzed with the news of a secret plot to reintroduce Catholicism as the state religion. A group of Catholic men intended to blow up the Houses of Parliament in which the members of parliament and the king were gathered for a session. The plot was foiled when authorities discovered thirty-six barrels of gunpowder in a cellar beneath the Palace of Westminster. They caught and tortured the leaders of this “gunpowder plot,” Robert Catesby and Guy Fawkes, whose capture is still commemorated in parts of England as Guy Fawkes Day.
Francis Marbury was at the opposite end of the religious spectrum from these rebels, for he considered the Church of England too Catholic rather than not enough. Despite the outward conformity that he adopted in order to support his family, Francis was still a dissenter at heart. Yet he followed the rules well enough to be able to supplement his income by taking on other parishes. From 1608 he served also in the parish of Saint Pancras, Middlesex, several miles northwest of the city, where he traveled on horseback once or twice a week to preach. Early in 1610 Marbury replaced that secondary assignment with the less strenuous one as rector of Saint Margaret’s, New Fish Street, a short walk east of Saint Martin in the Vintry.
Outwardly at least, fifty-five-year-old Francis Marbury had made peace with Anglican authorities. But the strain of this charade—concealing his convictions about worship and faith—may have contributed to his sudden death, in London, in February 1611. Nevertheless, the
seeds he had planted in his nineteen-year-old daughter, Anne—a willingness to question and even to show contempt for authority, a confidence in the rightness of one’s own views, a deep faith in God, and a desire to share that faith through teaching—would bear fruit in Massachusetts long after his death.
A MASTERPIECE OF WOMAN’S WIT
On that bitterly cold Tuesday in November 1637, the session of the General Court of Massachusetts halted the moment the defendant, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, dropped to the floor. Her husband and his brother Edward ran from the back of the hall to help her to her feet. Governor Winthrop did not rise, but “gave her leave to sit down, for her countenance discovered some bodily infirmity,” as he explained that evening to his wife, Margaret, who was in bed following a miscarriage, after which the defendant had ministered to her.
In the courtroom Anne Hutchinson accepted the bench offered her and agreed to continue with the trial. A manservant refreshed the heated coals in the brass foot warmers that lay beneath the boots of her forty judges.
Addressing the question asked just before her collapse, she told the court that she found her authority to run public meetings in Paul’s letter to Titus, which describes older women as “teachers of honest things.” She said, “I conceive there lies a clear rule in Titus, that the elder women should instruct the younger, and then I must have a time wherein I must do it.”
Winthrop corrected her, noting that Titus 2:3–5 states, “Elder women must instruct the younger about their business, and to
love
their husbands and
not
to make them clash.” The entire passage reads, “The elder women likewise, that they be in such behavior as becomes holiness, not false accusers, not subject to much wine, but teachers of honest things, That they may instruct the young women to be sober minded, that they love their husbands, that they love their children, That they be temperate, chaste, keeping at home, good and subject unto their husbands, that the word of God be not evil spoken of.”
Ignoring aspects of this passage—as she had to ignore other statements of the apostle Paul requiring silence and obedience of women—Hutchinson cited another Scripture. In the Acts of the Apostles 18:26, a married couple, Aquila and Priscilla, “took upon them to instruct [the man] Apollos, more perfectly, yet he was a man of good parts, but they, better instructed, might teach him.” A marginal note in the Geneva Bible, which she used, justified the revolutionary idea that a woman could teach religion, even to a man: “Apollos, a godly and learned man, did not refuse to profit in the school of a…woman: and so became an excellent minister of the Church.”
Winthrop mocked her. “See how your argument stands? Priscilla, with her husband, took Apollos home to instruct him privately, therefore Mistress Hutchinson without her husband may teach sixty or eighty?”
“I call them not. But if they come to me, I may instruct them.”
“Yet you show us not a rule.”
“I have given you two places of Scripture,” she answered, growing impatient.
“But neither of them will suit your practice.”
Her calm dissolving into sarcasm, she said, “Must I show
my name
written therein?”—meaning in Scripture.
This retort seems especially ironic in light of how rarely women’s names appear in the records of colonial America. But Winthrop could not appreciate Hutchinson’s wit. Her speech and actions were most unseemly in a woman, he and his peers believed. Although he had not noticed it when she first arrived in Boston, he was sure now that her behavior was out of place, which suggested the presence of evil, or the Antichrist.
In the courtroom he defended his position by citing two other passages. In 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, the apostle Paul admonishes all women to be silent in church and all wives to seek spiritual guidance from their husbands. And 1 Timothy 2:12 states, “I permit not a woman to teach, neither to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” This general wish for silence from women extended also into the courtroom, as Winthrop had earlier explained to Hutchinson: “We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex.”
Winthrop was arguing for nothing more than the role expected of any seventeenth-century Englishwoman. The model woman then—
modest, meek, submissive, virtuous, obedient, and kind—was solely occupied with supervising and maintaining the home, cooking, sometimes brewing and dairying, and bearing and rearing children. She was expected to suffer all these in silence, as in the oft-quoted passage from Genesis 3:16: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” The other role a woman could assume was that of nurse or midwife, which Anne and her mother did. Complex discourse, deep thought, and books of all kinds were believed to tax a woman’s weak mind and keep her from pleasing her husband, who was her superior intellectually. A woman who aimed for more was asking for trouble, Winthrop was sure. After Anne Hopkins, a well-read Connecticut woman who was married to the governor of Hartford, suffered a breakdown in 1645, Winthrop confided in his journal that her error was “giving herself wholly to reading and writing…. If she had attended her household affairs, and such things as
belong to women,
and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are
proper for men,
whose minds are stronger, she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably
in the place God had set her.
”
Luckily for the governor, all of his female intimates conformed to this model of femininity. Margaret (his third wife, for the first two had died, as was common, in childbirth) signed letters to him, “your faithful and obedient wife,” and said she felt she had “nothing within or without” worthy of him. His sister signed letters to him as “Your sister to command.” The wife of his son John described herself to John as “thy ever loving and kind wife to command in whatsoever thou pleasest so long as the Lord shall be pleased to give me life and strength.” All these women cheerfully obliged the governor. Why couldn’t Mistress Hutchinson?
This bout of biblical squabbling between Hutchinson and Winthrop over social identity and status ended in another standoff. Neither side was willing to accept the validity of the other’s view. This impasse was a microcosm of the state of the state, and in Winthrop’s mind was unacceptable. Impasses such as these could not be let stand. Something or someone had to be removed so that the colony could be at peace.
As for Hutchinson, the basis for her determined interpretation of Scripture was her exhaustive study over many decades of her 1595 edition of the Geneva Bible. This Bible, whose copious marginal notes
greatly influenced Puritan thinking, was the one used in most Reformed homes. It was named for the Swiss city where most of the translation had been done. It first came to America in 1620 aboard the
Mayflower.
Published from 1560 until 1644, the Geneva was for nearly a century the most popular English Bible. The King James Version, completed in 1611, would not gain wide acceptance until the 1640s.
The Geneva, one of the first English translations of the Bible, was also the first to contain both New and Old Testaments with chapter and verse divisions. A 1408 English church decree forbade as heresy any translation of the Bible into the “vulgar English tongue,” but with the split from Rome in 1534 and the spread of Reformation theology, Henry VIII had a new need. The first great English translator, the Oxford-educated priest William Tyndale, read Martin Luther in the 1520s and then finished his translation while in exile in Germany, where he was martyred in 1538. A Reformer, Tyndale believed that all Christians should independently study the New Testament and count it as the final authority in all matters of doctrine and life.
This was the case in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1637. For both Hutchinson and her judges, there was no more important text than the Bible. Scripture gave them their law, much of their culture, and most of their understanding of human emotions and relationships. They inhabited the New Israel, which was chosen by God, and saw themselves as “the people of God,” like the biblical Jews. In the words of John Cotton, “The same covenant which God made with the national church of Israel and their seed…is the very same (for substance) and none other which the Lord maketh with any Congregational Church and our seed.”
On a more practical level, the Holy Bible was one of the few texts available to the colonists of New England, who prior to 1660 had no active printing presses and imported little reading matter from London or Holland. A few of the best-educated men here, including the ministers, had libraries of biblical commentaries and works of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and some even wrote poetry, but dramatists and composers did not exist on this continent. The novel, of course, had yet to be invented. Most homes contained fewer than four books, at least one of which was the Bible. According to early Massachusetts probate records, the Bible was present in more than half of the households, and some houses had two or three. In addition, there was often a book of
psalms, a primer, an almanac, a catechism, or a chapbook—a small book of stories, songs, or rhymes.
It is not possible to exaggerate the importance of Scripture to this community. Children learned to read, if they did at all, from the Bible. Families studied it together daily, reading it aloud over several months—from Genesis through to Revelation—and then starting again. Many settlers knew much of it by heart and readily applied it to such events as thunderstorms, sudden inexplicable deaths, or the passing of a comet overhead. For most if not all of those present at Anne’s trial, the Good Book occupied hours of thought every day. “The life of the Puritan was in one sense a continuous act of worship,” the historian Patrick Collinson observed, “pursued under an unremitting and lively sense of God’s providential purposes and constantly refreshed by religious activity, personal, domestic and public. [The Puritan was] much in prayer; with it he began and closed the day.” Knowing God through the Bible and serving God through action were the most important human activities.
Anne, her judges, and many of their contemporaries read the Bible with an intensity that many of us now associate only with studying a poem, when we carefully plumb the meaning of each word. Scripture was the source not only of meaning but also of truth. Studying the Bible enabled one to live in God’s way, according to his dictates. Nowadays, the Bible may seem like an antique, a relic from which we learned stories in childhood, or it may seem nonessential, the gratuity in the drawer beside the bed in every roadside motel. But to the Puritans, the Bible, recently translated, was new, relevant, and powerfully true. For them, the Word was the world.
As one’s sole and constant reading matter, the Bible is not a bad choice, for it abounds in drama, poetry, and mystery. The Puritans had little else in the way of entertainment, in part because they spurned most forms of amusement except alcohol in moderation, tasty food, and matrimonial sex. In the Bible they found countless intriguing questions that served to occupy their minds as they performed the menial tasks necessary to settle a wilderness. What do these words of Christ’s mean? they asked themselves. More compellingly, they worried, Have I Christ in my heart or not? Have I true grace? How does one prepare for saving grace? How do I know I am saved? What is the right evidence
of this? How shall I go into heaven? These sorts of questions kept Puritans awake at night imagining the very flames of hell and roused them hours before dawn, their hearts in a panic.
The events foretold in the book of Revelation—pouring of vials, unfolding of seals—were as real to them as the dirt beneath their feet. They were actively awaiting Judgment Day, when the Holy Spirit would descend from heaven to condemn some and redeem others. In which group will I be? Do I deserve to partake of the Lord’s Supper after services? How do I know I have a sign or seal of God’s grace? How can I, such a great sinner, sit down to the Lord’s Table?
These were among the questions asked by Anne’s peers in casual conversation, during childbirth, or around a sickbed, which she felt competent to address. A ministerial word from the midwife Hutchinson, as she wiped a laboring woman’s brow or soothed a teenager mourning her dead mother, was eagerly received. As naturally as the women of Boston sought protection from the cold of winter, they came to Anne to quiet their anxieties about salvation (being saved by God), assurance (knowing with certainty that one is saved), and God’s great and mysterious gift of his grace. Many of them were illiterate, all had the constant burden of keeping house for their families, and most had little opportunity for mental stimulation. In these lives of physical labor, Anne’s brilliant explorations of subtle points in Scripture and sermon provided them with inspiration and even entertainment.
In running women’s meetings, in fact, Anne was following local custom, as she explained to the court. Upon her arrival in Boston in 1634, she had noted that local women met regularly in their homes to discuss the weekly Bible reading and the ministers’ sermons—occupying their minds with theology while keeping their hands busy with quilting and embroidery. These religious discussions, sometimes called “gossipings,” grew out of the ban on women participating in any activities at church. Women were barred not only from the ministry but also from voting on church membership, participating in services, and talking in the church. Within the meetinghouse they were segregated from men, entering by a different door and sitting in a separate side of the building. This custom, which has no precedent in the churches of England or Rome, was an innovation of the colonists and a few Reformed sects in Europe, with Old Testament origins. In
Orthodox Judaism men and women worship separately, and women do not participate in services.
Despite women’s exclusion from many aspects of worship in New England, they felt as much anxiety as did the men about their spiritual well-being. The women too had risked their lives by crossing the ocean to worship God freely. Concern about their soul’s salvation was rarely far from their minds, particularly in light of the Puritan belief that salvation is not possible unless one was chosen by God before birth—predestined, or “elect.” Unlike the men, women had few ways of salving their religious fears. One Boston woman suffered such “utter desperation” over “her spiritual estate”—whether before birth she was damned or saved—that “one day she took her little infant and threw it into a well, and then came into the house and said, now she was sure she should be damned, for she had drowned her child.” This extraordinary act shows the depth of the spiritual fear and how great the need for certainty.