Mistress Bradstreet (21 page)

In the annual election that same year, when baby Samuel had just turned one, Dudley was voted governor of Massachusetts Bay in place of Winthrop for the first time since they had arrived. Immediately a flurry of crises landed on his desk. Rumor had it that King Charles wanted to revoke the colony’s charter. In fact, people whispered that he was plotting an attack on Boston.
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It was shocking to imagine that Charles might order their countrymen to fire upon them, brother against brother, Protestant against Protestant. The tense political environment the Puritans had worked so hard to leave behind seemed to be catching up to them.

Everyone prepared for the worst. Right before Dudley was installed as the new leader, Winthrop ordered a garrison of local men who had been trained as soldiers to occupy the fort on Castle Island in Boston Harbor. He also made a plan for the beacon on Beacon Hill to be lit if Charles’s forces came sweeping into the bay.
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Then, as if the threat of attack were not worrisome enough, another worry arose: Dudley’s old friend, Roger Williams, was shaking the very roots of the community with a series of outrageous pronouncements.

Williams was one of the most popular champions of the migration to America. When he had met with Theophilus, Isaac Johnson, Dudley, Winthrop, and the others in Sempringham back in 1629, he had inspired them with the depth of his passionate faith. A visionary minister, he drew others to follow his ideas by virtue of his charm and profound convictions. But he was also one of the most stubborn, “God-intoxicated” individuals to come to America.
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From the moment he arrived in Massachusetts, Williams had been difficult. He refused to officiate at the church in Boston because he believed the membership was not “pure” enough, in effect denouncing many of the most pious settlers in the colony, such as his old friend John Winthrop.

But Williams did not care whom he alienated. Aghast at the tales that were crossing the ocean of the king’s heresies and his continued harassment of Puritans, by 1634 Williams had lost patience with the colony’s assertions of loyalty to the Crown and the Anglican Church. The king was a liar, he said, and worse, was in league with the devil. Such a terrible sinner did not have the right to grant land to the colonists; consequently, the royal charter had no basis, the settlers did not really own their acreages, the colony should be dissolved and everyone should return to England to confess that they had sinned by emigrating to America without any legitimate authority to back their claims.
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Winthrop, Dudley, and the other magistrates knew that if Williams’s pronouncements came to the ears of the king, the Bay colony could be punished for treason and perhaps dismantled. Luckily, during the first months of Dudley’s term, King Charles, who was distracted by the growing conflicts in England, turned his attention away from New England and let the matter of the charter drop. For Charles it seemed more important to contain Puritanism at home than to squander his limited resources on the remote and seemingly unimportant colony in America. To the colonists, the king’s change of heart seemed astonishingly auspicious, but even as the threats from outside the colony diminished, the problem of Roger Williams only seemed to grow.

To the horror of Dudley; his deputy governor, Roger Ludlow; and the forty other magistrates who sat on the General Court, Williams began to attract new followers. He wanted the colonists to break off all communication with the Old World because he believed that only if New England Puritans were fully “separated” from the corruption of England could they achieve salvation. The king’s recent sword rattling had made this seem appealing to some individuals, but Anne was not one of them. She saw herself as an Englishwoman and, therefore, as a member of the English church. After all, she and her family were among the “saving remnant” of the English people, the vanguard of the reform movement that would ultimately redeem England.
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But a zealot like Williams had no compassion for this lingering affection for the Old World. Rigid idealist that he was, he had lived briefly with the Pilgrims in 1633, hoping to discover in Plymouth a purer settlement than Massachusetts Bay. But he soon found that even holier-than-thou Plymouth had its pollutants. Reports trickled back to New Towne that he had refused to call his neighbors by the conventional “goodman” or “goodwife,” because none of them were free enough from sin to deserve this title. This sort of prickly arrogance hurt his popularity, and before long he reappeared in Salem, where, his enemies believed, he had “bewitched” the townspeople into choosing him, unofficially, as their new minister.

Williams’s absence from the center of government had given the colony’s leaders a brief respite from anxiety, but now that Williams had access to the Salem pulpit, he could make real trouble. In his sermons, Williams harped on the visible imperfections of the colonists and their leaders. The minister’s savage laments about the lack of virtue in New England often struck home. Dudley himself was sympathetic with the idea of correcting evildoers and separating oneself from those who would not repent. But as a government official, he would cope with this problem legislatively, cracking down hard on sin and sinners.

When he first took office, for example, Dudley led an effort to purify the community and remedy what he regarded as four lax years of Winthrop’s leadership. He strengthened the magistrates’ authority and passed a series of sumptuary laws, declaring a smoking ban not just in public places but also in the home. In addition, there could be no clothing adorned with gold, silver, or lace. Any fashion accessory that Dudley deemed excessive was banned, such as silver or gold belts, beaver hats, ruffs, and all “new fashions, long hair, or anything of the like nature.”
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But this was a slippery slope: After all, who was not a sinner? What litmus test could you use to test for purity?

Still, Dudley was a practical man, and he differed from Williams because he could see that compromises were sometimes necessary. Williams had gone too far in his attempt to separate himself and others from sin. There was no escaping the settlers’ corruption; instead it was the job of ministers and government officials to curb their carnal inclinations. Williams could not accept such a position. In one of his Salem sermons, the passionate minister ruffled everyone’s feathers by asserting that his church was “better” than the other New England congregations and therefore should secede from their sisterhood.
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He could hardly have uttered more alienating words. The other ministers, who had hesitated to condemn him due to their respect for his piety and learning, promptly leagued themselves against him.

Like most of the settlers, Anne was shocked that her father’s old friend had denounced the men she most admired, from Cotton to the New Towne minister, Thomas Hooker. But unlike other townspeople, especially the women, she was privy to confidential information about the colony’s political goings-on, since Dudley and Simon probably used their time at home to discuss the issues that troubled them. From them, Anne would have absorbed the cautionary lesson that too much idealism could get you in trouble, that it was important to learn how to speak your mind in a way that did not cross the authorities.

As the months passed, Williams galloped on, declaring not only that England was corrupt but that the English flag with its prominent “Catholic” cross was a disgrace. He advised Massachusetts Bay residents to fly their own “corrected” flag—a lily-white banner that would eschew any such papist emblem.

Such a public assertion of New England’s moral supremacy would surely strain relations with England even further, and there was nothing that Dudley, Winthrop, and the other magistrates feared more. What if the king remembered that he had wanted to revoke the colony’s charter? But Winthrop, Dudley, Ludlow, Endecott, and the other magistrates were loath to take legal action against Williams, as everyone understood that the man had the right intentions. Perhaps his idealism was misguided, but the minister was a virtuous sort of sinner, an odd duck whom Dudley and Winthrop understood and even begrudgingly admired. No one wanted to see Williams condemned by the General Court.

The Great and General Court of Massachusetts was the only court in the land. It convened in the New Towne meetinghouse without any of the elegant trappings of the law as it had been practiced in England, although its members were the leading citizens of the era. The governor, deputy governor, and a minimum of six “assistants” were selected by “freemen,” men who owned property and were members of a church. These officials were joined by elected representatives from every town. Without a king or parliament, the court needed to perform all the acts of government, from making laws and enforcing them, to the more traditional judicial role of hearing complaints and cases.

By the spring of 1635, when Dudley’s one-year term as governor was over, the die was cast. Even Williams’s few admirers saw that the minister had stretched the teachings of Puritanism to the brink and was now caught in the disease of “perfectionism,” a spiritual ailment that led the sufferer to seek endlessly (and hopelessly) for the impossible goal of freedom from sin. Williams refused to back down from any of his statements and was called to the court in October 1635, where Dudley joined Winthrop as one of the assistants.

If the renegade minister hoped he would escape punishment, he showed no evidence of this. Instead he attacked the magistrates almost before they could charge him with misconduct. The compromises of the New England leaders, he declared, would destroy the sanctity of the Puritan mission, and he called for them to join him in his holy vision.
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The other ministers of the colony, who had been invited to advise the magistrates on how to proceed, vowed that Williams had “run into heresy, apostacy,” and even “tyranny.” Unanimously, they called for the court to remove him from his pulpit and banish him.
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And so John Haynes, the new governor, proclaimed that Williams would have to leave the Bay colony for good.

Although at first Dudley had felt they should be lenient with his old friend, there was no avoiding the truth: Over the last year Williams had grown increasingly intransigent. By the end of his term as governor, Dudley had joined forces with the other magistrates and lobbied for Williams’s exile, even though he understood that in late October such a punishment could well be a death sentence. New England weather was brutal and the wild animals fierce. The colonists needed each other even more during the harshest season of the year.

At this inopportune moment, Williams became ill, and the magistrates delayed enforcing his sentence. But Dudley, who could not bear the fact that Williams was still at large, persuaded the court to seize the minister and set him on a ship to England. Winthrop, on the other hand, who had affection for Williams, intervened and secretly wrote to the fugitive, urging him to flee so that he could escape being returned to the Old World. When the agent of the court, Captain John Underhill, arrived in Salem, he found that Williams had disappeared into the wilderness.
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That winter the earnest “saint,” who believed that he had been “unkindly and unchristianly . . . driven from my house and land and wife and children,” surprised everyone by managing to survive. He turned up in Narragansett Bay, having traveled through snow and icy storms, and promptly set about establishing a new town, one where he could preach as he saw fit. Naturally, Williams took his safe journey as a sign that God was on his side and continued to chase after his visions for the rest of his long life. Ironically, however, he backed down from his pinnacle of separatism and instead began to preach congregational independence, a stance that would usher in a new kind of religious freedom. Soon the churches in what would become known as Rhode Island would offer safe harbor for all those who disagreed with the Massachusetts Bay authorities.

After Williams’s departure, most colonists hoped to return to the relative peace of the settlement’s first four years. Instead, to everyone’s dismay, another prominent “heretic” began to stir up far more dissension than Williams ever had, although this second troublemaker emerged from a most unexpected place.

In 1634, near the beginning of Dudley’s tenure as governor, the pious residents of Boston and New Towne had been honored to witness the arrival of Anne’s old heroine from Sempringham days, Mistress Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson’s reputation for wisdom and piety had preceded her, since many of her old neighbors and friends had already established themselves in the New World. For three years she had watched her friends sell their possessions, pack up their houses, and board their ships, but she had chosen to stay in England because she considered John Cotton the most important spiritual mentor in the country. As long as the minister was preaching at St. Botolph’s, she wanted to be in attendance.

But when, in 1633, Cotton was silenced by the authorities and fled to Massachusetts, where he could preach freely, Hutchinson declared there were no other ministers in England that she “durst hear.” Before long she felt in “great trouble” without Cotton as her guide.
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When she recounted the story later, Hutchinson hinted that, at this point, it was as though the Lord spoke directly to her and told her what to do. “The 30th of Isaiah was brought to my mind,” she later recalled. “Though the Lord give thee bread of adversity and water of affliction . . . thine eyes shall see thy teachers.”
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Immediately, she was convinced that God had directed her to chase Cotton across the Atlantic so that once again she could be steeped in her “teacher’s” wisdom. Afterward, her enemies would point out that Hutchinson’s message could have come from another, more sinister entity.

Once determined to go, Hutchinson prodded her husband and her eleven children to prepare in an astonishingly short time. In just a few months, their shoes, woolens, tools, grains, and bolsters were packed, their unnecessary possessions were sold, and the Hutchinsons set sail for America.
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