Anne Hutchinson Versus Massachusetts (June 1974 | Volume: 25, Issue: 4)

Anne Hutchinson Versus Massachusetts

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Authors: Wellington Newcomb

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June 1974 | Volume 25, Issue 4

It would have been no pleasant thing for any defendant to hear John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts colony, declaim the serious charges brought against Anne Hutchinson at her trial in 1637. In the Puritan society of early Massachusetts they were among the gravest that could be imagined. As recorded by the court reporter, they seem to evoke the gravity with which John Winthrop must have delivered them: “Mrs. Hutchinson, you are called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here. You are known to be a woman that hath had a great share in the promoting and divulging of those opinions that are causes of this trouble.… You have spoken divers things, as we have been informed, very prejudicial to the honour of the churches and ministers thereof. And you have maintained a meeting and an assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”

Anne Hutchinson, forty-five years old, stood listening to these charges on a November day when the New England fall had turned to its bleakest season. She faced her adversaries in the somber meetinghouse in Newtown, later to be called Cambridge. It was a square, rude building with small windows admitting little light. The grays, browns, and blacks of Mrs. Hutchinson’s surroundings were relieved only by the pallor of earnest English faces all focussed on her. But despite the severity of the setting, the meetinghouse was crowded to capacity with people eager to see how this woman, who had stirred the greatest storm yet in the young colony, would acquit herself. For people who eschewed the theatre as sinful the Newtown meetinghouse had become the stage for an exciting performance.

From what we know of Anne Hutchinson, she probably did not flinch for a moment upon hearing the charges against her. She was a woman of keen intelligence and strong personality, possessed of stubborn convictions not the least of which was that she had found direct favor with God. Even Winthrop, writing in his journal, begrudgingly described her as “a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit,” and he had good reason to know. But nowhere in his writings did it ever occur to him to describe what she looked like. Puritans were like that.

The daughter of a clergyman, Anne Hutchinson had been born Anne Marbury in Lincolnshire, England. By the time of her trial she had borne her husband, William Hutchinson, thirteen children; she was now expecting her fourteenth. Husband, wife, and children had arrived in Boston in September, 1634, on the ship Griffin , and Anne had been the motivating force that had started them on the long and arduous voyage to the New World. She had felt the need to follow their former minister, the Reverend John Cotton, to Massachusetts. His departure