Hutchinson, Anne Marbury (1591-1643)

Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591-1643)

Antinomian leader

Sources

A Formidable Woman. Anne Marbury Hutchinson posed the greatest threat to the theology and society of Puritan New England. An astute, forceful, and committed Christian, she could explain Scriptures with such precision and follow theological principles to their logical conclusions with such clarity that she outshone all of the Puritan clergy who sought to squelch her voice. All we know of her was written by others, mainly those who wished to discredit her. Yet even John Winthrop, her most implacable enemy, complimented her as “a woman of ready wit and bold spirit.” The Antinomian Crisis that she precipitated nearly destroyed his beloved colony.

Making of a Radical. Anne Marbury was born in 1591, the daughter of the Reverend Francis Marbury, an outspoken Anglican pastor in Lincolnshire, England. Although not officially a Puritan, he rejected most of the Anglican dogma and focused on the essential doctrines of the Scriptures. These he taught to his daughter, who received an education far superior to most girls of her time. She married William Hutchinson in 1612 but looked to the Reverend John Cotton and her brother-in-law, the Reverend John Wheelwright, for spiritual guidance after her father died. Both employed an evangelical style of preaching that focused on the mystical elements of conversion. Lincolnshire was a hotbed of puritans and other reforming Anglicans who could not be accommodated within the formal churches. Thus laymen who felt that they had received grace gathered together informally to discuss sermons, debate passages of the Scriptures, and pray without the presence of ordained ministers. Women played a particularly active role in these assemblies, and it was here that Hutchinson honed her natural intellect and leadership skills in the pursuit of religious truth. When Cotton was forced out of his ministry in 1633, he departed for New England and accepted a position with the Boston Church. Hutchinson packed up her family and followed in 1634, with Wheelwright close behind.

Crisis. Hutchinson quickly made her mark in the spiritual life of the colony, holding informal weekday meetings in her home to clarify and expand on Cotton’s sermons to those who could not attend the services. Her audiences grew, and soon her followers comprised a majority in the Boston Church. She became increasingly bothered by the sermons of the copastor, John Wilson, who stressed moral activity as preparation for God’s grace. To Hutchinson this smacked of the heresy of Arminianism, which claimed that good works earned salvation. Cotton’s message deemphasized good works and stressed the incomprehensible grace of God in saving predestined individuals. Taken to its extremes, this bordered on the heresy of Antinomianism, which maintained that the mystical experience of grace bore no relationship to human conduct, either before or after salvation. Cotton and Wilson were both within the parameters of Puritan orthodoxy, which sought a balance: good works could not save, but the ability to perform them were the fruits of salvation, and all were obliged to lead the moral lives that glorified God’s creation. Hutchinson, however, discerned important differences and exaggerated them. Her growing number of followers petitioned to appoint Wheelwright as a teacher and spokesman for their doctrines. When this failed, they openly shunned Wilson, walking out in the middle of his sermons and enlisting the support of those outside the congregation. Anne’s skill as a midwife and healer endeared her to women who lined up behind her, joined by merchants who were undergoing criticism for their business practices and found solace in the view that their spiritual state was not dependent on their adherence to price and wage controls. Matters came to a head early in 1637 when Wheelwright urged the dissidents to separate from the Arminians. When summoned before the General Court, he refused to recant and was banished.

Trial. The General Court, however, knew that Wheelwright was not the main source of the conflict that was tearing their colony apart; they sent for his sister-in law. Hutchinson had played her cards so cleverly, however, that she could only be charged with the minor offense of having urged others to petition for the appointment of Wheelwright. The ensuing trial might have ignored the niceties of a proper judicial proceeding, but the court believed that it was fighting for the very existence of the colony. The written account of the proceedings records a defendant outshining her intellectually inferior accusers. Hutchinson deftly defended her actions on the basis of Scripture, contradicted her judges, poked holes in their reasoning, and generally displayed not a whit of the deference that she was supposed to pay to her superiors. In the final, stressful parry Anne blurted out that she had received a direct revelation from God for one of her statements. This was clearly a heretical claim for any Calvinist to make because it was believed that God spoke to humans only through the Bible. Even Cotton distanced himself from her extreme views and agreed to her banishment. Her husband and fifteen children plus over eighty families of supporters followed Hutchinson to Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.

Lingering Threat. Hutchinson’s beliefs, posture, and popularity threatened to unravel the entire fabric of this Puritan society and its covenant with God. If individuals could receive direct revelations from God, why bother with the Scriptures? If moral actions were totally unnecessary and no indication of salvation, then everyone was free to commit the most heinous crimes because, if they were predestined, they would be favored by God no matter what they did. What then would become of that moral society that collectively glorified God by its good works? By refusing to soften her extreme views which were causing untold conflict, Hutchinson was destroying the consensus that re-created the harmony of God’s creation. When she continually defied the authorities, stepping out of her prescribed role as a woman, she endangered all of the hierarchical systems so necessary for order and harmony. This also left her vulnerable to the temptations of Satan, who was ever ready to pounce on a defenseless individual, as Cotton had insinuated. In fact some secretly considered her to be a witch. When Anne and most of her household were killed in an Indian raid after she left Rhode Island, John Winthrop smugly concluded that God had finally struck her down.

Sources

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

William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1978);

Selma Williams, Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981).