Anne Marbury Hutchinson

English-born Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591-1643) was banished from the Massachusetts colony and excommunicated from its church for dissenting from the Puritan orthodoxy. Her "case" was one of several prefiguring the eventual separation of church and state in America.

Anne Marbury was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, the eldest daughter of a strong-willed Anglican priest who had been imprisoned and removed from office because of his demand for a better-educated clergy. In 1605 the family moved to London, where her father was reinstated to the clergy. He died in 1611, leaving his daughter a legacy of biblical scholarship and religious independence. The following year Anne returned to her birthplace as the bride of William Hutchinson, a prosperous cloth merchant. For the next 20 years she operated the household, acquired a knowledge of medicinal herbs, and cared for over a dozen children.

Her Early Puritanism

Hutchinson also continued her father's religious individualism. Adopting Puritanism, she often journeyed to St. Botolph's Church in Boston, England, to hear John Cotton, one of England's outstanding Puritan ministers. When the Anglican Church silenced him and he left for the colony of Massachusetts in America, Hutchinson became extremely distraught. She finally persuaded her husband to leave for America, so that she could follow her religious mentor.

The Hutchinson family was well received in Massachusetts. William Hutchinson was granted a desirable house lot in Boston, and both husband and wife quickly became church members. William Hutchinson resumed his career as a merchant, became a landowner, and was elected a town selectman and deputy to the General Court. Hutchinson's experience with medicinal herbs made her much in demand as a nurse, and she made many friends. When she was criticized for failing to attend weekly prayer meetings in the homes of parishioners, she responded by holding meetings in her own home. She began by reiterating and explaining the sermons of John Cotton but later added some of her own interpretations, a practice that was to be her undoing.

Puritan Orthodoxy

John Cotton was an intelligent and subtle theologian who had articulated an extremely fine balance between the value of God's grace and the value of good works in achieving salvation. While the Puritans believed that salvation was the result of God's grace, freely given to man, they also maintained that good works, or living the moral life, were important signs of that salvation and necessary preparation for the realization that one had received God's grace. But grace and works had to be kept in proper balance. To overemphasize works was to argue that man could be responsible for his own salvation and thus would deny God's power over man. On the other hand, to overemphasize grace was to assert a religious individualism that denied the necessity of moral living and by implication rejected clerical leadership, church discipline, and civil authority. While Cotton had maintained his balance in this most difficult of issues, Hutchinson did not, and she finally came to stress grace to the exclusion of works in determining salvation. The origin of her views is difficult to discover. Certainly Cotton had influenced her. She probably held her beliefs prior to her arrival in Boston, but she evidently did not advance them until the meetings in her home.

As her meetings became more popular, Hutchinson drew some of Boston's most influential citizens to her home. Many of these were town merchants and artisans who had been severely criticized for profiteering in prices and wages; they saw in Hutchinson's stress on grace a greater freedom regarding morality and therefore more certainty of their own salvation. But others came in search of a more meaningful and personal relationship with their God. As she attracted followers and defenders, the orthodox Puritans organized to oppose her doctrines and her advocates.

Antinomian Controversy

The issue of grace as opposed to works assumed political significance and ultimately divided Massachusetts into hostile camps. The orthodox Puritans called the Hutchinson group "Antinomians," or those who denied the applicability of moral law to the saved, and the Hutchinsonians referred to orthodox Puritans as "Legalists," or those who trusted only the observance of church laws as a sign of salvation. The orthodox Puritans, always a majority in the colony, came to demand repudiation of what seemed not only religious error but also potential social chaos. If Hutchinson's views predominated, they reasoned, individual conscience would replace clerical and civil authority as the standard for public conduct.

The Puritan orthodoxy began its assault on the dissenters in the May 1637 election. Henry Vane, a Hutchinson defender, was defeated for reelection to the governorship by John Winthrop, an opponent of her views. In the summer a synod was called in order that the "errors" of the Hutchinsonians could be identified and dealt with by the government. Following a special election in October, in which the orthodoxy increased its political strength, the government moved against individuals. Boston's pro-Hutchinson deputies were not permitted to take their seats in the General Court, and Hutchinson's brother-in-law John Wheelwright (previously convicted for sedition and contempt because of a sermon preached in defense of grace) was banished.

Anne Hutchinson Banished

The court then moved against Hutchinson. It was a difficult situation. As a woman, her words had not been public and she had not participated in the political maneuvers surrounding the controversy. Called before the court, she was accused of sedition and questioned extensively. She defended herself well, however, demonstrating both biblical knowledge and debating skill. She returned the next morning to be aided by John Cotton's testimony about her beliefs, which differed from the report of the clergymen who had spoken for the court. This conflicting evidence would have cleared her, but she brashly intervened and, before it was over, had declared herself the recipient of direct revelations from God, without aid of either Scripture or clergy. This assertion of direct communion with God was regarded as the vilest heresy by all, and it sealed her doom. She was banished as a woman "not fit for [Massachusetts] society."

While Hutchinson's trial was, by modern standards, a gross miscarriage of justice, it was not unjust according to the standards of 17th-century England, where, generally, in sedition cases a formal defense was not permitted and a jury was not used. Yet even by 17th-century standards, a mistrial occurred when the same men sat both as prosecution and judge, for her guilt had been thus "known" by the General Court long before she even presented herself to it.

After her sentencing, Hutchinson's importance waned. Her strongest supporters had either left Massachusetts or been banished, and her idol, John Cotton, had finally allied himself with the orthodoxy. The result of her investigation by the Boston congregation was a foregone conclusion. Her attempt to renounce her former errors was taken as incomplete by the clergy, and she was excommunicated for the sin of lying. Within a week she and her family departed for Rhode Island, where she was free to practice her religious views. In 1642 her husband died, and Hutchinson moved with her six youngest children to Long Island and then to the New Netherland (New York) mainland. In the late summer of 1643, Hutchinson and all but one of her children were killed in an Indian attack.

It was a sad end for an important religious figure. Hutchinson's emphasis on grace as the only requirement for salvation was an important step toward the achievement of religious freedom—that is, the ability to follow the dictates of one's own conscience in matters of belief—in America.

Further Reading

The best biography of Anne Hutchinson is Emery John Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1962). Other useful biographies are Helen Auguer, An American Jezebel: The Life of Anne Hutchinson (1930); Edith R. Curtis, Anne Hutchinson (1930); and Winnifred King Rugg, Unafraid: A Life of Anne Hutchinson (1930). Relevant documents dealing with the Antinomian controversy were published in David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History (1968). Background material is in Charles F. Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History: The Settlement of Boston Bay; the Antinomian Controversy; A Study of Church and Town Government (2 vols., 1892; 5th ed. 1896); James T. Adams, The Founding of New England (1921); Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy (1947); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958); and Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (1962). □

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).

Hutchinson, Anne (1591–1643), religious dissenter.Born in Alford, England, the daughter of a dissenting Anglican clergyman, Anne married merchant William Hutchinson in 1612. Of their fifteen children, twelve survived infancy.

An admirer of the Puritan minister John Cotton, Hutchinson with her family followed Cotton to Boston in 1634. Soon she began holding religious meetings in her home, expounding Cotton's sermons and adding her interpretations. Her intelligence and skill as a midwife and herbalist assured her an audience. Mirroring the views of Anabaptists and other dissenters, and anticipating Quaker beliefs, Hutchinson rejected the so‐called Covenant of Works, by which a moral life offered evidence of salvation. Instead, she espoused an extreme form of the Covenant of Grace, teaching that God could act directly upon the worst sinner through immediate revelation, and that believers were freed from the moral law of the Old Testament. This doctrine, called Antinomianism, alarmed the colony's leadership, particularly when Hutchinson's meetings attracted merchants and the young governor, Henry Vane. Her teachings were seen as undermining ministerial authority, elevating a woman as the judge of men, and authorizing sinful behavior. A synod of Massachusetts churches condemned eighty‐two of Hutchinson's “errors” in September 1637, and in November she was tried before the General Court, presided over by Governor John Winthrop, who had replaced Vane. John Cotton aided her defense, but when she claimed by divine revelation that God would destroy her persecutors, the Court banished her. Confined that winter awaiting exile, her mental condition deteriorated, and she made extreme claims that further alarmed visiting ministers. In March 1638, after a heresy trial, the clergy excommunicated her.

She moved with her family to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and then, after her husband's death in 1642, to Pelham Bay, Long Island. Here in 1643 she and all but one of her six younger children perished in an Indian attack. Viewed in successive eras as a “disturber of social order,” a champion of religious freedom, and a model of female assertiveness, Hutchinson is perhaps best understood in terms of the specific theological issues of her day and the religious doctrines that she embraced and taught.
See also Colonial Era; Midwifery; New England; Puritanism; Society of Friends.

Bibliography

Francis J. Bremer, ed., Anne Hutchinson, 1981.
Selma R. Williams , Divine Rebel, 1981.

Lyle Koehler

Anne Hutchinson c.1591–1643, religious leader in New England, b. Anne Marbury in Lincolnshire, England. She emigrated (1634) with her husband and family to Massachusetts Bay, where her brilliant mind and her kindness won admiration and a following. The informal discussions at her home gave scope to Puritan intellects, but her espousal of the covenant of grace as opposed to the covenant of works (i.e., she tended to believe that faith alone was necessary to salvation) and her claim that she could identify the elect among the colonists caused John Cotton , John Winthrop , and other former friends to view her as an antinomian heretic. She defied them, was tried by the General Court, and was sentenced (1637) to banishment for "traducing the ministers." Several of her followers—including William Coddington , John Wheelwright , John Underhill , and John Clarke —also left Massachusetts Bay. After helping Coddington to found the present Portsmouth, R.I., she quarreled with him and, with Samuel Gorton , ousted him in 1639. After Coddington's return to power, she moved (1642) to Long Island and then to what is now Pelham Bay Park in New York City. There she and all the other members of her family but one were killed by Native Americans.

Bibliography: See W. K. Rugg, Unafraid (1930, repr. 1970); E. J. Battis, Saints and Sectaries (1962); F. J. Bremer, Anne Hutchinson (1981); A. S. Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (1987); E. LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (2004).

Hutchinson, Anne (1591–1643), emigrated from England to Massachusetts (1634), where her vigorous intellect soon led her to hold informal weekly meetings of women, in which she discussed the sermons of the previous Sunday and advocated a “covenant of grace” based on the individual's direct intuition of God's grace, as opposed to the orthodox belief in a “covenant of works” based on obedience to the statutes of church and state. She was called an Antinomian, was said to be “traducing the ministers and their ministry,” and, although Governor Vane, her brother‐in‐law John Wheelwright, and others supported her views, a synod of churches excommunicated her, and Governor Winthrop banished her from the colony. She and her family went to Rhode Island (1638), then to New York (1642), where Indians massacred all but one of them.