A History of the American People

religious enthusiasm and attended the charismatic sermons given by John Cotton at St Botolph's
in Lincoln. Under the Godless tyranny' of Archbishop Laud, Cotton lost his license to preach in 1633, and promptly emigrated to the Bay Colony. Mrs Hutchinson, her husband, and children followed the next year, and she gave birth to another child shortly after they arrived in Boston. She was capable of delivering a child herself, and acted as a midwife on occasions. She also dispensed home-made cordials andsimples' and gave medical advice to women. A natural
leader, she made her house a resort for women in trouble. There is no need to read into her story
the overtones of women's rights with which feminist historians have recently embellished it." But
it is clear she was formidable, and that she thought it proper and natural that women should
participate in religious controversy.
It was Anne Hutchinson's practice, along with her brother-in-law John Wheelwright, to hold
post-sermon discussion groups at her house on Sunday afternoons and on an evening in
midweek. There, the words of John Cotton and other preachers were analyzed minutely and at
length, and everyone present-there were often as many as sixty, half of them women-joined in if
they wished. Cotton himself, and Hutchinson and Wheelwright still more passionately, believed
in a Covenant of Grace. Whereas most official preachers held that a moral life was sufficient
grounds for salvation, Mrs Hutchinson argued that redemption was God's gift to his elect and
could not simply be earned by human effort-albeit the constant practice of good works was
usually an external sign of inward election. The logic of this doctrine was subversive. The one
power the clergy in New England still possessed was the right to determine who should be a full
member of the church-and monitoring of his or her good works was the obvious way in which to
do it. But the Hutchinson doctrine stripped the minister of this power by insisting that election, or
indeed self-election, with which he had nothing to do, was the criterion of church membership.
Such a system, moreover, by which divine grace worked its miracles in the individual without
any need for clerical intermediary, abolished distinctions of gender. A woman might just as well
receive the spirit, and utter God's teachings, as an ordained pastor. Some people liked this idea.
The majority found it alarming.
By 1636 the controversy was dividing the colony so sharply that the elders decided on extreme
measures. Cotton was hauled before a synod of ministers and with some difficulty cleared
himself of a charge of heresy. Then Winthrop was reelected governor in May 1637 and
immediately set about dealing with Mrs Hutchinson, whom he regarded as the root of the
problem. He put through an ordinance stipulating that anyone arriving in the colony could not
stay more than three weeks without the approval of the magistrates. In November he had
Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and their immediate followers up before the General Court, and
banished. Some seventy-five of their adherents were disenfranchised and disarmed. He followed
this up in March 1638 by having Hutchinson and Wheelwright charged with heresy before the
church of Boston, and excommunicated. It is clear that Winthrop believed Anne Hutchinson was
in some way being manipulated by the Devil-was a witch in fact. He discovered that she had had
a miscarriage, which he interpreted as a sign of God's wrath, and that her friend Mary Dyer had
given birth to a stillborn, malformed infant-a monster. He even went so far as to have the pitiful
body of the monster' dug up and examined. All this he recorded in his diaries. He also communicated the results to England soall our Godly friends might not be discouraged from
coming to us.' Mrs Hutchinson and her supporters, to save their lives, had no alternative but to
leave the Bay Colony and seek refuge in Williams' Rhode Island, where most of them settled and
flourished. Her husband, a long-suffering man many might argue, died, and in due course the
widow and his six youngest children moved further west, to Pelham Bay in what is now New