Puritan Wives: Anne Hutchinson- Screeching usurper, or passionate devotee?
By Elizabeth Prata
You know how some people jokingly say he or she ‘broke the internet’? Well, Anne Hutchinson broke the colony.
History hasn’t been that balanced to Puritan wife Anne Hutchinson. She is either portrayed as an religiously oppressed early feminist denied her identity, or a screeching harridan who deserved what she got. She has been called a heroine, an American Jezebel, an instrument of satan, poison, and a great imposter (the negative ones were all from Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop).
Of course the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Sometimes we think of our historical brethren as backward or uneducated, but in fact Puritan Massachusetts was populated with highly literate people, and that included the women, unusual for the time. The 1600s was an era when women were mainly quiet at home, revered, but out of the public eye. We only know of Anne Bradstreet because her brother-in-law copied her poems and published them in London without her knowing. We only know of Margaret Winthrop because her letters between her and her husband were preserved. And we know of Anne Hutchinson because of the trial transcripts! The two years she stirred up controversy reverberate to this day, I am not kidding.
In her religious outworkings and domestic life, Hutchinson was loud and active. An intelligent, complex, wayward mother of 15 children, she was tried and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Exiled at age 47 in 1638 and left with nowhere to go, she traipsed to Rhode Island where she was welcomed by that colony’s founder, the also-exiled Roger Williams.
That was the end of the end of the Antinomian controversy but not the end of Anne Hutchinson.
Anne was born Anne Marbury in 1591 in Alford, England. Her father was an Anglican cleric. Being literate himself and a teacher, he educated Anne to the fullest.
The family moved to London and lived there a while, but when Anne married childhood friend William Hutchinson she moved back to Alford. There, they enjoyed John Cotton’s sermons. Cotton was an outstanding theologian and a dynamic preacher, a combination not often found. Cotton was extremely well thought of.
Cotton was an Anglican preacher who had served for 20 years by the time the Hutchinsons met up with him. He peached much on grace in justification as well as the usual works being the fruit of it. Anne liked the grace part.
He believed the Church needed reforms, such as divesting itself of ritual and ceremony, but did not want to separate from it. He wanted to change it from within, or, “purify” it. Hence the moniker Puritans. As time went on, though, his consistent attitude against the framework of the Anglican church and his continual speaking against it eventually exceeded the leniency his overseers gave him, and pressure forced him out. He sailed for Massachusetts in 1633.
Devastated, Anne prompted her husband to follow Cotton. In 1634, the Hutchinsons packed up their 14 children and decided to follow Cotton to the new Colony that had been established just 13 years prior.
The Hutchinsons and William’s brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, were quickly accepted into the life of the colony. Anne was a midwife, and she met and discipled many women on her normal rounds. Being articulate and a deep thinker, many women sought her commentary on the Bible. Anne soon began holding weekly meetings for women at her home, repeating and commenting on Cotton’s sermons.
So far, so good. A woman ministering to her fellow sisters in body and soul is what the Bible tells us ladies to do. (Titus 2:3-4). Mothering in midwifery and ministering spiritually to sisters in the colony is a good thing.
However, it wasn’t long before Hutchinson expanded the discussions of the week’s sermon into her own exposition on them. Notoriety and interest caused men to attend her meetings, which were ever-expanding. Anne’s commentary was insightful, but a woman leading men in preaching and teaching, even in the privacy of a home, is a dangerous endeavor spiritually. (1 Timothy 2:12). The tendency to usurp is great, and that is what Anne did when she taught and preached to men. Some say that up to 60 people flooded her home to listen to Anne’s opinions and expositions. And it was definitely Anne they came for, not her husband John. (the sin of passive Adam, Genesis 3:6).
Does sin ever only get worse? Yes. Eventually, Anne did not restrict her home meetings’ topics solely to dissecting/discussing her pastor’s sermons, she strayed into dissecting other ministers’ sermons, too, usually negatively. Believing only she and her small circle of supporters were the only ones in the right, she criticized heavily, violating Titus 2:3 not to be slanders and Colossians 4:6 to let your conversation be gracious.
Remember, these were emigrants defying death in England for their views, defying death aboard the ships that brought them, surviving the first winters of privation and starvation. The one thing they needed was trust in their leaders’ stances and that is the very thing Anne destroyed.
More men began showing up, women too. Her ‘talks’ gravitated to mainly criticism of everyone else besides her favorite, John Cotton. She began to call names, and impugn character.
A soothing tongue is a tree of life, But perversion in it crushes the spirit. (Proverbs 15:4)
She hinted that some were antichrists and not saved. She said that these other pastors were preaching a covenant of works, while the only true pastor, Cotton, was preaching rightly, the covenant of grace. Anne over-focused on grace and was against Law. She was an antinomian.
Definition Antinomian: Anti means against, nomos is law. It’s “relating to the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law.” Oxford Dictionary
In looking at the two sides of the theological debate, it seems to me that both sides were right and both sides were wrong. Anne thought that the Holy Spirit indwelled, which is true, but, she taught that a person could live as they pleased under grace because assurance of salvation was known to the individual, therefore no external moral proof was necessary to evidence justification. Anne took this as far as it could go- where Cotton had been careful to link the Spirit with the Word, Anne decided that the mystical union with the Spirit was so close, one did not need the word, and could rely on “immediate revelations” from Him.
John Winthrop’s reply to a person receiving personal revelation from God was that it is “the most desperate enthusiasm in the world.”
Several of the named pastors naturally took a dim view of her preaching, and there was a meeting held to discuss what to do. John Winthrop, the Governor and spiritual leader of the Puritans at that time, was equally, if not more angered. Anne refused to listen.
And the sin deepened. Soon Hutchinson began to encourage women to rise up and walk out of sermons that preached doctrines with which she did not agree. Walking out is a disdainful, rebellious act. Elders deserved double honor. (1 Timothy 5:17). But many women did it. Men too.
The meetings continued, only growing in number. Anne’s dissections of others’ sermons, were not God-glorifying nor encouraging to pastors. Nor did they focus on educating the attendees and enlighten them as to Jesus as Savior. Nor did they prompt the people to good works and moral restraint. They were simply to point out the pastor’s errors and to cement her own position which she believed to be righteous. Think of the worst discernment ministries running today, who lack love, and who never lift up but only tear down, and that was the situation between 1636-1638 with Anne.
Anne was spurred on by people who should know better. A male admirer put it this way-
“I’ll bring you to a woman who preaches better gospel than any of your black-coats who have been at the ninnyversity, a woman of another kind of spirit who has had many revelations of things to come….I had rather such a one who speaks from the mere notion of the Spirit without any study at all than any of your learned scholars.” (Source)
See how personal revelations take a person AWAY from the word of God as it did this admirer?
Left, the statue of Hutchinson on the Massachusetts State House at 24 Beacon Street, Boston, MA. Still so controversial 375 years after death, and almost 100 years after the statue was commissioned, the original recipient, the Public Library, refused it and the Legislature ignored it for 2 years. It was finally installed in 2005. Story here: A heretic’s overdue honor
And Anne’s sin just deepened and deepened. It wasn’t long before Hutchinson began spouting personal revelations and prophecies. The apex of this was at her trial for sedition and heresy. Anne’s behavior had spawned a schism, had encouraged women to rebel, and caused a region-wide argument on the finer points of works v. grace. It also exiled her brother-in-law, John Wheelwright. It damaged Cotton’s reputation for years to come. The colony itself was suffering over this to the point of collapse. Winthrop’s “city on a hill” was only after a few years mired in petty bickering and politically unstable, caused by Anne. She had to be stopped.
Hutchinson was put on trial, after various attempts to get her to stop, recant, and repent. Hutchinson held firm. In her trial, she bested every single man in a theological debate, including Winthrop, who never forgave her, as we’ll see later.
It might have gone her way, except at the last, she overstepped, and claimed that God Himself had told her these things, and worse, that He told her He put a curse on them all. The initial charge of sedition was not met with a preponderance of evidence, due to her skill in theological combat. However when Hutchinson insisted God spoke to her personally, she was charged with blasphemy and exiled. In the spring, she moved to nearby Rhode Island and founded Portsmouth. Her husband and many of her children were already there.
Anne Hutchinson is noted as “a woman of conscience who yielded to no authority”, as quoted in this book about fellow Puritan preacher William Wentworth. Today’s feminists laud Hutchinson’s stance, but Christians know that is not the way. Of course we yield to authority.
Hutchinson rebelled against the scriptures, namely 1 Timothy 2:12 by teaching men. She and was unconcerned and unrepentant about it. She also failed to submit to her leaders, as Hebrews 13:17 says to do. Open and constant criticism of your leaders by disparaging them and encouraging walk-outs, is sin. (Also 1 Thessalonians 5:12, 1 Corinthians 16:16). Anne seems to have been unconcerned about the rift she was causing, and the word submit didn’t seem to be in her vocabulary. When she knew she was causing a problem, she did not repent, but persisted. This violated Romans 12:16, as she did not live in harmony with one another and failed to be humble. See also 1 Peter 3:8.
Above, John Cotton by John Smibert
How many Proverbs did Anne Hutchinson violate? She was not the meek, kind, quiet woman Proverbs calls us to be. She did not tend to her house (Proverbs 14:1). She was contentious, quarrelsome, and loud. She was overly proud of her own theological positions AND her ability to not only express them but to defend them.
The woman of folly is boisterous, She is naive and knows nothing. (Proverbs 9:13).
Men are supposed to lead the household. John Winthrop wrote of Anne’s husband William,
a man of very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife,
[Of interest: Where is Beth Moore’s Husband? 90-second NoCo Radio video clip]
Anne’s positive influence could have been great. She was mother of 15 children, many of them boys. Her insights and strong theological knowledge could have raised up a new generation of founding fathers for our nation. If Anne had remained in her mid-wifery and women’s Bible study sphere, and tended to her home, who knows what might have come of it.
As it was, there were a few positives from the negatives of the Anne Hutchinson Antinomian controversy. Winthrop sought a colonial confederation to unite the colonies. The men banded together and established Harvard College, initially a seminary to train up the generation of men, as this quote indicates,
To provide a bulwark against remnants of Hutchinson’s free-grace theology, just two weeks after she was banished the General Court of Massachusetts finally released funds in November 1637 to establish the “College at Newtowne” (renamed Harvard in 1639)
Third, it spurred Roger Williams to deepen his conviction that there should be a “wall of separation” between church and state. Hutchinson was tried as a seditionist and a heretic, and eventually convicted of blasphemy. Williams thought that-
the magistrate should not punish religious infractions—that the civil authority should not be the same as the ecclesiastical authority. The second idea—that people should have freedom of opinion on religious matters—he called “soul-liberty.” It is one of the foundations for the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Williams’ use of the phrase “wall of separation” in describing his preferred relationship between religion and other matters is credited as the first use of that phrase, and Thomas Jefferson’s source in later writing of the wall of separation between church and state in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802.
In addition, the controversy illuminated the fact that there was no perfect uniformity of doctrine among the men, which caught the leading Puritans off-guard. Winthrop thought that “The society must not only function as a unit, but in order to do so, must remain narrowly exclusive in content.” (Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries). Whether this is ever possible, only God knows…
Debating whether to bring Anne to trial and during the trial, it became clear that there was no uniformity of content.
Hutchinson was not the only bad actor in this debacle. John Winthrop behaved badly too. (Among others). Anne was in her mid-forties when the trial occurred. She was either pregnant during the trial or shortly after. She emigrated to Rhode Island the spring after the trial ended and shortly afterward, gave birth. The issue from the birth was not a baby but what is believed to have been a hydatidiform mole, or molar pregnancy. It was a mass of tumors, not a baby. Knowing what would happen if it became publicly known, the Hutchinsons had it quickly and secretly buried. However, Winthrop heard about it, sought the grave, got it exhumed, and used the tragedy as ‘proof’ that his stance was right. He wrote of it widely: ‘see how the wisdom of God fitted this judgment to her sin every way, for look—as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.” Not cool.
[Of interest: Anne Hutchinson’s Monstrous Birth and the Pathologies of Obstetrics]
This to me, is a total lack of charity and speaks ill of his own character.
Yet, William Coddington quoted a friend reminiscing about the controversy: “We were in a heate, and chafed, and were all of us to blame. In our strife, we had forgotten we were brethren.“
Later, when it appeared that Massachusetts was set to annex Rhode Island (it never happened), fearing reprisals, Anne and her children (her husband had passed away by then) moved out of Winthrop’s reach and into New York, the Netherlands’ territory. A year later, Anne and all but one of her children were killed in an Indian massacre. Many New England pastors wrote gloating reports of her death. Winthrop called her upon her death “An American Jezebel.”
Anne Hutchinson was an amazing colonialist who had much to offer the colony and her church. Unfortunately, she went outside the bounds of the ordained spheres for a woman and she caused upset, schism, and was a negative role model that reverberates 387 years later!! There’s no doubt though, she was formidable and earned a place in American history. As a wife, though, the more negative Proverbs speak of her and women like her than do the positive ones.
Unlike the positive example of Anne Bradstreet and Margaret Winthrop, whose excellence as wives and contributors to their family and community are noted to this day, Anne Hutchinson is the anti-wife whose contentious spirit and pride caused much harm to all those around her.
Be peaceable, And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, (2 Timothy 2:24)
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A few resources I used for background, sources for you too-
‘Revising what we have done amisse’: John Cotton and John Wheelwright, 1640
The William and Mary Quarterly
The Antinomian Controversy 1636-1638: A Documentary History, by David D. Hall, Editor
William Wentworth: Puritan Preacher, by Susan Ostburg
Rebels and Renegades: A Chronology of Social and Political Dissent in the United States by Neil Hamilton
Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, By Emery Battis
Anne Hutchinson Preaching in Her House in Boston, illustration published in Harper’s Monthly, circa February 1901 http://historyofmassachusetts.org/anne-hutchinson/
Previous Puritan Wives entries:
Intro: Puritan wives: literate, capable, and invisible in history?
Puritan Wives: Margaret Tyndal Winthrop and her extraordinary love letters
Puritan Wives: The Tenth Muse, Anne Bradstreet
