Mistress Bradstreet

by Charlotte Gordon

  She reflected, “[God] is not man that He should lie.” Instead, like a perfect suitor, “His word He plighted hath on high.” And it was this idea that comforted her most as she yearned to “cleave close to him alway[s].”36 Perhaps her loneliness and pain during these years was beneficial, since, according to her faith, it was an opportunity to deepen her relationship with God.

  Still, sometimes her suffering grew so intense that life felt almost impossible to endure. For the first time since she was an adolescent, she was tortured with thoughts of her own death. “In my distress,” she cried, “I sought the Lord / When naught on earth could comfort give, / And when my soul these things abhorred.” But God gave her comfort in her despair. “Then Lord,” she wrote, “Thou said’st unto me, ‘Live.’”37

  During this bleak period, it must have felt to her that her sons and daughters were all she had left. Although her eldest, twenty-year-old Samuel, had just graduated from Harvard and her second son, thirteen-year-old Simon, was at school in Ipswich, all the others were still home with her. Her two older daughters, Dorothy and Sarah, aged eighteen and fifteen, were helpful, but they were restlessly awaiting bridegrooms (Dorothy would soon marry Seaborn Cotton, John Cotton’s eldest son). The two younger girls, Hannah and Mercy, were also useful helpmates, but in 1653, when baby John was a year old, they were still only eleven and seven, while Dudley was a busy and mischievous five-year-old.

  And so, even as she combated the rolling tide of fevers that struck her down, she continued the spiritual education of her strong-willed children, who “began to sin as soon as act.” She tried to guard herself against their “pleasing face[s]” because, behind their smiles, there often lurked “a serpent’s sting.” Sadly, sometimes they seemed to delight in breaking the fifth commandment to honor their parents; they were “oft stubborn, peevish, sullen,” and were inclined to “pout and cry” for no apparent reason. All this while encountering the childhood illnesses and daily “breaches, knocks and falls” that were part of life on the frontier.38

  To Anne it must have seemed that the household would fall apart without her efforts. Her sons and daughters desperately needed her, and yet her strength seemed to be failing her. If she were to die, she wanted to ensure that her children grew to become devout Puritans and would continue to build New England in accordance with her father’s vision. Rather than trusting her children entirely to the care of servants or giving in to the temptation to succumb to her illnesses, she fought to stay alive and keep them out of the clutches of some “step-dame.” And it was in this protective vein that she decided to write a spiritual autobiography for the benefit of her children. She explained why in the prefatory lines:

  This book by any yet unread,

  I leave for you when I am dead,

  That being gone, here you may find

  What was your living mother’s mind.

  Make use of what I leave in love,

  And God shall bless you from above.39

  This five-page document is remarkable as a celebration of her faith as well as an admission of her doubts. Anne urged her children to know that questioning was an essential component of Puritan belief; she wrote, “I have not studied in this you read to show my skill, but to declare the truth, not to set forth myself, but the glory of God.” She had always assumed that “there is a God,” but she wondered, “How should I know He is such a God as I worship in Trinity, and such a Saviour as I rely upon?” By voicing her own uncertainties, she gave her children permission to make their own journeys of faith. Not that they should stray from Puritanism but that they should not allow their delusions and questions to take them away from God. Everyone, Anne implied, could face such “block[s],” and she outlined hers in surprising detail, from her flirtation with “the Popish religion” to a profound despair, where she asked, “Is there faith upon the earth?” She had to put aside the virtuous reputation she had worked so diligently to create in order to confess such things, but nothing was more important than helping her children persevere in their “pilgrimage.”40

  Characteristically, she ended what she called her “short matters” with an apology: “This was written in much sickness and weakness, and is very weakly and imperfectly done, but if you can pick any benefit out of it, it is the mark which I aimed at.”41 In fact this would be the principle that would govern Anne for the rest of her writing life. Even in the formal poetry she would embark on once again, she would endeavor to reveal “the glory of God” rather than the splendor of her “skill.” The most important thing now, she believed, was to write for the benefit of her readers. Like her father, she would dedicate herself to the “after-comers”: those inhabitants of New England who would read her words after she died. Perhaps she could provide them with the inspiration to devote themselves to the true God as well as to Massachusetts Bay, God’s chosen land.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Farewell Dear Child

  TO HER SURPRISE, Anne did eventually regain her health, and her spirits. In the spring of 1657, she exclaimed, “My sun’s returned with healing wings, / My soul and body doth rejoice.”1 She could not believe her good luck. By 1660 her life had become somewhat easier. She had survived her battles with illness. Her troubled and unhappy sister Sarah had died the year before at age thirty-nine, bringing sorrow but also relieving Anne and all her siblings of their worries about her behavior.

  The long decade of prayer, physical suffering, desolation, and self-reliance had stood Anne in good stead as a religious pilgrim. She had discovered that she could search out the divine and receive consolation from her prayers. Truly, she had matured into a devout woman her father and mother would have been proud of. At last she felt she had gained “access unto His throne, / Who is a God so wondrous great” and she yearned “to show my duty with delight.”2

  Her children were thriving. Her daughter Sarah had married a pious and wealthy man named Richard Hubbard and lived in nearby Ipswich. Simon graduated from Harvard that spring and began his studies as a minister. Hannah had married a man named Andrew Wiggin in 1659 and had moved to Exeter, New Hampshire.3 Mercy, Dudley, and John were the only children left in the Bradstreet home. At fourteen, Mercy was indispensable to her mother, aiding in the cheese making, mending, cooking, and gardening.

  Servants were now more plentiful and far more reliable because Andover was gradually becoming a more established community, and so Anne was likely not as overwhelmed by her household duties. The town itself had also become a more pleasant place to live. There were close to five hundred inhabitants, and more were coming. An entire generation had grown up there, married, and produced children. A few small shops had set up business, and trade had become brisk and profitable, although, of course, the settlement was still a far cry from being a center of colonial life. The road to Boston was poorly marked, and the trip could take as long as three days. There were still no bridges, and when the rivers were swollen with rain, crossings could be dangerous.

  In some ways, then, Anne was more alone and isolated than ever, with most of her children out of the house and civilization a long way away, but something she had never anticipated had come to pass. The children’s absence meant that a good deal of the hard labor of the last ten years was over. She had more time on her hands and more strength than she had had in years. She was “blessed” in “elder age,” she declared joyfully.4

  Gradually she turned her attention to correcting the poems in The Tenth Muse, revising and in some cases deleting entire passages. Without the company of her male advisers, this task had lost some of its luster, but it was also a way of remembering her old friends, and her father, too. In 1661, however, a blockbuster poem flashed onto the Massachusetts scene. Suddenly everyone was talking about Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, and Anne’s little book was rendered second best, seemingly less notable and less substantial than this gripping melodrama that graphically described each sorrowful detail of Judgment Day.

  An unhappy minister, Wigglesworth was a tortured
individual, prone to psychosomatic diseases, and subject to terrible waves of anxiety and self-recrimination.5 His poem reflected his own imaginative re-creation of the punishments of the Lord. Wives shrieked as they were ripped from their husband’s side and cast into hell. Piteous little babies called for their mothers as they too were plunged into “fire and brimstone [where] they wail and cry and howl / For tort’ring pain.” No one was spared except for the chosen “sheep.”6

  New Englanders could not lap this up quickly enough. By the end of the first year, the book had sold eighteen hundred copies in America alone, and one out of twenty colonists had purchased it. In fact there are no complete first editions of the poem because it was “literally read to pieces.”7 It was impossible for Anne not to notice this kind of splashy success. Whether she was jealous or inspired or even unmoved, Anne made a decision that her own career was not over and began to think about writing new verse again. But while Anne had been drawing closer to God, it seemed the rest of the world was growing further away from Him.

  In 1660, after more than a decade of Puritan rule, most English people yearned for a relaxation of the strict moral code of the dissenters and a return to the old ways, such as the right to drink, smoke, play games, and go to the theater. After the iron-willed Cromwell died, and Royalists and moderates were returned to power, Parliament actually entreated Charles’s son, Charles II, to come back to England. The new Charles agreed, and the Puritan era was over.

  This event, known as the Restoration, left Massachusetts Bay feeling isolated and alone. Now they were the only Puritan enclave and as such were vulnerable to the whims of the new king. Charles II was, quite naturally, suspicious of any individual with Puritan leanings, let alone an entire colony.

  When rumors floated from overseas that the king and his advisers were grumbling at New England’s very existence, the General Court knew that the situation was urgent; it was time to send their best negotiators to England. Even before he told her, Anne must have suspected her husband would be in charge of this expedition. Who else in the colonies had his credentials? Simon believed that their ties to the Old World were crucial to their survival and that their best chance was to pursue a compromise with England, one that would appease the king and yet leave them “the liberty to walk in the faith of the gospel.”8

  In January 1661 Simon boarded a ship that was coated with ice. The ocean was black with cold, but Anne knew that it was her husband’s duty to brave the wintry Atlantic for the sake of the colony. The only way to preserve their existence, it seemed, was for Simon to persuade Charles that Massachusetts was no threat to the Old World.

  While Simon was gone, discussions hummed in every household. What did the future hold? The first generation of immigrants and their leading magistrates and ministers were almost all dead; people feared that the founders’ dream of a “godly” Massachusetts Bay might soon follow them to their graves. It seemed “the saving remnant” had become just that—leftovers of the fierce movement of the first half of the century. Now that England had chosen a different path, many New Englanders felt abandoned, and this caused the most pious among them to look inward.9 To the devout it had begun to seem that Massachusetts was sliding away from the ideals of the original settlers. There was no one among their friends and family who seemed as religious or as visionary as Cotton, Ward, Winthrop, or Dudley.

  For many, though Anne was luckily not one of them, their children were a large part of the struggle. Some younger Puritans simply refused to examine their consciences or attend services in the meetinghouses. Each congregation faced the possibility of extinction as the old members died off and new ones failed to join. Some thought the churches should adopt something the ministers called the Half Way Covenant, which permitted children of church members to be baptized but did not allow them to become full-fledged participants in church rites such as the Lord’s Supper without proving their faith. But men and women like Anne resisted this idea because they feared it would lessen the purity of the original churches. They felt that congregations of “true believers” were all they had left now that the Anglicans were back in charge in England.

  Yet there were some children who struggled to become more observant. In fact these individuals devoted themselves to their religion with a kind of fierce insecurity based on their sense of being less faithful than their parents. They had not made the same sacrifices for their religion as those who had crossed the ocean and homesteaded in the wilderness; consequently their admiration for the men and women who had come before them bordered on hero worship. Inevitably, Anne and Simon, as surviving members of the first-generation immigrants, had grown into icons for these young people.

  What most Bay colonists agreed on was that they did not need a diversity of faith. Almost ten years earlier, Dudley had warned of what was to come, in a preface to his will:

  I . . . leav[e] this testimony behinde mee for the use and example of my posteritie . . . that I have hated & doe hate every false way in religion, not onely the Old Idolitry and superstition of Popery which is weareing away, but much more (as being much worse), the newe heresies, blasphamies, & errors of late sprange up in our native country of England, and secretly received & fostered here more then I wish they were.10

  But in the first years of his rule, King Charles II broke with his New England subjects on this topic, issuing—to their horror—proclamations of tolerance in the mother country. His advisers were pushing him to extend this sort of open-minded policy to the colony’s Bible-based government. After all, the English were still reeling from thirteen years of Puritan tyranny, where it was illegal to “keep Christmas, or to deck the house with holly and ivy.” Statues had been “chipped ruthlessly into decency.” Pictures that were deemed irreligious were burned. One could only serve in Parliament by showing evidence of “real godliness.” Every theater in the land had been closed. “Bull-baiting, bear-baiting, horse-racing, cock-fighting, the village revel, the dance on the village green were put down.” No one could even “eat a mince pie.”11 To the majority of English people, Massachusetts Bay was no longer the shining example of virtue it had been in the turbulent 1640s; rather, it was a vestige of the terrible rigidity that had killed a king and almost destroyed their country.

  In the face of this opposition from their homeland, Puritan New England snapped to attention. Suddenly it seemed their dedication to Puritan orthodoxy was in profound danger. For example, from their point of view, the Quakers, who had recently invaded Boston, “strolling naked down the aisles” of the Puritans’ churches, shouting disagreement in the middle of the ministers’ sermons, and in general flouting all attempts to restrain their behavior, were a shocking new challenge from Satan.12

  The court had tried its ordinary shaming tactics, at first whipping and banishing the Friends and then resorting to chopping the ears off two individuals who were repeat offenders. But these punishments proved ineffective against the determined Quakers, and Governor Endecott grumbled that they had an “incorrigible contempt of authority.” The next band of marauding Friends who shouted on the street corners in Boston were banished, but when they returned despite repeated warnings, the court decided that the time had come to up the ante. In 1659 two Quakers were hung on the Boston Common, and the following year Anne Hutchinson’s old friend Mary Dyer, who had converted to Quakerism, was also executed. “She hangs there like a flag” one witness exclaimed.13

  Most English people were scandalized when they got wind of what they could only regard as the latest evidence of New England fanaticism. Even English Puritans were worried by such fierce intolerance; they had seen the bloodshed it could cause, and they wrote letters urging their New England counterparts to relent and accept non-Puritans into their towns.

  Instead of being moved by these entreaties, the Bay magistrates were alarmed. Nothing could be worse, they believed, than the kind of open society the English government now advocated. The outrage the English expressed at the execution of the Quakers exacerbated the New
Englanders’ sense of being the only light left in the world. In response they assumed an even more aggressive stance against outsiders and those who challenged the authority of Massachusetts churches and government. To people like Anne and Simon, who were actually moderates in this debate, New England deserved to be admired. Of course the colony should adhere to its principles of religion and governance, as these were far superior to English ones.

  But if the colonists were anxious to hear the results of Simon’s conference with the king, Anne was worried that she had bid farewell to her husband for the last time. In a heartfelt prayer revealing how much she still loved him, she begged God to keep Simon safe for her. “O hearken, Lord, unto my suit / And my petition sign. / . . . Keep and preserve / My husband, my dear friend.”14

  Anne devoted the months Simon was away to searching for “secret places” to “kneel or walk,” to commune with God and consider the poems that lay ahead.15 But besides her entreaty for Simon’s safety, she had not yet put her pen to paper when at last he returned to Massachusetts with mixed tidings.

  The king had renewed their charter, but only in exchange for certain concessions: that the court allow the free worship of Anglicans, and that anyone, not just church members, could vote. Both of these tenets were anathema to the New England Puritans, and although Anne was relieved that her husband was safely home, it seemed to her and her friends that their colony was in profound danger of becoming like the corrupt and licentious Old World.

  That fall she inscribed the first words of a poem that she decided to call “Contemplations.” In this work she sought to capture the depth of her reflections during her solitary walks. Gone were her Elizabethan flourishes, her claims to encyclopedic knowledge. Her style had changed as her commitment to her religion had deepened. Her old hunger for fame had gradually given way to a concern for the spiritual well-being of future generations. It was her job, she believed, to help save the Puritan faith of the colony. Unfortunately, when she scoured her books and her memory, she could find no poetic structure that seemed right, and so she invented her own stanza, laboring to make this the most finely crafted of all her verse.