CHAPTER 14
Defiance and Disarray
1
THE PEQUOTS’ THREAT had been eliminated in genocidal slaughter. Yet fears of Indian conspiracies persisted, for Satanic influences could never be finally defeated here below—not in the world at large and not in one’s hearth and home.
Thus Stoughton’s troops had no sooner returned from the war than the struggle with threats from within was resumed.
Since Wheelwright’s condemnation, the elders, fearful of the insidious spread of Familist or antinomian views, had started the process of barring from immigration into the colony all who “might be dangerous to the commonwealth,” especially since, Winthrop wrote, “it was very probable” that some particularly dangerous people would soon be arriving from what was considered to be the true pit of English Familism, the notorious village of Grindleton, in Yorkshire. In fact, no Grindletonians ever migrated to New England. The main effect of the restrictive statute was to deny entrance to Hutchinson’s quite inoffensive brother-in-law Samuel and “some other of Mr. Wheelwright’s friends,” which was “taken very ill” by Winthrop’s opponents and touched off “many hot speeches.” And it led Cotton, who believed the ban would bar from entrance “godly passengers” who saw the truth as he did, to consider leaving the colony for another. But the real danger, the leaders knew, lay not at the port of entry but deep within the hearts of Hutchinson’s and Wheelwright’s resident sympathizers. And it was to cauterize their dangerous errors before they spread further that a synod of the colony’s clerics and elders was assembled, charged with identifying and refuting every one of the theological nodes of malignancy.1
With so many fears circulating in the colony, so many wild and unfocused dangers believed to be lurking, the investigators let their imaginations soar and quickly produced a list of no less than eighty-two errors, “some blasphemous, other erroneous, and all unsafe.” No sooner had the list been presented than trouble erupted. Some of the Bostonians and others demanded to see names. Who, they said, had ever subscribed to such wild notions? Where were the documents, the witnesses? When Winthrop told the dissenters that the synod was dealing with doctrines, not people, and to desist in their objections or the magistrates would “interpose,” the opponents challenged the right of civil authorities to interfere in religious matters and walked out of the meeting.2
But the enumeration of errors—which, Winthrop believed, were spreading like a plague—was not the only, or the most important, of the synod’s accomplishments. Once the catalog of abominations marking the outer limits of possible error had been established and the devilish means by which they had been insinuated into unsuspecting worshippers were revealed, the synod turned to more immediate and practical matters. It formulated the central points of contention between Cotton and Wheelwright on the one hand and the other clerics, led by Hooker and Shepard, on the other. The central question, stated and restated in several forms, was by then only too familiar: the correct priority between justification and sanctification—that is, direct, inner assurance of salvation or the articulated process of striving, which involved belief, personal sanctity, theological correctness, and the church’s ministrations.3
The discussion and resolution of this inflamed question in early September 1637 were memorable and decisive. The outcome determined the ultimate character of New England’s Puritanism. For in the midst of the discussion, John Cotton, the central figure, always conciliatory, always determined to avoid “differences, and jarres,” and proud if uncertain of his role as the community’s most respected preacher and counselor, came to believe that the radicals, and especially Wheelwright and Hutchinson, had taken advantage of his goodwill and deliberately distorted the delicate balance of his thought to promote their own extremist views, which, he said, he had never endorsed. They had advanced their distended opinions behind the shield of his reputation. He had been duped, misused, by his most fervent followers, made to appear to be something he never was, and now was exposed to criticism he did not deserve. The “iniquities” of these people grated on him. They had “without my Privety … harboured & secretly disseminated such Erroneous & daungerous Opinions, as (like a Gangrene) would have corrupted & destroyed Faith & Religion had not they bene timely discovered, & disclaymed both by our owne & other Churches.” His own views, he explained, were subtle indeed. Faith, he now agreed, was not simply a passive element in joining with Christ, not simply “habitual” in that ultimate union. While faith and sanctification might not be determinative of redemption, they were at least coexistent with it. If therefore the soul must consent through faith, faith and all its behavioral attributes must play a necessary if not sufficient role in the achievement of salvation.
It was a careful change of phrasing if not a change of mind—indeed, “a masterpiece of equivocation.” Some—Shepard especially, who had himself once flirted with radical ideas until he withdrew in panic—never believed that Cotton had really changed his mind; he had simply changed his appearance for quite pragmatic reasons. But however delicate it was and however unconvincing to some, Cotton’s reformulation was enough to separate him from the “sectaries” and to associate him with the emerging mainstream. Before the synod met he had promised his colleagues that if the suspects’ errors could be proved by two witnesses he would “bear witness against them.” And now, having cleared himself, he did exactly that. He named the “Ringleaders” who had deceived him, and he repudiated their “Bastard-opinions.”
He would never forget those decisive moments at the synod. Later he would explain again and again—to colleagues in New England, to Wheelwright in a long exculpatory letter, and to his English correspondents—how slow he had been “to see [the radicals’] windings, and subtile contrivances, and insinuations … whilst they propagated their Opinions under my Expressions … as if they had held forth noething, but according to the doctrine publickly taught by me.” How naïve he had been, he would recall, to have thought that the errors they had promoted had been mere “misexpressions” or “misconstructions.” And how trusting he had been to think that by private counseling he could reclaim from their errors such confirmed “Familists” as William Aspinwall, John Coggeshall, and William Coddington, once his trusted friends from Lincolnshire. But he knew now how corrupt their judgments had become and the extent of “their fraudulent pretence of holding forth no other, but what they received from me.”
There was profound satisfaction behind Winthrop’s quiet note in his account of the synod, that on the questions propounded, “Mr. Cotton and [the Elders] agreed, but Mr. Wheelwright did not.”4
The unrepentant Wheelwright and the other leading dissidents, now stripped of Cotton’s protection and denounced by him as dangerous schemers, were isolated and defenseless against formal prosecution. It proceeded quickly and thoroughly. On November 2 Aspinwall, for having signed a petition, itself a “seditious libell,” in support of Wheelwright, and for his “insolent & turbulent carriage,” was dismissed from his seat in the General Court, disfranchised, and banished from the colony. Coggeshall was similarly deprived of position and “enjoyned not to speake any thing to disturbe the publike peace, upon paine of banishment.” Wheelwright’s sentence was phrased more elaborately. Rejecting a last chance to repent, he was—for having declared magistrates, ministers, and most of God’s people “enemies to Christ and Antichrists”; for having preached sedition, by which now “all things are turned upside down among us”; and for having made the differences between himself and the establishment “as wide as between Heaven and Hell”—for all of this he was banished—“put out from among us”—and given fourteen days to leave the colony.
Other punishments, most commonly disfranchisement, were imposed on nineteen others, though ten, acknowledging their sin, were reprieved on the spot. It was at that point, as the climax of this general purge of the “opinionists” whose views had been so thoroughly condemned by the synod, that they turned on Anne Hutchinson—“the head of all this faction, (
Dux fœmina facti),” Winthrop wrote in a steaming indictment, “the breeder and nourisher of all these distempers,” a woman “of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold then a man, though in understanding and judgement, inferiour to many women.”5
Fierce, voluble, and bold she certainly was in the criminal trial before the General Court that stretched over two full days. Again and again, in the swirling debate between the unintimidated woman and the phalanx of interrogators, she was challenged—for having held illegal conventicles in which she instructed men as well as women; for having condemned all the clergy except Cotton as soul-dead preachers of works; for having exceeded her proper role as a woman; for having violated the fifth commandment in failing to honor the legal authorities; for having said things “very prejudicial to the honour of the churches”; and for having encouraged those who supported Wheelwright.
But again and again she eluded their grasp. Anything can be alleged, she said; but can anything be proved? Where were the witnesses? Conscience is surely free: had she done anything wrong? Religious meetings were common and had always been proper: why were hers improper? “Can you find a warrant for yourself and condemn me for the same thing?” Where is the rule that required her to reject men who came to her for instruction? Why will her accusers not testify under oath—were they afraid that untruths would be revealed? What authority was there for applying the fifth commandment to civil affairs? If she had in fact “countenance[d]” Wheelwright’s supporters, did that make her guilty of their crime?
Winthrop, who as governor chaired the trial, grew increasingly irritated, increasingly impatient with the deft evasions and the unwavering defiance of this “proud dame, that … makes havocke of all that stand in the way of her ambitious spirit.” She was by no means “so simple a Devill” as had been the rustic instigator of the bloody tragedy of Münster, the catastrophe that always haunted his imagination. Satan had surely used the “utmost cunning” in commissioning her “to undermine the Kingdome of Christ here.” For by her clever maneuvers, she seemed at times to be turning the whole trial on its head. Remember, he felt obliged to insist, “we are your judges, and not you ours.”6
Winthrop was in fact outpointed in sparring with Hutchinson, so others took over. Simon Bradstreet: Would she now give up her meetings? As far as she was personally concerned, yes, she said, “but for others I do not yet see light but shall further consider of it.” Deputy Governor Dudley: Had she not charged all the clergy but Cotton with preaching nothing but a covenant of works? Nothing but …? she asked. Prove that I ever said that—but if I did, “I proved it by God’s word” and only in private, and not in public. And in any case it is not a matter of black and white: “one [person] may preach a covenant of grace more clearly than another,” and the weakest such account might fade into works.
Then the ministers were brought in: Wilson, Peter, Phillips, Weld, Symmes, Shepard, Eliot. All testified against her, but still she saw only assertions, not proof. And with the clergy she could, and did, confidently dissect the subtlest issues. Did they not see the difference between preaching a covenant of works and being under a covenant of works? Could they not see the distinction, made clear in the sixteenth-century Geneva translation of Romans 3 and 2 Corinthians 3, between the letter of the law and the letter of the gospel, and that one could be under the letter but not the spirit of the gospel and by virtue of that be under a covenant of works? Finally, Cotton was brought in, somewhat embarrassed, but no doubt privately gratified, by her repeated assertion that he alone was under a covenant of grace. Though he had repudiated Wheelwright and several of his supporters, he could not bring himself to do the same for his disciple Hutchinson, whose arguments were more elusive and whose dialectical skills were more intimidating. He temporized. He could not definitely confirm, he said, that he knew for a fact that she had explicitly said that the clergy were under a covenant of works. In fact, it was not clear what precisely she had said to him, nor, in what he had heard of her wrangles with others, what exactly she had said to anyone else, and when.
Given such an opening Hutchinson felt her confidence rising, and turning broadly to her audience she lectured them freely on the growth of her spiritual state, on the voices she had heard, and on the ability God had given her to discern which ministers were preaching what and with what effect. But how, it was asked, had such knowledge come to her? It came, she said, just as the word had come to Daniel, that is, “by an immediate revelation” (Dudley: “How! an immediate revelation”), and furthermore she knew that she would be delivered out of their hands “by miracle as Daniel was.” Dudley challenged Cotton to condemn her talk of miracles and revelations. Cotton equivocated, distinguishing between God’s deliverance by the Word (reasonable, scriptural) and outright miracles (delusive and sinful). Dudley: “Sir, you weary me”: did Cotton not realize that all the atrocities in Germany had stemmed from just such revelations? There the deluded prophets “stirred up their hearers to take up arms against their prince and to cut the throats of one another.… Mrs. Hutchinson is deluded by the devil.” Winthrop: “The revelation she brings forth is delusion.” All the Court but two or three: “We all believe it—we all believe it.”7
The ordeal was over. Her confession of immediate revelations, Winthrop wrote with great relief, had gone beyond scripture and all church authority; Hutchinson had “freely and fully discovered her selfe.” And that she had done this by “her owne mouth” was surely a special providence, for in fact, he had to confess, the Court had not been “furnished with proofe sufficient to proceed against her.” She had done the work for them, and so, exuberantly, the Court was able to pronounce the sentence of banishment. When she asked, “Wherefore I am banished?” Winthrop replied, “Say no more, the Court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”8
But simply to banish Hutchinson along with Wheelwright and the other “opinionists” was not enough. The specter of a violent uprising of a millennial frenzy leading to a bloody rebellion against constituted authority—the ultimate threat that burned in the deep recesses of Puritan radicalism—could not so easily be dissipated. The fear of a satanic conspiracy in the guise of fanatical religion persisted—the fear of precisely the kind of murderous, suicidal rampage that the Fifth Monarchy zealots were capable of. Drastic, precisely targeted measures were necessary to head off such violent prospects. On November 20 the Court—noting that Wheelwright’s and Hutchinson’s “opinions & revelations” had “seduced & led into dangerous errors many of the people heare” and that there was as a consequence “just cause of suspition that they, as others in Germany in former times, may, upon some revelation, make some suddaine irruption upon those that differ from them”—ordered seventy-five men, chiefly Bostonians, to surrender all their “guns, pistols, swords, powder, shot, & match” to designated authorities. Failure to do so would incur a fine of £10 for each weapon concealed. And further, the same suspects were denied the right to buy or borrow such weapons, though magistrates might exempt from the order any who “acknowledg their sinn in subscribing the seditious libell” or at least “acknowledg it evill.”
But even that did not satisfy the worried authorities. The Court, “sensible of the great disorders growing” and the “contempts wch have of late bene put upon the civill authority,” ordered that anyone who defamed a court of law, its proceedings or its judges, would be fined, imprisoned, disfranchised, or banished. And if the Court itself became corrupted and magistrates abused their own colleagues for their opinions or rulings, such offenders were to be “sharply reproved” by the governor; if they persisted they were to be punished by fines or imprisonment.9
But the Antinomian Controversy, as it would be known, was not yet at an end. After seven months of confinement and intense, isolated biblical study, Hutchinson, pregnant and physically weak, was brought before the church of Boston to be tried for her “divers errors and unsound opinions.” The exhausting, two-day inquisition focused primaril
y on the charge of “mortalism”—that Hutchinson denied the soul’s immortality, hence endorsed “familistical” libertinage (“let us eate and drinke and doe any Thinge, tomorrow we shall dye”), which led quickly to the further charge that she misunderstood and deluded others on the doctrine of resurrection, a delusion, Cotton charged, that led inescapably to “that filthie Sinne of the Comunitie of Woemen and all promiscuus and filthie cominge togeather of men and Woemen without Distinction or Relation of Marriage.” And further, she was accused of falsely attributing her “errors” (“mistakes,” she insisted) to the effects of the debilitating confinement she had suffered.10
Amid the confusion of charges and countercharges and the tangles of biblical citations, a partial recantation that she had crafted with Cotton’s help was ignored. Her accusers, agreeing that they could no longer allow her to go on “seducinge to seduce, and in deacevinge to deceave, and in lyinge to lye,” closed in on her as her fortitude faded. With Cotton’s reluctant agreement to condemn his “puft up” disciple, whose revelations and theology seemed to be increasingly independent of scripture and church authority and who persisted, he believed, in falsifying when she had adopted such ideas, they reached the scripted verdict on her “groce and damnable Heresies.” For having disturbed the church’s tranquillity, for having misled “many a poor soule,” for having persisted in her revelations, and for having lied in her testimony, Hutchinson was finally and totally “cast out” of the church. “I doe deliver you up to Sathan,” the Rev. John Wilson, on behalf of the church, declared. And “I command you in the name of Christ Jesus and of this Church as a Leper to withdraw your selfe out of the Congregation.”11
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 56