The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

  Hutchinson denies Bartholomew’s claim. When Winthrop presses him further, Bartholomew says that back in England he heard her profess “that she had never had any great thing done about her but it was revealed to her beforehand.” In other words, she claimed to be able to predict the future. Hutchinson denies this as well.

  Now that her witchlike pronouncements are on the table, Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley shrewdly seizes the opportunity to challenge John Cotton as to whether “you approve of Mistress Hutchinson’s revelations.”

  Cotton is stuck. Hutchinson has handily enumerated her shocking delusions of grandeur. She has claimed to hear the voice of God. Honorable men have testified that she boasts of being able to predict the future. The disquieting syllable “witch” has come up. On the one hand, this woman has been his friend and stalwart supporter for years. On the other hand, if he sticks up for her, he could end up like Wheelwright and Underhill and the other men who have defended her—banished. And Cotton already knows what that’s like, remembers well his time back in England on the run from Bishop Laud, hiding out in friends’ houses, his wife being followed, unable to practice his calling. When he went underground, he was a man without a home or a church, which to an old preacher like Cotton is the same thing.

  Dudley presses him: “Do you believe her revelations are true?”

  Winthrop steps in, saying, “I am persuaded that the revelation she brings forth is delusion.” There’s a surprise.

  Finally, in one sentence, Cotton sells out Hutchinson by recalling hearing another of her claims to predict the future. He says, “I remember she said she should be delivered by God’s providence, whether now or at another time she knew not.”

  In this context, Cotton’s concession is a smoking gun. He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t have to.

  Winthrop is ready to take a vote:

  Mrs. Hutchinson for these things that appear before us is unfit for our society, and if it be the mind of the court that she shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away, let them hold up their hands.

  Nine out of twelve hands go up, among them, of course, Winthrop’s. He continues, “Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.”

  She demands, “I desire to know wherefore I am banished?”

  Winthrop waves her off. “Say no more,” he commands. “ The court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”

  In the Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Anti nomians, and Libertines that Infected the Churches of New England, a victory tract published in London in 1644 and almost certainly written by Winthrop, Hutchinson is famously described as “this American Jezebel” whose downfall came when “the hand of civil justice laid hold on her, and then she began evidently to decline, and the faithful to be freed from her forgeries.”

  After being banished by the court, Hutchinson is excommunicated by the church. Winthrop writes in his diary that though her banishment had left her “somewhat dejected,” excommunication cheered her up. “She gloried in her sufferings, saying that it was the greatest happiness, next to Christ, that ever befell her.” He adds that it’s actually the churches of Massachusetts that are happiest, as the “poor souls who had been seduced by her” had “settled again in the truth.”

  Winthrop writes that Hutchinson went “by land to Providence, and so to the island in the Narragansett Bay,” that being Aquidneck, currently called Rhode Island. There, with the help of her fellow banishee, Roger Williams, Hutchinson, her husband, their litter of children, and some of her followers settled on land “purchased of the Indians.” There they would found the town of Portsmouth.

  Soon after her departure, it comes to Winthrop’s attention that back in Hutchinson’s Boston midwifery days, she and a fellow midwife had delivered the stillborn baby of her friend Mary Dyer and, with the blessing of John Cotton, secretly buried the fetus. The reason for this cover-up, according to Winthrop, was “that the child was a monster.”

  When the other midwife is interrogated by a church elder she confesses that the child, a girl, “had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp.” Also, her “nose hooked upward,” her back was covered in scales, “it had two mouths” and “instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.”

  For a woman, it can’t get any worse than bearing a stillborn child, right? Oh, but it can, especially for a woman living in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Remember that to the Puritans, all luck, good or bad, is a message from God, and thus deserved. A stillborn child is to be seen as God’s punishment of the parents. A stillborn “monster” was obviously an even harsher divine judgment.

  Winthrop queried Cotton as to why he advised the women to hide this deformity. The minister answered simply in the terms of the golden rule, that if the girl had been his own child, “he should have desired to have had it concealed.” Also, he had witnessed other “monstrous births” and had concluded that these punishments from God were meant solely “for the instruction of the parents.”

  Winthrop convinces Cotton that the parents of monstrous stillborns are supposed to be a cautionary tale to others—other sinners. And according to Winthrop, Cotton makes a public apology, “which was well accepted.”

  If only that were the end of this grisly business. Winthrop, after seeking the advice of the other magistrates and church elders, gives orders for Mary Dyer’s stillborn child to be exhumed. John Winthrop, who once said those beautiful words to his shipmates about mourning and suffering together, dug up what he thought was a decomposing monster—a monster sent as a message from God that Anne Hutchinson was wrong. The fetus, he writes in his journal, was “much corrupted, yet most of those things were to be seen, as the horns and claws, the scales, etc.”

  The only monster in this anecdote is Winthrop. He explains the child’s death as a consequence of her mother’s friendship with Anne Hutchinson. To him, this is vindication. The obvious enjoyment he gets out of recounting how mere proximity to Anne Hutchinson destroyed Mary Dyer’s child is surpassed only by his glee a few months later when he hears the news from Rhode Island that Anne Hutchinson herself had “expected deliverance of a child” but “was delivered of a monstrous birth” instead. He even goes so far as to write a doctor he knows living on Aquidneck, fishing for juicy details about the fetus.

  Then, just as he wrote they should in “Christian Charity,” Winthrop and his Boston congregation rejoice together. In his journal, he writes that John Cotton celebrates the death of Hutchinson’s fetus in his next sermon, proclaiming it to “signify her error in denying inherent righteousness” and that “all Christ was in us.” Winthrop had predicted in “Christian Charity” that God “will delight to dwell among us as His own people” and this had come to pass.

  Winthrop won. As a good Calvinist, he will continue to write in his journal things like “the devil would never cease to disturb our peace.” But still, by 1638, the troublemakers were gone. Williams had been banished and yet still served as Winthrop’s toady in dealing with the Indians. Hutchinson was not only banished but giving birth to the monster babies she deserved in godforsaken Rhode Island. The Pequot were done for. That swanky crybaby Henry Vane had sniffled his way back to England, and Winthrop with his God-given tallness was governor again. Even the ship that was supposed to bring a new governor commissioned by Archbishop Laud had literally broken apart—’twas by God’s providence, for sure. And anyway, the king had so many problems back home as the English Civil War starts to simmer, he couldn’t be bothered about a few scruffy religious fanatics in Massachusetts.

  When Winthrop first mentioned the tiny, ragged settlement of Boston in his journal in 1630, it was to record that a goat had died. Back then, every goat seemed to count. When he died in 1649,
even if Boston had yet to become that city upon a hill he’d dreamed of, it was a city nonetheless. Today, from his grave, near John Cotton’s, in the King’s Chapel Burying Ground, you can look across noisy Tremont Street at a bland, concrete office building, a perfect stereotype of capitalist efficiency.

  Such architectural stability would no doubt please Winthrop. But not this: around the corner, on Beacon Street, the grounds of the Massachusetts State House feature statues of heroes from the history of the commonwealth. There are two bronze representatives from Winthrop’s era—Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer.

  Mary Dyer and her husband were among Anne Hutchinson’s followers who were banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and followed her to Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Later, on a trip to England, Mary will convert to Quakerism and return to Massachusetts in 1658 to preach against the colony’s new law banning Quakers. They banish her again. When she returns a third time, she is arrested, sentenced to death, and hanged on Boston Common, which is across the street from her mournful but elegant statue on the State House grounds.

  In Portsmouth, Hutchinson and Dyer are remembered in a park called Founders Brook, a lovely spot next to a little stream under the shade of old trees. Hutchinson and Dyer are each remembered on plaques attached to rocks, Hutchinson’s talking her up as a “wife, mother, midwife, visionary, spiritual leader and original settler.”

  Near these rocks, plantings of echinacea, hollyhock, and fennel grow. A feminine hand has written “Hutchinson-Dyer Women’s Healing Garden” in black marker on a small piece of plywood. I wish I could say that I find comfort in the words “women’s healing garden.” I like gardens and healing and quite a few women. I drink echinacea tea and enjoy fennel in salads. I even have a concrete casting of an abstract hollyhock designed by Frank Lloyd Wright hanging on my living room wall.

  That said, the words “women’s healing garden” fill me with the same feminist dread I feel when a subscription card falls out of a magazine and I catch a glimpse at the address form. A potential male magazine subscriber is given the choice of one title, “Mr.,” but a female magazine subscriber is given three choices, thereby requiring a woman to inform perfect strangers in the mail room at Newsweek or Condé Nast exactly what kind of woman she is. She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).

  I hate that I’m picking on a nice little flower garden planted by well-intentioned, historically minded horticulturalists. I guess the Women’s Healing Garden makes me uncomfortable for the same reason I feel for Anne Hutchinson—because it’s unfair that her gender kept her from pursuing her calling. She should have been a minister or a magistrate. She should have had John Cotton’s job—or John Winthrop’s. Instead, she spent her working life brewing groaning beer and burying deformed fetuses in the dead of night. There’s nothing wrong with healing women, or women’s healing. There is something very wrong, or at least very sad, that a legal, theological mind like hers, on display only in her trial transcripts, didn’t get to study law or divinity at Cambridge like her male peers and accusers. As Peter G. Gomes once wrote in an article in Harvard’s alumni magazine about Hutchinson’s role in the origins of that institution, “Inadvertent midwife to a college founded in part to protect posterity from her errors, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, ironically, would be more at home at Harvard today than any of her critics.”

  The reason Founders Brook is called Founders Brook is because it marks the spot where, in 1638, Hutchinson’s followers wrote and signed their mutual pledge that came to be known as the Portsmouth Compact. A plaque on another rock near the Women’s Healing Garden and the little Hutchinson and Dyer memorials presents the compact’s text:

  We whose names are underwritten do here solemnly in the presence of Jehovah incorporate ourselves into a body politic and as he shall help, will submit our persons, lives and estates unto our lord Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, and to all those perfect and most absolute laws of his given us in his Holy word of truth, to be guided and judged thereby.

  The names of the compact’s signers, including Anne Hutchinson’s husband, Will, are listed below the text. Here lies the deepest reason why the Women’s Healing Garden strikes me as so forlorn—that Hutchinson is remembered here by pink echinacea in bloom instead of on the Portsmouth Compact plaque, where she belongs. All of the signers were there because of her, because she stood up to Massachusetts and they stood with her. But all the signers were men. Anne Hutchinson wasn’t allowed to sign the founding document of the colony she founded.

  After Will’s death in 1642, Anne Hutchinson moved with some of her children to the Dutch colony of New Netherland, near what is now the Split Rock Golf Course in the Bronx. In 1643, Anne and every member of her household, except one of her daughters, was killed by Indians at war with the Dutch.

  Of course, John Winthrop is not particularly devastated by the loss; after all, he writes in his journal, “these people had cast off ordinances and churches.”

  Because New York’s Hutchinson River is named after Anne Hutchinson, and a major highway is named after the river, the main road leading from New York City to Boston is called the Hutchinson River Parkway. My word, how Winthrop would cringe if he knew that. To get to his city, you see her name.

  A few weeks prior to Anne Hutchinson’s death, Winthrop notes in his journal that Roger Williams, passing through New Amsterdam to board a ship for England to secure a charter for Providence, had actually tried to negotiate a peace between the Dutch and their Indian opponents. Winthrop writes that thanks to Williams, peace was “reestablished between the Dutch and them.” Alas for Hutchinson, that peace didn’t stick.

  It is during this 1643 voyage from New Amsterdam that Williams writes his Algonquian dictionary, A Key to the Language of America, by a “rude lamp at sea.” It is an eventful trip. In London, Williams goes on a publishing binge, printing A Key, along with John Cotton’s callous letter about his banishment, his response to Cotton’s letter, and his diatribe on liberty of conscience, The Bloudy Tenent. He also secures a charter from Parliament for Providence, Newport, and Portsmouth. The three towns, the document claims,

  have adventured to make a nearer neighborhood and society with the great body of the Narragansett, which may in time by the blessing of God upon their endeavors, lay a sure foundation of happiness to all America.

  Among the names of parliamentarians signing the charter is one “H. Vane,” the former governor of Massachusetts Bay.

  Williams made another return visit to England in 1651, staying at Vane’s house and hobnobbing with Puritan celebrities like Cromwell and the poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost (whom Williams taught Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch). But the person who would, some twelve years later, in 1663, make Williams’s dream of codifying religious liberty come true was not one of his fellow Puritans. It was the philandering, theater-attending “merry monarch” of the Restoration himself, Charles II.

  The new Rhode Island charter signed by the king proclaimed:

  No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion in matters of religion, and do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all and every person and persons may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concern ments, throughout the tract of land hereafter mentioned, they behaving themselves peaceable and quietly.

  While the previous charter had urged Rhode Island, like the Massachusetts Bay Charter of yore, to “conform to the laws of England,” this one extends to the inhabitants of Rhode Island more freedom than the inhabitants of England.

  In the years after Massachusetts forces Roger Williams, and then Anne Hutchinson, to trudge through the snow to Narragansett Bay, Williams’s colony becomes a place of refuge for the unwanted and displaced, the outcasts and the cranks,
including Baptists, Quakers, and Jews.

  In The Witches of Eastwick, a novel set in a fictional, seemingly dull Rhode Island village, John Updike tips his hat to Rhode Island’s weirdo founders. Satan moves to town and wonders why the alluring local witches live in such a humdrum place. “Tell him Narragansett Bay has always taken oddballs in,” says one witch to another, “and what’s he doing up here himself?”

  That said, Williams’s colony is hardly utopia. There is as much internecine squabbling—if not more—going on there as there is in Massachusetts.

  In 1672, the sixty-nine-year-old Williams himself will wage a vicious war of words with the colony’s Quakers because he believes they have “set up a false Christ.” The Quaker belief in the “God within” each person is anathema to a Bible-based Calvinist like Williams, who writes in his screed against Quaker founder George Fox, George Fox Digg’d Out of his Burrowes, “they preached the Lord Jesus to be themselves.”

  Williams even holds a three-day-long debate in Newport with three Quakers. “The audience, mostly Baptists and Quakers,” writes Perry Miller, “heckled him with cries of ‘old man, old man,’ and whispered, after he had on the first day shouted himself hoarse in order to get any hearing, that he was drunk.” (More than three decades after John Cotton accused Williams of missing God’s point back in Salem when he smote him with laryngitis, he was once again struck dumb during a spree of punditry.)