• Born: July 1591
• Birthplace: Alford, England
• Died: 20 August 1643
• Best Known As: Religious midwife banished from colonial Massachusetts

Name at birth: Anne Marbury

Anne Hutchinson was a theologically literate midwife who was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 for her religious views. Hutchinson emigrated with her husband and children from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, following religious mentor Reverend John Cotton. Bible-study classes she hosted for women earned her a following that later included men, notably the colony's governor, Henry Vane. But she roused controversy with her criticisms of other ministers and her interpretations of Christian doctrine, including her emphasis on personal revelation over classical church rites. In 1637 John Winthrop, who had replaced Vane as governor, put Hutchinson on trial for heresy. He charged her with violating the Bible's commandment to "honor thy father and mother," arguing that Hutchinson had undermined the fathers of the church with her preaching. Although Hutchinson ably defended herself in court, she was banished from the colony as being unfit for society. She settled in Rhode Island, where she and her husband helped found Portsmouth. After his death in 1642 she and her younger children moved to Dutch territory in what is now New York's Pelham Bay Park. She and all but one of her children were killed in an attack by members of the Siwanoy tribe in 1643.

Hutchinson's exact date of birth is unknown; she was baptized on 20 July 1591 in the town of Alford, a clue that she was likely born a few days earlier. William Shakespeare's birth is dated in the same manner... Hutchinson and her husband had 15 children.

English-born Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591-1643) was banished from the Massachusetts colony and excommunicated from its church for dissenting from the Puritan orthodoxy. Her "case" was one of several prefiguring the eventual separation of church and state in America.

Anne Marbury was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, the eldest daughter of a strong-willed Anglican priest who had been imprisoned and removed from office because of his demand for a better-educated clergy. In 1605 the family moved to London, where her father was reinstated to the clergy. He died in 1611, leaving his daughter a legacy of biblical scholarship and religious independence. The following year Anne returned to her birthplace as the bride of William Hutchinson, a prosperous cloth merchant. For the next 20 years she operated the household, acquired a knowledge of medicinal herbs, and cared for over a dozen children.

Her Early Puritanism

Hutchinson also continued her father's religious individualism. Adopting Puritanism, she often journeyed to St. Botolph's Church in Boston, England, to hear John Cotton, one of England's outstanding Puritan ministers. When the Anglican Church silenced him and he left for the colony of Massachusetts in America, Hutchinson became extremely distraught. She finally persuaded her husband to leave for America, so that she could follow her religious mentor.

The Hutchinson family was well received in Massachusetts. William Hutchinson was granted a desirable house lot in Boston, and both husband and wife quickly became church members. William Hutchinson resumed his career as a merchant, became a landowner, and was elected a town selectman and deputy to the General Court. Hutchinson's experience with medicinal herbs made her much in demand as a nurse, and she made many friends. When she was criticized for failing to attend weekly prayer meetings in the homes of parishioners, she responded by holding meetings in her own home. She began by reiterating and explaining the sermons of John Cotton but later added some of her own interpretations, a practice that was to be her undoing.

Puritan Orthodoxy

John Cotton was an intelligent and subtle theologian who had articulated an extremely fine balance between the value of God's grace and the value of good works in achieving salvation. While the Puritans believed that salvation was the result of God's grace, freely given to man, they also maintained that good works, or living the moral life, were important signs of that salvation and necessary preparation for the realization that one had received God's grace. But grace and works had to be kept in proper balance. To overemphasize works was to argue that man could be responsible for his own salvation and thus would deny God's power over man. On the other hand, to overemphasize grace was to assert a religious individualism that denied the necessity of moral living and by implication rejected clerical leadership, church discipline, and civil authority. While Cotton had maintained his balance in this most difficult of issues, Hutchinson did not, and she finally came to stress grace to the exclusion of works in determining salvation. The origin of her views is difficult to discover. Certainly Cotton had influenced her. She probably held her beliefs prior to her arrival in Boston, but she evidently did not advance them until the meetings in her home.

As her meetings became more popular, Hutchinson drew some of Boston's most influential citizens to her home. Many of these were town merchants and artisans who had been severely criticized for profiteering in prices and wages; they saw in Hutchinson's stress on grace a greater freedom regarding morality and therefore more certainty of their own salvation. But others came in search of a more meaningful and personal relationship with their God. As she attracted followers and defenders, the orthodox Puritans organized to oppose her doctrines and her advocates.

Antinomian Controversy

The issue of grace as opposed to works assumed political significance and ultimately divided Massachusetts into hostile camps. The orthodox Puritans called the Hutchinson group "Antinomians," or those who denied the applicability of moral law to the saved, and the Hutchinsonians referred to orthodox Puritans as "Legalists," or those who trusted only the observance of church laws as a sign of salvation. The orthodox Puritans, always a majority in the colony, came to demand repudiation of what seemed not only religious error but also potential social chaos. If Hutchinson's views predominated, they reasoned, individual conscience would replace clerical and civil authority as the standard for public conduct.

The Puritan orthodoxy began its assault on the dissenters in the May 1637 election. Henry Vane, a Hutchinson defender, was defeated for reelection to the governorship by John Winthrop, an opponent of her views. In the summer a synod was called in order that the "errors" of the Hutchinsonians could be identified and dealt with by the government. Following a special election in October, in which the orthodoxy increased its political strength, the government moved against individuals. Boston's pro-Hutchinson deputies were not permitted to take their seats in the General Court, and Hutchinson's brother-in-law John Wheelwright (previously convicted for sedition and contempt because of a sermon preached in defense of grace) was banished.

Anne Hutchinson Banished

The court then moved against Hutchinson. It was a difficult situation. As a woman, her words had not been public and she had not participated in the political maneuvers surrounding the controversy. Called before the court, she was accused of sedition and questioned extensively. She defended herself well, however, demonstrating both biblical knowledge and debating skill. She returned the next morning to be aided by John Cotton's testimony about her beliefs, which differed from the report of the clergymen who had spoken for the court. This conflicting evidence would have cleared her, but she brashly intervened and, before it was over, had declared herself the recipient of direct revelations from God, without aid of either Scripture or clergy. This assertion of direct communion with God was regarded as the vilest heresy by all, and it sealed her doom. She was banished as a woman "not fit for [Massachusetts] society."

While Hutchinson's trial was, by modern standards, a gross miscarriage of justice, it was not unjust according to the standards of 17th-century England, where, generally, in sedition cases a formal defense was not permitted and a jury was not used. Yet even by 17th-century standards, a mistrial occurred when the same men sat both as prosecution and judge, for her guilt had been thus "known" by the General Court long before she even presented herself to it.

After her sentencing, Hutchinson's importance waned. Her strongest supporters had either left Massachusetts or been banished, and her idol, John Cotton, had finally allied himself with the orthodoxy. The result of her investigation by the Boston congregation was a foregone conclusion. Her attempt to renounce her former errors was taken as incomplete by the clergy, and she was excommunicated for the sin of lying. Within a week she and her family departed for Rhode Island, where she was free to practice her religious views. In 1642 her husband died, and Hutchinson moved with her six youngest children to Long Island and then to the New Netherland (New York) mainland. In the late summer of 1643, Hutchinson and all but one of her children were killed in an Indian attack.

It was a sad end for an important religious figure. Hutchinson's emphasis on grace as the only requirement for salvation was an important step toward the achievement of religious freedom - that is, the ability to follow the dictates of one's own conscience in matters of belief - in America.

Further Reading

The best biography of Anne Hutchinson is Emery John Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1962). Other useful biographies are Helen Auguer, An American Jezebel: The Life of Anne Hutchinson (1930); Edith R. Curtis, Anne Hutchinson (1930); and Winnifred King Rugg, Unafraid: A Life of Anne Hutchinson (1930). Relevant documents dealing with the Antinomian controversy were published in David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History (1968). Background material is in Charles F. Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History: The Settlement of Boston Bay; the Antinomian Controversy; A Study of Church and Town Government (2 vols., 1892; 5th ed. 1896); James T. Adams, The Founding of New England (1921); Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy (1947); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958); and Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (1962).

For more information on Anne Hutchinson, visit Britannica.com.

(1591-1643), New England religious leader and midwife. Hutchinson is known chiefly for her role in the antinomian controversy in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her participation in so public an event, though rare for premodern women, was not unique. From the early Christian era, female activism in religious life gave some women high visibility, thus preserving their voices in the historical record. The splintering of the Puritan movement in seventeenth-century England gave women broader scope for leadership as lay preachers, visionaries, and petitioners.

Like many of her contemporaries, Hutchinson left no correspondence, journal, or published works. Only the documents of the antinomian controversy, principally the record of her two trials before the General Court (November 1637) and the Church of Boston (March 1638), provide the primary source material for interpreting her mental world. Close readings of these documents have enabled historians to understand the political, theological, and gender issues at the root of this colonial crisis.

Several factors contributed to Hutchinson's social authority in early Boston. Born in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, she was the daughter of Bridget Dryden and the dissenting Anglican clergyman Francis Marbury. As the second daughter of the Marburys' thirteen children, Anne developed her talents for domestic leadership and the use of herbal medicines early in life. From her father she received an education in theology and conscientious dissent. The Marburys moved to London in 1605, but when Anne married the merchant William Hutchinson in 1612 the couple returned to Alford to live. They began traveling to St. Botolph's in Lincolnshire to hear the charismatic preaching of John Cotton. During these years, too, Hutchinson gave birth to twelve children; another would be born in Boston, Massachusetts. Following Cotton's suppression for his Puritan views, he migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633. Bereft at the loss of his inspiring ministry, Hutchinson persuaded her husband to remove their family to Boston, Massachusetts, in September 1634, where their gentry status and piety assured them a prominent position in the Puritan colony. Two years later, however, Anne Hutchinson and John Cotton found themselves at the center of a religious and political contest.

The antinomian controversy of 1636-1638 broke out in the waning months of a religious revival led by Cotton when a spiritual malaise gripped the colonists. Hutchinson had been holding biweekly devotional meetings to discuss Cotton's sermons at her home, which drew as many as sixty people. She brought attention to Cotton's spirit-centered theology, championing him and her brother-in-law John Wheelwright as true Christian ministers against the "legal" preachers who taught that a moral life was sufficient grounds for salvation. With Cotton and Wheelwright, Hutchinson believed that redemption was God's gift to his elect and could not be earned by human effort: the soul remained passive to the work of divine grace in the drama of salvation.

The effect of Hutchinson's meetings was divisive, and her supporters composed a significant faction in the colony. A ministerial synod examined Cotton and cleared him from the charge of heresy; the investigation then focused on Hutchinson and Wheelwright. In contrast to Cotton, Hutchinson and her brother-in-law took their radical spirituality to an extreme position. Cotton's style was mediative; theirs was adversarial. Consequently, Hutchinson and her supporters were banished by the General Court of Massachusetts; and the result of her trial by the Church of Boston was excommunication. The Hutchinsons went to Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay. In 1642 when William Hutchinson died, his widow and the six youngest children moved to New York where all but one daughter were killed in an Indian raid in 1643.

The domestic setting for Hutchinson's leadership is key to understanding the role of premodern women in religious life. It was among her female neighbors in need of her medical skills that she first communicated her controversial religious ideas. Her devotional meetings were also common practice among the early Puritans. Like many religious movements, early Puritanism was a household religion. With its institutionalization, women lost the authority they had exercised in the formative domestic phase. Such was the case in Massachusetts where John Winthrop and company were intent on building a godly society protected by the coordinate powers of church and state. The enterprise demanded a new emphasis on outward morality, or sanctification, that would bolster the authority of both ministers and magistrates. But Hutchinson's prophetic stress on the indwelling Holy Spirit, although an authentic strain of Puritan belief, empowered the laity at the expense of the ministry. Moreover, her claim to immediate revelation was especially threatening to the advocates of law and order. A generation later a similar contest would be waged against the Quakers, some of whom had been among Hutchinson's supporters.

Bibliography:

Francis J. Bremer, ed., Anne Hutchinson: Troubler of the Puritan Zion (1981); David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History, rev. ed. (1990); Amy Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (1987).

Author:

Barbara Ritter Dailey

See also New England Colonies; Puritanism.

c.1591–1643, religious leader in New England, b. Anne Marbury in Lincolnshire, England. She emigrated (1634) with her husband and family to Massachusetts Bay, where her brilliant mind and her kindness won admiration and a following. The informal discussions at her home gave scope to Puritan intellects, but her espousal of the covenant of grace as opposed to the covenant of works (i.e., she tended to believe that faith alone was necessary to salvation) and her claim that she could identify the elect among the colonists caused John Cotton, John Winthrop, and other former friends to view her as an antinomian heretic. She defied them, was tried by the General Court, and was sentenced (1637) to banishment for “traducing the ministers.” Several of her followers—including William Coddington, John Wheelwright, John Underhill, and John Clarke—also left Massachusetts Bay. After helping Coddington to found the present Portsmouth, R.I., she quarreled with him and, with Samuel Gorton, ousted him in 1639. After Coddington's return to power, she moved (1642) to Long Island and then to what is now Pelham Bay Park in New York City. There she and all the other members of her family but one were killed by Native Americans.

Bibliography

See W. K. Rugg, Unafraid (1930, repr. 1970); E. J. Battis, Saints and Sectaries (1962); F. J. Bremer, Anne Hutchinson (1981); A. S. Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (1987); E. LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans (2004).

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