It was not long before it was found out that most of the errors then crawling like vipers were hatch’d at these meetings.
So disturbed was the synod of ministers which was held early in the controversy, that this question was at once resolved:—
That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another, yet such a set assembly (as was then the practice in Boston) where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way by resolving questions of doctrines and expounding scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly and without rule.
As I read the meagre evidences of her belief, I see that Anne Hutchinson had a high supernatural faith which, though mystical at its roots, aimed at being practical in its fruits; but she was critical, tactless, and over-inquisitive, and doubtless censorious, and worst of all she “vented her revelations,” which made her seem to many of the Puritans the very essence of fanaticism; so she was promptly placed on trial for heresy for “twenty-nine cursed opinions and falling into fearful lying, with an impudent Forehead in the public assembly.” The end of it all in that theocracy could not be uncertain. One woman, even though her followers included Governor Sir Henry Vane, and a hundred of the most influential men of the community, could not stop the powerful machinery of the Puritan Church and Commonwealth, the calm, well-planned opposition of Winthrop; and after a succession of mortifying indignities, and unlimited petty hectoring and annoying, she was banished. “The court put an end to her vapouring talk, and finding no hope of reclaiming her from her scandalous, dangerous, and enchanting extravagancies, ordered her out of the colony.”
In reading of her life, her trials, it is difficult to judge whether—to borrow Howel’s expression—the crosier or the distaff were most to blame in all this sad business; the preachers certainly took an over-active part.
Of the personal appearance of this “erroneous gentlewoman” we know nothing. I do not think, in spite of the presumptive evidence of the marked personal beauty of her descendants, that she was a handsome woman, else it would certainly be so stated. The author of the Short Story of the Rise Reigne and Ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines that infected the Churches of New England calls her “a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man, though in understanding and judgment inferior to many women.” He also termed her “the American Jezebel,” and so did the traveller Josselyn in his Account of Two Voyages to New England; while Minister Hooker styled her “a wretched woman.” Johnson, in his Wonder-Working Providence, calls her the “masterpiece of woman’s wit.” Governor Winthrop said she was “a woman of ready wit and bold spirit.” Cotton Mather called her a virago, cunning, canting, and proud, but he did not know her.
We to-day can scarcely comprehend what these “double weekly lectures” must have been to these Boston women, with their extreme conscientiousness, their sombre religious belief, and their timid superstition, in their hard and perhaps homesick life. The materials for mental occupation and excitement were meagre; hence the spiritual excitement caused by Anne Hutchinson’s prophesyings must have been to them a fascinating religious dissipation. Many were exalted with a supreme assurance of their salvation. Others, bewildered with spiritual doubts, fell into deep gloom and depression; and one woman in utter desperation attempted to commit a crime, and found therein a natural source of relief, saying “now she was sure she should be damned.” Into all this doubt and depression the wives—to use Cotton Mather’s phrase—“hooked in their husbands.” So; perhaps, after all it was well to banish the fomenter of all these troubles and bewilderments.
Still, I wonder whether Anne Hutchinson’s old neighbors and gossips did not regret these interesting meetings, these exciting prophesyings, when they were sternly ended. I hope they grieved for her when they heard of her cruel death by Indian massacre; and I know they remembered her unstinted, kindly offices in time of sickness and affliction; and I trust they honored “her ever sober and profitable carriage,” and I suspect some of them in their inmost hearts deplored the Protestant Inquisition of their fathers and husbands, that caused her exile and consequent murder by the savages.
Samuel Johnson says, “As the faculty of writing is chiefly a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon women.” As the faculty of literary composition at that day was wholly a masculine endowment, we shall never know what the Puritan women really thought of Anne Hutchinson, and whether they threw upon her any reproach.
We gain a slight knowledge of what Margaret Winthrop thought of all this religious ecstasy, this bitter quarrelling, from a letter written by her, and dated “Sad-Boston.” She says:—