XXI.
The persecution. The field was now cleared for the orderly persecution of the dissentients. Whelewright, Mrs. Hutchinson's brother-in-law, had been convicted of sedition in the preceding March on account of an imprudent sermon preached on a fast day. But his sentence had been deferred from court to court, apparently until after the synod. Mass. Rec., i, 207. At the November court following the synod Whelewright was banished, and those who had signed a rather vigorous petition in his favor many long months before were arraigned and banished or otherwise punished. The banished included some of the most intelligent and conspicuous residents. Not until this November court had her opponents ventured to bring Mrs. Hutchinson to trial. Whelewright, standing by his hot-headed sermon, had just been sentenced; the abler but more timid Cotton had already been overborne and driven into a safe ambiguity by the tremendous pressure of the great synod. Vane had left the colony, and the time was ripe to finish the work of extirpation. The elders were summoned to be present and advise.
XXII.
Mrs. Hutchinson's trial, 1637. During a two days' trial, conducted inquisitorially, like an English Court of High Commission, Cambridge presented the spectacle of a high-spirited and gifted woman, at the worst but a victim of enthusiasm, badgered by the court and by the ministers, whose dominant order she had attacked. Hutchinson's Hist. of Mass. Bay, ii, appendix. Cotton, with more than his usual courage, stood her defender. The tough-fibered Hugh Peter, who made himself conspicuous in several ways, took it on him to rebuke Cotton for saying a word in defense of the accused. [Note 7.] Endecott and Hugh Peter, mates well matched, browbeat the witnesses who appeared in Mrs. Hutchinson's behalf, and Dudley, the conscientious advocate of persecution, was rude and overbearing. Winthrop acted as chief inquisitor, the narrow sincerity and superstition of his nature obscuring the nobler qualities of the man.
Mrs. Hutchinson defended herself adroitly at first, refusing to be trapped into self-condemnation. But her natural part was that of an outspoken agitator, and her religious exaltation had been increased, doubtless, by persecution, for combativeness is a stimulant even to zeal. On the second day she threw away "the fear of man," and declared that she had an inward assurance of her deliverance, adding that the General Court would suffer disaster. For this prophesying she was promptly condemned. Cotton had prophesied notably on one occasion, Wilson, his colleague, was given to rhyming prophecies, and Hooker had made a solemn prediction while in Holland. In this very year the plan of the Pequot campaign had been radically changed in compliance with a revelation vouchsafed to the chaplain, Stone. But these were ministers, and never was the ministerial office so reverenced as by the Puritans, who professed to strip it of every outward attribute of priestliness. Above all, for a woman to teach and to have revelations was to stand the world on its head. "We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex," etc., said Winthrop severely to Mrs. Hutchinson during the trial. Mrs. Hutchinson is excommunicated. She was sentenced to banishment, but reprieved, that the church might deal with her. On the persuasion of Cotton and others, Mrs. Hutchinson wrote a recantation apologizing for her assumption to have revelations, and retracting certain opinions of which she had been accused. But she added that she had never intended to teach or to hold these opinions. [Note 8.] For this falsehood, as it was deemed, she was summarily excommunicated. Yet nothing seems more probable than that her hyperbolic utterances under excitement had not stood for dogmatic opinions. Rise, Reign, Ruine, etc., and Winthrop's Journal, i, 309, 310. Under Cotton's fine-spun system of church government a member could not be excommunicated except by unanimous consent. Many of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends were absent from the colony, others had prudently changed sides or stayed away from the meeting. But her sons ventured to speak in her behalf. Cotton at once admonished them. The effect of putting them under admonition was to disfranchise them; it was one of Cotton's ingenuities of the sanctuary. The sons out of the way, the mother was cast out unanimously—a punishment much dreaded among the Puritans, who believed that what was thus bound on earth was bound in heaven. It was a ban that forbade the faithful even to eat with her. But the melancholy under which Mrs. Hutchinson had suffered vanished at once, and she said as she left the church assembly, "Better to be cast out than to deny Christ."
XXIII.
Omens and auguries. Mrs. Hutchinson and most of her party settled on Rhode Island, where they sheltered themselves at first in caves dug in the ground. Here she again attracted attention by the charm of her eloquent teaching, and some came from afar to hear the "she Gamaliel," as her opponents called her. Such gifts in a woman, and in one who had been excommunicated by the authority vested in the church, could be accounted for only by attributing her power to sorcery. Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 313, 316; ii, 11, and Short Story of Rise and Reign of Antinomianism. Winthrop sets down the evidence that she was a witch, which consisted in her frequent association with Jane Hawkins, the midwife, who sold oil of mandrakes to cure barrenness, and who was known to be familiar with the devil. At length "God stepped in," and by his "casting voice" proved which side was right. Mary Dyer, one of the women who followed Mrs. Hutchinson, had given birth to a deformed stillborn child. Winthrop, i, 316. This fact became known when Mrs. Dyer left the church with the excommunicated Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop had the monstrosity exhumed after long burial had rendered its traits difficult to distinguish. He examined it personally with little result, but he published in England incredible midwife's tales about it. God stepped in once more, and Mrs. Hutchinson herself, after she went to Rhode Island, suffered a maternal misfortune of another kind. The wild reports that were circulated regarding this event are not fit to be printed even in a note; the first editor of Winthrop's journal felt obliged to render the words into Latin in order that scholars might read them shamefacedly. Savage's Winthrop, i, 326. But Cotton, who was by this time redeeming himself by a belated zeal against the banished sectaries, repeated the impossible tale, which was far worse than pathological, to men and women, callow youths, young maidens, and innocent children "in the open assembly at Boston on a lecture day," explaining the divine intent to signalize her error in denying inherent righteousness. The governor, who was more cautious, wrote to the physician and got a correct report, from which the divine purpose was not so evident, and Cotton made a retraction at the next lecture. We are now peering into the abyss of seventeenth-century credulity. Death of Mrs. Hutchinson. Here are a grave ruler and a divine once eminent at the university, and now renowned in England and in America, wallowing in a squalid superstition in comparison with which the divination of a Roman haruspex is dignified.
Having suffered the loss of her husband, and hearing of efforts on the part of Massachusetts to annex Rhode Island, Mrs. Hutchinson removed to the Dutch colony of New Netherland with her family. [Note 9.] Here she and all her household except one child were massacred by the Indians. This act of Providence was hailed as a final refutation of her errors, the more striking that the place where she suffered was not far removed from a place called Hell Gate.
XXIV.
Results of ecclesiastical government. This famous controversy lets in much light upon the character of the age and the nature of Puritanism. It is one of many incidents that reveal the impracticability of the religious Utopia attempted in New England. The concentration of religious people undoubtedly produced a community free from the kind of disorders that are otherwise inseparable from a pioneer state and that were found abundantly in New Netherland, in Maryland, and in Virginia and on the eastward fishing coast. "These English live soberly," said a Dutch visitor to Hartford in 1639, "drinking but three times at a meal, and when a man drinks to drunkenness they tie him to a post and whip him as they do thieves in Holland." But while some of the good results to be looked for in an exclusively Puritan community were attained, it was at the cost of exaggerating the tendency to debate and fanaticism and developing the severity, the intolerance, and the meddlesome petty tyranny that inheres in an ecclesiastical system of government. During the lifetime of one generation Massachusetts suffered all these, and it is doubtful whether regularity of morals was not purchased at too great a sacrifice of liberty, bodily and spiritual, and of justice. Certainly the student of history views with relief the gradual relaxation that came after the English Restoration and the disappearance from the scene of the latest survivors of the first generation of New England leaders.