ANNE HUTCHINSON
As I do understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway. He who has God's grace in his heart can not go astray. —Anne Hutchinson
[Illustration: ANNE HUTCHINSON]
Boston was founded in Sixteen Hundred Thirty. The village was first called Trimountain, which was shortened as a matter of prenatal economy to Tremont.
The site was commanding and beautiful—a pear-shaped peninsula, devoid of trees, wind-swept, facing the sea, fringed by the salt-marsh, and transformed at high tide into an actual island.
The immediate inspirer of the Puritan exodus from England was Archbishop Laud, who had a cheerful habit of cutting off the ears of people who differed with him concerning the unknowable. The Puritans were people who believed in religious liberty. They rebelled from ritual, form, pomp and parade in sacred things. Their clergy were "ministers," their churches were "meetinghouses," their communicants "a congregation."
The Boston settlers were Congregationalists, and stood about halfway between Presbyterianism and the Independents. Oliver Cromwell, it will be remembered, was an Independent. John Winthrop, a man very much like him, was a Congregationalist.
The Independents had no priests, but the Congregationalists compromised on a minister.
Charles the First and his beloved Archbishop Laud regarded these
Congregationalists as undesirable citizens, and so obligingly gave
John Winthrop his charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and said,
"Go, and peace be with you," although that is not the exact phrase
they used.
In Sixteen Hundred Thirty-three, the Reverend John Cotton arrived at Tremont from Boston, Lincolnshire, England. In his honor, in a burst of enthusiasm, the settlers voted to change the name of their town from Tremont to Boston. And Boston Village it remained—Saint Botolph's Town—governed by the town-meeting, until Eighteen Hundred Thirty-two, when it became a city, and Boston it is, even unto this day.