Anne Bradstreet and Her Time

by Helen Campbell

With such conditions the colonists were happy, and as the work of their hands prospered, one might have thought that gentler modes of judgment would have grown with it, and toleration if not welcome have been given to the few dissenting minds that appeared among them. Had Winthrop lived, this might have been possible, but the new generation, fast replacing the early rulers, had their prejudices but not their experience, and were as fierce opponents of any new ism as their fathers had been before them, while their rash action often complicated the slower and more considerate movements of the elders that remained.

For England the ten years in which the Colony had made itself a power, had been filled with more and more agitation and distress. There was little time for attention to anything but their own difficulties and perplexities, the only glances across seas being those of distrust and jealousy. Winthrop happily died before the news of the beheadal of Charles I. had reached New England, and for a time, Cromwell was too busy with the reduction of Ireland and the problem of government suddenly thrust upon him, to do anything but ignore the active life so much after his own heart, in the new venture of which he had once so nearly become a part. It is possible that the attitude of New England for a time based itself on the supposition, that life with them was so thoroughly in harmony with the Protector's own theories that interference was impossible. There were men among them, however, who watched his course warily, and who were not indisposed to follow the example he had set by revolt against hated institutions, but for the most part they went their way, quietly reticent and content to wait for time to demonstrate the truth or error of their convictions. But for the most there was entire content with the present.

Evidently no hint of a possible and coming Restoration found slightest credence with them, and thus they laid up a store of offences for which they were suddenly to be called to account. When at last the Restoration had been accomplished and Charles II, whose laughing eyes had held less mockery for William Penn than any among the representatives of sects he so heartily despised, turned to question how Quakers had fared in this objectionable and presumptuous Colony of New England, the answer was not one to propitiate, or to incline to any favor. The story is not one that any New Englander will care to dwell upon, even to-day, when indifference is the rule toward all theological dissension, past or present. It is certain that had Winthrop lived, matters could never have reached the extremity they did. It is equally certain that the non-combatants conquered, though the victory was a bloody one. Two sides are still taken to-day, even among New England authorities. For Quakers, there is of course but one, yet in all their statements there seems to be infinitely less bitterness than they might reasonably have shown. That one or two wild fanatics committed actions, which could have no other foundation than unsettled minds, cannot be denied by even the most uncompromising advocate of the Quaker side. But they were so evidently the result of distempered and excited brains, that only a community who held every inexplicable action to result from the direct influence of Satan, could have done anything but pass them by in silent forbearance.

Had John Cotton been alive in the year in which the Quakers chose Boston as their working ground, his gentle and conciliating nature, shown so fully in the trial of Anne Hutchinson, would have found some means of reconciling their theories with such phases of the Puritan creed as were in sympathy with them. But a far different mind held his place, and had become the leading minister in the Colony. John Norton, who had taken Nathaniel Ward's place at Ipswich, was called after twenty years of service, to the Boston church, and his melancholy temperament and argumentative, not to say pragmatical turn of mind, made him ready to seize upon the first cause of offence.

News of the doings of the obnoxious sect in England had been fully discussed in the Colony, and the law passed as a means of protection against the heresies of Anne Hutchinson and her school, and which had simply waited new opportunity for its execution, came into exercise sooner than they had expected.

It is difficult to re-create for our own minds, the state of outraged susceptibility—of conviction that Jehovah in person had received the extremity of insult from every one who dared to go outside the fine points for a system of belief, which filled the churches in 1656. The "Inward Light" struck every minister upon whose ears the horrid words fell, as only less shocking than witchcraft or any other light amusement of Satan, and a day of public humiliation had already been appointed by the General Court, "to seek the face of God in behalf of our native country, in reference to the abounding of errors, especially those of the Ranters and Quakers."

The discussion of their offences was in full height, when in July, 1656, there sailed into Boston harbor a ship from the Barbadoes, in which were two Quaker women, Mary Fisher and Anne Austin.

Never were unwelcome visitors met by a more formidable delegation. Down to the wharf posted Governor and Deputy-Governor, four principal Magistrates, with a train of yeoman supplemented by half the population of Boston, who faced the astonished master of the vessel with orders which forced him to give bonds to carry the women back to the point from whence they came. This might have seemed sufficient, but was by no means considered so. The unhappy women were ordered to goal till the return of the vessel; a few books brought with them were burned by the executioner, and from every pulpit in the Colony came fierce denunciations of the intruders.

They left, and the excitement was subsiding a little when a stronger occasion for terror presented itself in another vessel, this time from England, bearing eight more of the firebrands, four men and four women, besides a zealous convert made on the way from Long Island, where the vessel had stopped for a short time. Eleven weeks of imprisonment did not silence the voices of these self- elected missionaries, and the uncompromising character of their utterances ought to have commended them to a people who had been driven out of England for the identical cause. A people who had fallen to such depths of frenzied fanaticism as to drive cattle and swine into churches and cathedrals and baptize them with mock solemnity, who had destroyed or mutilated beyond repair organs, fonts, stained glass and every article of priestly use or adornment, might naturally have looked with understanding and sympathetic eyes on the women who, made desperate by suffering, turned upon them and pronounced their own preachers, "hirelings, Baals, and seed of the serpent."

The Quakers frowned upon Church music, but not before the Puritan Prynne had written of choirs: "Choirsters bellow the tenor as it were oxen; bark a counterpart, as it were a kennel of dogs; roar out a treble, as it were a sort of bulls; and grunt a bass, as it were a number of hogs." They arraigned bishops, but in words less full of bitterness, than those in which one of the noblest among Puritan leaders of thought, recorded his conviction. Milton, writing of all bishops: "They shall be thrown down eternally, into the darkest and deepest gulf of hell the trample and spurn of all the other damned … and shall exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them … they shall remain in that plight forever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected and down-trodden vassels of perdition."