(T. F.; X.)
[1] See Belfast Magazine for August 1813.
HUTCHINSON, ANNE (c. 1600-1643), American religious enthusiast, leader of the “Antinomians” in New England, was born in Lincolnshire, England, about 1600. She was the daughter of a clergyman named Francis Marbury, and, according to tradition, was a cousin of John Dryden. She married William Hutchinson, and in 1634 emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, as a follower and admirer of the Rev. John Cotton. Her orthodoxy was suspected and for a time she was not admitted to the church, but soon she organized meetings among the Boston women, among whom her exceptional ability and her services as a nurse had given her great influence; and at these meetings she discussed and commented upon recent sermons and gave expression to her own theological views. The meetings became increasingly popular, and were soon attended not only by the women but even by some of the ministers and magistrates, including Governor Henry Vane. At these meetings she asserted that she, Cotton and her brother-in-law, the Rev. John Wheelwright—whom she was trying to make second “teacher” in the Boston church—were under a “covenant of grace,” that they had a special inspiration, a “peculiar indwelling of the Holy Ghost,” whereas the Rev. John Wilson, the pastor of the Boston church, and the other ministers of the colony were under a “covenant of works.” Anne Hutchinson was, in fact, voicing a protest against the legalism of the Massachusetts Puritans, and was also striking at the authority of the clergy in an intensely theocratic community. In such a community a theological controversy inevitably was carried into secular politics, and the entire colony was divided into factions. Mrs Hutchinson was supported by Governor Vane, Cotton, Wheelwright and the great majority of the Boston church; opposed to her were Deputy-Governor John Winthrop, Wilson and all of the country magistrates and churches. At a general fast, held late in January 1637, Wheelwright preached a sermon which was taken as a criticism of Wilson and his friends. The strength of the parties was tested at the General Court of Election of May 1637, when Winthrop defeated Vane for the governorship. Cotton recanted, Vane returned to England in disgust, Wheelwright was tried and banished and the rank and file either followed Cotton in making submission or suffered various minor punishments. Mrs Hutchinson was tried (November 1637) by the General Court chiefly for “traducing the ministers,” and was sentenced to banishment; later, in March 1638, she was tried before the Boston church and was formally excommunicated. With William Coddington (d. 1678), John Clarke and others, she established a settlement on the island of Aquidneck (now Rhode Island) in 1638. Four years later, after the death of her husband, she settled on Long Island Sound near what is now New Rochelle, Westchester county, New York, and was killed in an Indian rising in August 1643, an event regarded in Massachusetts as a manifestation of Divine Providence. Anne Hutchinson and her followers were called “Antinomians,” probably more as a term of reproach than with any special reference to her doctrinal theories; and the controversy in which she was involved is known as the “Antinomian Controversy.”
See C. F. Adams, Antinomianism in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, vol. xiv. of the Prince Society Publications (Boston, 1894); and Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (Boston and New York, 1896).
HUTCHINSON, JOHN (1615-1664), Puritan soldier, son of Sir Thomas Hutchinson of Owthorpe, Nottinghamshire, and of Margaret, daughter of Sir John Byron of Newstead, was baptized on the 18th of September 1615. He was educated at Nottingham and Lincoln schools and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and in 1637 he entered Lincoln’s Inn. On the outbreak of the great Rebellion he took the side of the Parliament, and was made in 1643 governor of Nottingham Castle, which he defended against external attacks and internal divisions, till the triumph of the parliamentary cause. He was chosen member for Nottinghamshire in March 1646, took the side of the Independents, opposed the offers of the king at Newport, and signed the death-warrant. Though a member at first of the council of state, he disapproved of the subsequent political conduct of Cromwell and took no further part in politics during the lifetime of the protector. He resumed his seat in the recalled Long Parliament in May 1659, and followed Monk in opposing Lambert, believing that the former intended to maintain the commonwealth. He was returned to the Convention Parliament for Nottingham but expelled on the 9th of June 1660, and while not excepted from the Act of Indemnity was declared incapable of holding public office. In October 1663, however, he was arrested upon suspicion of being concerned in the Yorkshire plot, and after a rigorous confinement in the Tower of London, of which he published an account (reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. iii.), and in Sandown Castle, Kent, he died on the 11th of September 1664. His career draws its chief interest from the Life by his wife, Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, written after the death of her husband but not published till 1806 (since often reprinted), a work not only valuable for the picture which it gives of the man and of the time in which he lived, but for the simple beauty of its style, and the naïveté with which the writer records her sentiments and opinions, and details the incidents of her private life.
See the edition of Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson by C. H. Firth (1885); Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 25,901 (a fragment of the Life), also Add. MSS. 19, 333, 36,247 f. 51; Notes and Queries, 7, ser. iii. 25, viii. 422; Monk’s Contemporaries, by Guizot.