“Spirits are not finely touched
But to fine issues.”
But one bold avowal sealed her doom. “We have,” she said, “a new rule of practice by immediate revelations; by these we guide our conduct. Not that we expect any revelation in the way of a miracle; that is a delusion; but we despise the anathemas of your synods and courts, and will still follow the whisperings of conscience.”[1002]
This speech caused wide-spread alarm. It seemed to squint towards anarchy. “The true parents of the brats began to discover themselves,” quaintly comments old Mather, “when the synod lifted the sword upon them.”[1003] An insurrection of lawless fanatics, “like a Munster tragedy,” seemed brewing. The magistrates decided that the danger was desperate; that Anne Hutchinson was “like Roger Williams, or worse;”[1004] and so, says Winthrop, “we applied the last remedy, and that without delay.”[1005]
Anne Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and Aspinwall, were solemnly exiled as “unfit for the society” of the Pilgrims; and those of their followers who remained were ordered to deliver up their arms, lest they should, “upon some revelation, make a sudden insurrection.”[1006]
Thus ended the ecclesiarum prælia.[1007] “And thus,” says Cotton Mather, “was the hydra beheaded—hydra decapitata.”[1008] “This legislation may be reproved for its jealousy, but not for its cruelty; for it condemned the “heretics” to a banishment not more severe than many of the best of the Pilgrims had encountered from choice.” But it is a sad chapter; and perhaps the old divine was right when he wrote, “What these errors were ’tis needless now to repeat; they are dead and gone, and buried past resurrection; ’tis a pity to strive to rake them from their graves.”[1009]
The exiles, followed by great numbers of proselytes, on quitting Massachusetts Bay, wandered southward, “designing to plant a settlement on Long Island, or near Delaware Bay. But Roger Williams welcomed them to his vicinity,” and obtained for them a resting-place. They colonized Rhode Island, or Aquitneck, as it was then called. “It was not price nor money that got Rhode Island,” wrote Williams; “it was gotten by love; by the love and favor which that honorable gentleman, Sir Harry Vane, and myself, had with that great sachem, Miantonomoh.”[1010]
Being thus held by the same tenure that Providence owned, Aquitneck was based upon the self-same principle of intellectual liberty; and though the two were not united in one state until after the Restoration, they clasped hands in equal brotherhood, and were buoyed by toleration.
Thus the principles of Anne Hutchinson, thrown out of Massachusetts, sprouted in Rhode Island, and grew a well-ordered, sober state. A happy result flowed from an unhappy cause.
And now for a season internecine strife was hushed. All eyes were directed across the water. “The angels of the trans-Atlantic churches, sounding forth their silver trumpets, heard the sound of rattling drums” on every European breeze.[1011] Democracy was about to assert itself in England. The Pilgrim Fathers grasped hands, and silently marked the lesson; which was, that “courtiers, bishops, and kings, too, have a joint in their necks.”