Anne Hutchinson

Her father lost two years of his life to an argument about clerical education. Francis Marbury, an Anglican cleric with Puritan leanings, kept telling his superiors that England's clergy were ignorant, and a public trial for heresy in 1578 sent him to Marshalsea Prison. Released at 25, he was posted to the Lincolnshire market town of Alford, where he became curate and then schoolmaster, and gave his daughter an education almost no girl of the period received. Anne Marbury was baptised at Alford on July 20, 1591, the third of 15 children of his second marriage. She married William Hutchinson in London in 1612, bore 15 children of her own, worked as a midwife, and in 1634 followed the preacher John Cotton across the Atlantic aboard the Griffin.

In Boston she held weekly meetings at her house to go back over the Sunday sermons, and the audiences grew until she was running separate sessions for men and drawing 60 people a week. What she taught, that a believer knows salvation directly through the Holy Spirit and not through visible good conduct, set her against the colony's ministers and started the fight historians call the Antinomian, or Free Grace, Controversy. Governor John Winthrop tried her on November 7, 1637, for slandering the ministers and troubling the peace of the commonwealth. The charge was hard to make stick, since she had never preached publicly or signed anything. Then she told the court that God spoke to her by immediate revelation and would ruin Winthrop and the whole state. Banished, then excommunicated in March, she helped found Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island.

Four months after the banishment she miscarried what her physician described as a handful of transparent grapes, a hydatidiform mole in modern terms. Winthrop published it. She had brought forth not one but thirty monstrous births or thereabouts, he wrote, and see how the wisdom of God fitted this judgment to her sin, for as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters. Historians have argued since about whether she was pregnant during the trial at all or enduring severe menopausal symptoms after 25 years of continuous pregnancy and nursing. The woman now celebrated for tolerance was not herself tolerant. When Boston sent laymen to Portsmouth to correct her errors, she shouted them out of the room, telling them to call it the whore and strumpet of Boston, but no Church of Christ.

In August 1643 Siwanoy warriors killed her at the settlement she had built near Split Rock in what is now the Bronx, along with six of her children and the rest of the household. Winthrop entered it in his journal under September, but the record points to August. Her nine-year-old daughter Susanna was taken instead and held between two and six years, depending on the account. The river beside the killing ground carries the family name and so does the parkway built along it. Massachusetts took three and a half centuries to reconsider: in 1987 Governor Michael Dukakis revoked the banishment. A Cyrus Dallin statue of her with Susanna now stands in front of the State House that expelled her.

Anne Hutchinson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Boston conventicles other
  Weekly sermon meetings at her own house, drawing 60 or more people 1636
• Testimony at the November 1637 trial speech
  Preserved in transcript — the fullest surviving statement of her theology 1637
• Portsmouth, Rhode Island company
  Founded on Aquidneck Island by the banished, with William Coddington 1638
• The Portsmouth Compact other
  The civil covenant of the new settlement — her husband among the signers 1638

• July 20, 1591 aged 0 Baptised at Alford, Lincolnshire Third of the 15 children of Francis Marbury and Bridget Dryden.
• August 9, 1612 aged 21 Marries William Hutchinson at St Mary Woolnoth, London
• 1634 aged ~43 Lands at Boston aboard the Griffin with ten surviving children
• November 7, 1637 aged 46 John Winthrop opens her civil trial Charged with traducing the ministers and troubling the peace of the commonwealth.
• March 22, 1638 aged 46 Excommunicated by the Boston church John Wilson delivered the sentence and named her a heathen and a publican.
• April 1638 aged 46 Settles at Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island
• 1641 aged ~50 William Hutchinson dies at Portsmouth No record of the death survives — the settlement had no established church to keep one.
• 1642 aged ~51 Moves beyond Massachusetts reach into Dutch New Netherland Sixteen people in the party, seven of them her children.
• August 1643 aged 52 Killed with six of her children during Kieft's War Only nine-year-old Susanna was spared and taken captive.

• John Winthrop 1588–1649
  Long-serving Massachusetts Bay governor whose vision of a covenant community influenced New England political culture. prosecuted by
• William Penn 1644–1718
  Founder of Pennsylvania who advanced representative government and religious toleration in colonial America. successor in the experiment
• Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758
  Theologian and preacher whose role in the Great Awakening shaped American evangelical religion. argued the other side of grace
• Mary Baker Eddy 1821–1910
  Founder of Christian Science and a major female religious leader and publisher. later woman who founded a church
• Sojourner Truth 1797–1883
  Abolitionist and women's rights activist whose Ain't I a Woman? speech became a rallying cry for equality. later woman who preached without a licence