The Wordy Shipmates

by Sarah Vowell

  Then Wheelwright, clearly alluding to his and Hutchinson’s beleaguered little faction, proclaims that “the saints of God are few, they are but a little flock.” Then, alluding to Winthrop’s side, he continues, “Those that are enemies to the Lord, not only paganish, but antichristian, and those that run under a covenant of works are very strong.”

  With this sermon, Winthrop writes, Wheelwright “stirred up the people . . . with much bitterness and vehemency.” Hutchinson’s followers start “frequenting the lectures of other ministers” to “make much disturbance by public questions, and objections to their doctrines.” Thus the Hutchin sonians from Boston become an irreverent peanut gallery, traveling the colony to interrupt the sermons of other towns’ ministers. Such outrageous questioning of authority is an obvious violation of the Fifth Commandment, as it dishon ors church fathers.

  At the next meeting of the General Court, Winthrop writes that Wheelwright is found “guilty of sedition, and also of contempt, for that the court had appointed the fast as a means of reconciliation of the differences . . . and he purposefully set himself to kindle and increase them.”

  Vane, who is still governor at the start of the meeting, protests in vain. Wheelwright’s sentencing is postponed until the next court in May, though it will be postponed again. By the end of the meeting, Winthrop is reelected governor, which is a rebuke of Vane, and, by extension, of Wheelwright and Hutchinson.

  Also in May 1637 the court issues an order, writes Winthrop, “to keep out all such persons as might be dangerous to the commonwealth.” And who will be the arbiters of which persons are or are not dangerous? The magistrates, of course. This outrageous immigration policy is meant expressly to bar the Hutchinson and Wheelwright camp from importing supporters to their cause. Vane, who was voted out as governor but remains as one of the deputies (and one of Anne Hutchinson’s best friends), is infuriated by this policy. After Winthrop defends it, Vane writes in response, “This law we judge to be most wicked and sinful.” Among his objections to the law, Vane includes the fact that it gives the power “to expel and reject those which are most eminent Christians, if they suit not with the disposition of the magistrates.” Vane’s point is dangerously close to Roger Williams’s recognition that Christianity is inherently divisive and when it is the state religion, the Christians in power tend to persecute other kinds of Christians with whom they disagree. One of Vane’s more basic, and legally correct, arguments against the law is that it could theoretically bar the king himself from setting foot in this part of his own kingdom. Which is a violation of the Charter’s charge for the colonists to make no law “repugnant to the laws of England.”

  The Bay Colony’s reactionary immigration legislation is not unlike reactionary immigration legislation throughout history: it exposes a people’s deepest fears. For example, the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, passed by Congress to bar anarchists from the United States after an anarchist assassinated President McKinley. Or the not particularly Magna Carta-friendly clause in the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowing for illegal immigrants to be detained indefinitely and without legal counsel for up to six months if they are suspected of terrorism, or simply have terrorist “ties.”

  Behind every bad law, a deep fear. And in 1637, the two things panicking the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony the most are the Pequot and Anne Hutchinson. After the Pequot are burned alive in May, Winthrop and his fellow magistrates have one down and one to go.

  In August, Vane sails home to England for good. It must have been a relief to go where an Englishman is generally allowed to just show up unannounced, without court approval.

  In the years to come, Vane will stand out as a rare man during the English Civil War, an actual moderate. He is in the minority of Puritan Members of Parliament who argue against beheading Charles I, writing later that the king’s execution “will be questioned whether that was an act of justice or murder.” (“The most interesting thing about King Charles I,” reports Monty Python, “is that he was 5 foot 6 inches tall at the start of his reign, but only 4 foot 8 inches tall at the end of it.”)

  Vane’s friend Oliver Cromwell had commanded his army to defeat a king in the name of Parliament only to then make himself Lord Protector and dissolve Parliament like the king before him. Vane becomes such an outspoken critic of Cromwell’s despotism that Cromwell is said to have cried, “ The Lord deliver me from thee, Henry Vane!”

  Forced to retire from public life during Cromwell’s dictatorship, Vane takes to writing. Like Roger Williams, Vane believes in religious liberty, gently insisting that when freedom of worship is denied, people “are nourished up in a biting, devouring, wrathful spirit, one against another, and are found transgressors of that royal law which forbids us to do that unto another which we would not have them do unto us.” In other words, required membership in one religion, like that in Massachusetts Bay, is a violation of the golden rule called for by Jesus, the King of Kings, in the Sermon on the Mount.

  When Cromwell’s weakling son Richard tries to hold on to his father’s title, Vane writes a withering summary of the whole country’s misgivings about Richard’s character, stating:

  One could bear a little with Oliver Cromwell, though, contrary to his oath of fidelity to the Parliament, contrary to his duty to the public, contrary to the respect he owed that venerable body from whom he received his authority, he usurped the government. His merit was so extraordinary, that our judgments, our passions might be blinded by it. He made his way to empire by the most illustrious actions; he had under his command an army that had made him conqueror, and a people that had made him their general. But, as for Richard Cromwell, his son, who is he? What are his titles? We have seen that he had a sword by his side; but did he ever draw it? And what is of more importance in this case, is he fit to get obedience from a mighty nation, who could never make a footman obey him? Yet, we must recognize this man as our king, under the style of protector!—a man without birth, without courage, without conduct! For my part, I declare, sir, it shall never be said that I made such a man my master!

  Such talk paved the way for the return of Charles II, the dead king’s son, from exile in France. After Charles II came home to England and the monarchy was restored, the new king condemned to death a few men he held responsible for the execution of his father, including Henry Vane. Who had argued against the execution! Vane was beheaded. (Cromwell was, too—posthumously. Charles II had Cromwell’s corpse dug up, dragged through the streets of London, hanged on a gallows, taken down, and decapitated. His rotting head was skewered on a pike and displayed at Westminster for over twenty years. Eventually, Cromwell’s skull was buried at his old college in Cambridge.)

  Henry Vane’s headless ghost is said to haunt the library of his father’s house, Raby Castle. But I think it’s more accurate to say that Vane’s departure in 1637 haunts American history. I can’t help but wonder what might have been had he stuck around and lived out his years in New England as John Winthrop’s conscience instead of Oliver Cromwell’s. Vane’s later writing has much in common with the Winthrop of “Christian Charity.” In his book The Retired Man’s Meditations, Vane describes a good society, in Winthrop-like terms, as “reunited of all good men as one man in a happy union of their spirits, prayers and counsels, to resist all common danger . . . and promote the interest and common welfare of the whole.”

  Reading those words, Vane’s abandonment of New England can be seen as the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s loss. Vane was a person—a governor—who possessed Williams’s insistence on religious liberty and Winthrop’s beautiful communitarian ideals (but without his totalitarian flaws). Vane was so young in Massachusetts that the disagreements of other men made him cry like a girl. But he matured into a formidable advocate for goodwill and common sense. Considering what happened to his friend Anne Hutchinson right after his exit, Massachusetts could have used him.

  In September of 1637, one month after Henry Vane sailed away, the freemen meet to decide on matt
ers Hutchinso nian. They resolve, writes Winthrop, “That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another,” assemblies of “sixty or more” as were then taking place in Boston at the home of “one woman” who had had the gall to go about “resolving questions of doctrine and expounding scripture” are not allowed. The Bill of Rights, with its allowance for freedom of assembly, is a long way off.

  Also, a member of a church’s congregation “might ask a question publicly, after sermon, for information; yet this ought to be very wisely and sparingly done.” In other words, no heckling the ministers allowed.

  In November, Wheelwright appears before the court and, refusing to repent for his Fast Day sermon the previous January, is, Winthrop writes, “disenfranchised and banished.” So are four other supporters of Hutchinson and Wheelwright, including John Underhill, hero of the Mystic Massacre.

  “The court also sent for Mrs. Hutchinson,” writes Winthrop, “and charged her with . . . keeping two public lectures every week in her house,” which were attended by “sixty to eighty persons.” She is also accused of “reproaching most of the ministers,” except for Cotton, “for not preaching a covenant of free grace, and that they had not the seal of the spirit.”

  Hutchinson’s judges are Winthrop, Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, five assistants, and five deputies. Various ministers, including John Cotton, are also present. As governor, Winthrop presides over the trial, for the most part stu pidly. Hutchinson continually outwits him, even though she is, at the age of forty-six, pregnant yet again.

  Winthrop explains to Hutchinson she has been “called here as one of those that have troubled the peace of the commonwealth.” And, as is his policy toward all godly persons who repent their blunders, he offers the court’s corrections, so that she “may become a profitable member here among us.” If not, “the court may take such course that you may trouble us no further.”

  Hutchinson points out she has not been charged with anything. Winthrop says he just told her why she’s here.

  “What have I said or done?” she asks.

  Winthrop answers that she “did harbor . . . parties in this faction that you have heard of.” I.e., she invited troublemakers into her home.

  Then he accuses her of being in favor of Wheelwright’s Fast Day sermon, and those in favor of the sermon “do break a law.”

  “What law have I broken?” she asks.

  “Why the fifth commandment,” answers Winthrop. This is of course the favorite commandment of all ministers and magistrates, the one demanding a person should honor his father and mother, which for Winthrop includes all authority figures. Wheelwright’s sermon was an affront to the fathers of the church and the fathers of the commonwealth.

  A Ping-Pong match follows in which Winthrop accuses her of riling up Wheelwright’s faction and she’s, like, “What faction?” And he accuses her of having “counseled” this mysterious faction and she wonders how she did that and he answers, “Why in entertaining them.”

  She asks him to cite the law against having people over. And he lamely says she has broken the law of “dishonoring the commonwealth.”

  (Genealogy buffs might enjoy learning that this lopsided battle of the wits will be repeated between Winthrop and Hutchinson’s descendants during the presidential debates of 2004. Winthrop’s heir, John Kerry, debates Hutchinson’s great-something grandson, George W. Bush. Only in this instance it’s the Hutchinson who is flummoxed by his opponent’s sensical answers. Bush’s constant blinking appears on television as if he thinks the answers to the questions he’s being asked are tattooed inside his own eyelids.)

  Winthrop and Hutchinson go back and forth as to whether or not she’s honoring her parents, and Winthrop is so flummoxed by the way she crushes his shaky arguments, he erupts, “We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex.” Not a particularly good comeback, considering that they’re the ones who have forced her into this discourse.

  He then quizzes her on why she holds her commonwealth-dishonoring meetings at her house. She cites Paul’s Epistle to Titus, in the New Testament, which calls for “the elder women” to “instruct the younger.”

  He tells her that what she’s supposed to instruct the younger women on is “to love their husbands and not to make them clash.”

  She responds, “If any come to my house to be instructed in the ways of God what rule have I to put them away?”

  “Your opinions,” Winthrop claims, “may seduce many simple souls that resort unto you.” Furthermore, with all these women at Hutchinson’s house instead of their own, “Families should be neglected for so many neighbors and dames and so much time spent.”

  When she presses him once again to point out the Scripture that contradicts the Scripture she has quoted calling for elders to mentor younger women, Winthrop, flustered, barks, “We are your judges, and not you ours.”

  Winthrop really is no match for Hutchinson’s logic. Most of his answers to her challenges boil down to “Because I said so.”

  In fact, before this trial started, the colony’s elders had agreed to raise four hundred pounds to build a college but hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it. After Hutchinson’s trial, they got cracking immediately and founded Harvard so as to prevent random, home-schooled female maniacs from outwitting magistrates in open court and seducing colonists, even male ones, into strange opinions. Thanks in part to Hutchinson, the young men of Massachusetts will receive a proper, orthodox theological education grounded in the rigorous study of Hebrew and Greek.

  Moving along, Winthrop asks her of ministers preaching “a covenant of works, do they preach truth?”

  “Yes sir,” she answers, “but when they preach a covenant of works for salvation, that is not truth.” In other words, it’s fine to exhort people to good behavior, but good behavior is not going to save their souls. Which is in fact, what every person in the room, including Winthrop, believes. They are angry with her because she has accused all the ministers except for Cotton and her brother-in-law, Wheelwright, of preaching only a covenant of works, a Puritan put-down. Several ministers then gang up on her to claim that that’s what she’s been going around saying.

  The trial resumes the next morning and John Cotton is called to testify. If the court can get the beloved Cotton, Hutchinson’s highest-ranking friend, to rat her out for heresy or sedition, she’s lost. He stands by her, though, more or less. He says he regrets that any comparison has been made between him and his colleagues, calling it “uncomfortable.” But, he adds, “I must say that I did not find her saying that they were under a covenant of works, nor that she said they did preach a covenant of works.”

  Cotton has exonerated her. Now the court has to acquit her. And it would have except that one person stands up and gives the testimony that will get Anne Hutchinson banished from Massachusetts. And that person is: Anne Hutchinson.

  “If you please to give me leave I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true,” she says.

  Music to John Winthrop’s ears. He was about to step in and silence her. But, while the trial transcript proves that she’s a better debater than he, he’s no idiot. He later recalls, “Perceiving whereabouts she went”—namely, self-incrimination—he “permitted her to proceed.”

  I wish I didn’t understand why Hutchinson risks damning herself to exile and excommunication just for the thrill of shooting off her mouth and making other people listen up. But this here book is evidence that I have this confrontational, chatty bent myself. I got my first radio job when I was eighteen years old and I’ve been yakking on air or in print ever since. Hutchinson is about to have her life—and her poor family’s—turned upside down just so she can indulge in the sort of smart-alecky diatribe for which I’ve gotten paid for the last twenty years.

  Hutchinson starts by informing the court of her spiritual biography. She recalls that back home, she was disconcerted by the “falseness” of the Church of England and contemplated “turn[ing] Separatist.”
But after a “day of solemn humiliation,” she had, like every man in the room, decided against separatism. Unlike every man in the room, she claimed to hear the voice of God, who “let me see which was the clear ministry and which the wrong.” Ever since, she continues, she has been hearing voices—Moses, John the Baptist, even “the voice of Antichrist.”

  To the men before her (and, by the way, to me) this is crazy talk. It might also be devil talk. An assistant asks her, “How do you know that was the spirit?”

  Her answer couldn’t be more uppity. She compares herself to the most exalted Hebrew patriarch facing the Bible’s most famous spiritual dilemma: “How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?”

  Dudley replies, “By an immediate voice.”

  Hutchinson: “So to me by an immediate revelation . . . by the voice of his own spirit to my soul.”

  This is blasphemous enough, but she’s on a roll. She then dares them to mess with her, a woman who has the entire Holy Trinity on speed dial. “Look what you do,” she warns. “You have power over my body but the Lord Jesus hath power over my body and soul.” Their lies, she claims, “will bring a curse upon you and your posterity, and the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

  Winthrop provokes her further. Since she is shameless enough to compare herself to Abraham, he seems to think it might be fun to find out if she is Daniel in the lion’s den, too. “Daniel was delivered by miracle,” he says. “Do you think to be delievered so too?”

  Yep. “I do here speak it before the court,” she responds helpfully, adding, “I look that the Lord should deliver me by his providence.” She claims God told her, “ ‘I am the same God that delivered Daniel out of the lion’s den, I will also deliver thee.’ ”

  She was quoting God. Not the Bible. Just something God said to her one day when they were hanging out.

  A magistrate named William Bartholomew who had sailed to Massachusetts on the Griffin with Hutchinson pipes up that when Boston came into view she was alarmed by “the meanness of the place” but then proclaimed that “if she had not a sure word that England should be destroyed, her heart would shake.” Bartholomew recalls that “it seemed to me at that time very strange and witchlike that she should say so.”