The Cambridge meetinghouse is cold and full, magistrates on the benches and ministers along the walls, and a woman stands alone in the middle of it to answer for what she has been saying in her own parlor.
It is 1637.
She does not just cross an ocean for her faith. She follows a minister whose preaching on grace she trusts above every other voice in the colony, and she brings her husband and her children with her.
She does not just listen on Sunday. She opens her Boston home on weeknights to talk the sermon through, first with women, then with men, until half the leading citizens of the colony are finding their chairs in her parlor.
She does not just discuss doctrine. She argues that a tidy life and a full pew prove nothing about salvation, that only God’s free grace saves, and that most of the ministers in Massachusetts Bay are preaching law and calling it grace.
She does not just defend herself at trial. She holds the court for two days, meeting every charge with Scripture until there is almost nothing left to convict her of.
Her Spark of Liberty was a conscience that answered to God before it answered to the court.
Then she said the thing she could have kept. She told them God had spoken to her directly and promised to deliver her out of their hands. That single sentence gave the court what two days of questioning had not. They called it heresy, sentenced her to banishment, and finished the work months later with excommunication.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
She was born in Lincolnshire in 1591, the daughter of a clergyman who taught her to read Scripture and to argue it. She came to Boston in 1634 with her husband William and their children, following the minister John Cotton across the water. The meetings she held at home were ordinary at first and then were not, because she began to teach as well as repeat, and because men came to listen.
Governor John Winthrop watched the crowds in her parlor with real alarm, and not only over her theology. A laywoman instructing men was, to his mind, a disorder in itself. The trial at Newtown in November 1637 was his court, and her two days of argument nearly defeated it.
Banished, she went south with her family and helped found a settlement on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island built on liberty of conscience, a plain answer to the colony that had exiled her for claiming too much of it. After her husband died she moved her household further still, into Dutch territory near what is now the Bronx. She and most of her children were killed there in 1643, in a frontier war between colonists and the region’s Indigenous peoples. Some of the men who had judged her called it God’s verdict on her life.
It was not a verdict. It was a war she had no part in starting, and it was useful to the men who said otherwise. What she actually left behind was a colony built to protect the conscience Massachusetts Bay had just punished her for having.
Her name was Anne Hutchinson.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
A new Sparks of Liberty short read is here. What the Candle Witnessed tells the story of the enslaved boy who taught himself to read and, by candlelight in the summer of 1776, read the anti-slavery passage that Congress struck from the Declaration of Independence. Read it now on Amazon.
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