American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante

Author:Eve LaPlante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

11

AN UNEASY AND CONSTANT WATCH

“The prisoner,” as John Winthrop took to calling Anne Hutchinson that winter, saw little of her children during her house arrest. One-year-old Zuriel; Susan, age four; six-year-old William; seven-year-old Katherine; Mary, nine; ten-year-old Anne; thirteen-year-old Samuel; and Francis, seventeen, stayed in the house on Shawmut with their father, his cousins Anne and Francis Freiston, and several servants. The older siblings—Richard, Edward and his wife, and Faith and Bridget and their husbands—often visited, as did their young aunt Katherine Scott. But the children saw their mother only rarely on account of the winter weather, which that year was particularly harsh.

It was the court’s intention to isolate the prisoner and reduce her support. Winthrop was determined that no one should be inspired by her or spread news of her. Still, she caused the governor to worry. “She began now to discover all her mind to such as came to her,” he wrote of her confinement, “so that her opinions came abroad, and began to take place among her old disciples, and now some of them raised up questions—which the elders, finding to begin to appear in some of their children, they took much pains both in public and private to suppress.”

The ministers, who had agreed among themselves to make the trip to Joseph Weld’s house in Roxbury as often as possible during her imprisonment there, came at least once a week, alone or in pairs. Thomas Weld, one of her strongest opponents, who lived nearby in Roxbury, came frequently. He had suggested his brother as her jailer in order that he might have more access to the prisoner and opportunity to reform her. Another forceful opponent of Antinomianism, Thomas Shepard, came as often as he could manage from Cambridge, and even Hugh Peter made the trip from Salem every few weeks. John Eliot, who seemed less forceful than the rest, came several times a week because he lived in Roxbury.

The ministers had two purposes in coming. They preached God’s word so she might see the light and recant her obnoxious opinions. In addition, they recorded those “errors, taken from her own mouth,” to present as evidence at her church trial in the spring. After each visit, the ministers dutifully added to the list they were compiling, “proved by four witnesses,” themselves. By the time of the trial in March 1638, this list would contain nearly thirty errors.

When the ministers challenged her doctrine, she repeatedly associated herself with the colony’s most respected minister, saying, they reported, that she “held nothing but what Mr. Cotton held” and “Mr. Cotton and she were both of one mind.” To this, the Reverend Weld, for one, told her she must have changed. He showed her papers written by Cotton “expressly against some of the opinions she held,” but “she affirmed still that there was no difference between Mr. Cotton and her.”

Apart from these missionary visits, which Hutchinson did not welcome but could not refuse, she spent the winter largely alone. She was isolated

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