81 Facts About Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson was a Puritan spiritual advisor, religious reformer, and an important participant in the Antinomian Controversy which shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638.

Anne Hutchinson was eventually tried and convicted, then banished from the colony with many of her supporters.

Anne Hutchinson lived in London as a young adult, and there married a friend from home, William Hutchinson.

Anne Hutchinson was a midwife and helpful to those needing her assistance, as well as forthcoming with her personal religious understandings.

Anne Hutchinson began to accuse the local ministers of preaching a covenant of works rather than a covenant of grace, and many ministers began to complain about her increasingly blatant accusations, as well as certain unorthodox theological teachings.

Anne Hutchinson is a key figure in the history of religious freedom in England's American colonies and the history of women in ministry, challenging the authority of the ministers.

Anne Hutchinson is honored by Massachusetts with a State House monument calling her a "courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration".

Anne Hutchinson's father was an Anglican cleric in London with strong Puritan leanings, who felt strongly that a clergy should be well educated and clashed with his superiors on this issue.

Anne Hutchinson later used this transcript to educate and amuse his children, he being the hero and the Bishop of London being portrayed as a buffoon.

Anne Hutchinson moved to the remote market town of Alford in Lincolnshire, about 140 miles north of London.

Anne Hutchinson was the third of 15 children born to this marriage, 12 of whom survived early childhood.

In 1605 when Anne Hutchinson was 15, her family moved from Alford to the heart of London, where her father was given the position of vicar of St Martin Vintry.

The year after her father's death, Anne Marbury, aged 21, married William Hutchinson, a familiar acquaintance from Alford who was a fabric merchant then working in London.

Anne Hutchinson was inspired by Cotton and by other women who ran conventicles, and she began holding meetings in her own home, where she reviewed recent sermons with her listeners, and provided her own explanations of the message.

When Cotton left England, Anne Hutchinson described it as a "great trouble unto her," and said that she "could not be at rest" until she followed her minister to New England.

Anne Hutchinson believed that the Spirit instructed her to follow Cotton to America, "impressed by the evidence of divine providence".

Anne Hutchinson was well into her 14th pregnancy so she did not travel until after the baby was born.

In 1634,43-year-old Anne Hutchinson set sail from England with her 48-year-old husband William and their other ten surviving children, aged about eight months to 19 years.

William Anne Hutchinson was successful in his mercantile business and brought a considerable estate with him to New England, arriving in Boston in the late summer of 1634.

The Anne Hutchinson family purchased a half-acre lot on the Shawmut Peninsula, now downtown Boston.

Once established, William Anne Hutchinson continued to prosper in the cloth trade and made land purchases and investments.

Anne Hutchinson became a town selectman and deputy to the General Court.

Anne Hutchinson became an active midwife, and while tending to women in childbirth, she provided them with spiritual advice.

Anne Hutchinson soon began hosting weekly meetings at her home for women who wanted to discuss Cotton's sermons and hear her explanations and elaborations.

Anne Hutchinson's gatherings were seen as unorthodox by some of the colony's ministers, and differing religious opinions within the colony eventually became public debates.

Anne Hutchinson was exposed to his teaching for the first time, and she saw a big difference between her own doctrines and his.

Anne Hutchinson found his emphasis on morality and his doctrine of "evidencing justification by sanctification" to be disagreeable.

Anne Hutchinson expressed concern about Cotton's preaching and about some of the unorthodox opinions found among his Boston parishioners.

Anne Hutchinson is the one who likely alerted magistrate John Winthrop, one of his parishioners, to take notice.

Anne Hutchinson responded to this only when prompted, and only to one or two ministers at a time.

Anne Hutchinson believed that her response, which was largely coaxed from her, was private and confidential.

Governor Vane began challenging the doctrines of the colony's divines, and supporters of Anne Hutchinson refused to serve during the Pequot War of 1637 because Wilson was the chaplain of the expedition.

Governor John Winthrop presided over the trial, in which Anne Hutchinson was charged with "traducing [slandering] the ministers".

Question by question, Anne Hutchinson effectively stonewalled him in her responses, and Winthrop was unable to find a way to convert her known membership in a seditious faction into a convictable offence.

Anne Hutchinson's defence was that she had spoken reluctantly and in private, that she "must either speak false or true in my answers" in the ministerial context of the meeting.

Anne Hutchinson was confident of herself and her intellectual tools, largely because of the intimacy she felt with God.

Anne Hutchinson continued to criticise the ministers of violating their mandate of confidentiality.

Anne Hutchinson said that they had deceived the court by not telling about her reluctance to share her thoughts with them.

Anne Hutchinson insisted that the ministers testify under oath, which they were hesitant to do.

Dudley reiterated that Anne Hutchinson had told the ministers that they were not able ministers of the New Testament; Cotton replied that he did not remember her saying that.

Winship, citing the work of historian Mary Beth Norton, suggests that Anne Hutchinson consciously decided to explain why she knew that the divines of the colony were not able ministers of the New Testament.

Anne Hutchinson simplified the task of her opponents, whose prosecution had been somewhat shaky.

Anne Hutchinson's revelation was considered not only seditious, but in contempt of court.

Many of the Puritans had been convinced that there was a single destructive prophetic figure behind all of the difficulties that the colony had been having, and Anne Hutchinson had just become the culprit.

Anne Hutchinson was called a heretic and an instrument of the devil, and was condemned to banishment by the Court "as being a woman not fit for our society".

The Puritans sincerely believed that, in banishing Anne Hutchinson, they were protecting God's eternal truth.

The distance was not great, yet Anne Hutchinson was rarely able to see her children because of the weather, which was particularly harsh that winter.

Anne Hutchinson was frequently visited by various ministers, whose intent, according to LaPlante, was to reform her thinking but to collect evidence against her.

Anne Hutchinson called Hutchinson and read the numerous errors with which she had been charged, and a nine-hour interrogation followed in which the ministers delved into some weighty points of theology.

Anne Hutchinson admitted to having been wrong about the soul and spirit, wrong about the resurrection of the body, wrong in prophesying the destruction of the colony, and wrong in her demeanour toward the ministers, and she agreed that sanctification could be evidence of justification "as it flowes from Christ and is witnessed to us by the Spirit".

Anne Hutchinson admonished the "heinousness of her lying" during a time of supposed humiliation.

Anne Hutchinson was now banished from the colony and removed from the congregation, and her leading supporters had been given three months to leave the colony, including Coddington and Coggeshall, while others were disenfranchised or dismissed from their churches.

Anne Hutchinson had been ill most of the winter, with unusual weakness, throbbing headaches, and bouts of vomiting.

The Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gloated over Anne Hutchinson's suffering and that of Mary Dyer, a follower who had the premature and stillbirth of a severely deformed infant.

Coddington had openly supported Anne Hutchinson following her trial, but he had become autocratic and began to alienate his fellow settlers.

Early in 1639, Anne Hutchinson became acquainted with Samuel Gorton, who attacked the legitimacy of the magistrates.

Coddington became governor of the island, and William Anne Hutchinson was chosen as one of his assistants.

Anne Hutchinson was therefore taking a considerable risk in putting a permanent dwelling at this site.

The exact location of the Anne Hutchinson house has been a source of great interest for several centuries.

Anne Hutchinson concluded that the site of the homestead was on the west side of the Hutchinson River in Eastchester.

The fate of the Anne Hutchinson family was summarised by LaPlante:.

Anne Hutchinson is believed to have had red hair, which was unusual to the Indians, and perhaps because of this curiosity her life was spared.

Anne Hutchinson was taken captive, was named "Autumn Leaf" by one account, and lived with the Indians for two to six years until ransomed back to her family members, most of whom were living in Boston.

The exact date of the Anne Hutchinson massacre is not known.

Anne Hutchinson claimed that she was a prophetess, receiving direct revelation from God.

Anne Hutchinson further taught her followers that personal revelation from God was as authoritative in a person's life as the Bible, a teaching that was antithetical to Puritan theology.

Anne Hutchinson claimed that she could identify "the elect" among the colonists.

Anne Hutchinson is a contentious figure, having been lionised, mythologised, and demonised by various writers.

Anne Hutchinson was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1994.

Lang notes that Hester was what orthodox Puritans said Anne Hutchinson was, either in reality or at least spiritually.

The parallel is that Anne Hutchinson was the heretic who metaphorically seduced the Puritan community, while in Hawthorne's novel Hester Prynne literally seduced the minister of her community.

Hawthorne noted that The Scarlet Letter was inspired by John Neal's 1828 novel Rachel Dyer, in which Anne Hutchinson's fictional granddaughter is a victim of the Salem witch trials.

Anne Hutchinson appears in the opening chapters as a martyr connected to the later martyrs of the witch hysteria.

Anne and William Hutchinson had 15 children, all of them born and baptised in Alford except for the last child, who was baptised in Boston, Massachusetts.

Anne Hutchinson signed the Portsmouth Compact and settled on Aquidneck Island with his parents, but he soon made peace with the Massachusetts authorities and returned to Boston.

Anne Hutchinson was an officer in the colonial militia, and died from wounds received during King Philip's War.

Anne Hutchinson married William Collins, and both of them went to New Netherland and perished in the massacre with her mother.

Anne Hutchinson survived the Indian attack in 1643, was taken captive, and eventually traded to the English, after which she married John Cole and had 11 children with him.

Anne Hutchinson's grandson Peleg Sanford was a governor of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

One descendant bearing the Anne Hutchinson name was her great-great-grandson Thomas Anne Hutchinson, who was a loyalist Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay at the time of the Boston Tea Party, an event leading to the American Revolutionary War.

In 1914, John Champlin published the bulk of the currently known ancestry of Anne Hutchinson, showing her descent on her father's side of the family from Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.