History of Bonsai Trees

Tap to Read ➤

Timeline of Anne Hutchinson's Life

Sonal Panse
History of Bonsai Trees
History of Bonsai Trees
Calling a spade a spade always makes you very popular in certain quarters and very infamous in others. This story takes a look at the life of Anne Hutchinson, who preached a life away from religious conflicts and on the lines of true freedom of religion.
Background Image

Early Life

Born in July 1591 to Bridget Dryden and Francis Marbury, Anne Hutchinson grew up in Alford, Lincolnshire, England. Her father was a deacon at Christ Church, Cambridge at the time of her birth, and later became the rector, in turn, of St. Martin's Vintry, St. Pancras, and St. Margaret's.
Background Image

Influences

Francis Marbury was to perhaps have the strongest influence on Anne Hutchinson. He was a principled and outspoken man. He did not hesitate from speaking his mind on things that mattered deeply to him and as it happened there were plenty of things about the Church, its theology and clergy that bothered him and compelled him to speak out against.
Background Image
Religious tolerance was at an even lower ebb in those days than in the present age. People were routinely killed and tortured for questioning Church diktats.
Background Image
So it required a great deal of courage to speak out the way Francis Marbury did. Not once or twice, but continuously and despite the many times he was arrested and jailed for being seditious. He was a very brave man and his daughter gained his spirit in full.
Background Image
Education for women was not a burning issue in those times, but Anne Hutchinson was home-schooled and had the free run of her father's extensive library. The more she read, the more she began to examine and question established beliefs.
Background Image

Marriage

In 1612, when she was 21, Anne Hutchinson married a merchant named William Hutchinson, and settled down to a comfortable existence as a house-wife. Well-educated or not, women didn't have too many options outside that career back then.
Background Image
Anne maintained a strong interest in Church affairs, developed an affinity for the teachings of the Protestant Minister, John Cotton, and at the same time raised a family of fifteen children.
Background Image

Move to America

John Cotton, like Anne's father, was of the opinion that the Church's ideals had been hijacked by a corrupt and undeserving clergy. If the protestants were becoming as depraved as the catholics, what was the whole point in being a protestant? His movement to reform the protestant church came to be known as Puritanism.
Background Image
Persecuted from all sides in England, the Puritans decided to move to greener pastures and migrated to the USA. This is how the Hutchinsons came to settle in Massachusetts. They believed that in this new land there would be no discrimination and persecution, and each individual would be free to follow his or her own beliefs.
Background Image

Disillusionment at Massachusetts

But the grass always seems greener on the other side until you actually land on it. With no more persecution from the English Authorities, the persecuted soon forgot what that experience had been like and began unleashing their own brand of intolerance on their own people and on the native Indian population.
Background Image
Anne deplored the shoddy treatment meted out to the natives and she resented the second-class citizen treatment given to women. For all her sharp mind, she was 'only a woman' and as such, she was not expected to voice her opinions, or indeed have any opinions to voice and lead in any community decisions. Life in the Land of Liberty began to daily seem anything but free and liberal.
Background Image

Private Meetings and Sermons

Initially, to avoid trouble, Anne went along with the flow. But she was not the type that could knuckle down and live under oppression . She hadn't left England, just so she could have her opinions stifled over here.
Background Image
And so she founded a weekly gathering of women friends and here she began airing her views without compunction. She believed that having faith was enough for a Christian and one didn't really need all the elaborate Church rituals and the rigid rules to get anywhere, let alone to heaven.
Background Image
Word got around and soon a lot of people, men as well as women, began coming over to listen to her forthright speeches. Soon Anne's house became an important place for exchanging and challenging ideas in the new colony.
Background Image

Trial and Excommunication

Anne's regular, free-thinking rhetoric did not do down well with the Puritan clergy. She was after-all, questioning their authority, and, even more vulgarly, bringing women out from the kitchen shadows into the well-lit realm of ideas.
Background Image
The clergy, well-versed in the story of Eve, no doubt worried about how many apples this would cause them to eat and digest; it was nothing short of an assault on their well-ordered Eden.
Background Image
Anne was arrested, imprisoned, and brought to trial. She was judged by John Winthrop, a Puritan leader who was also the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony. He had a well-known distaste for women who didn't know their place and for Anne especially.
Background Image
It was anything but a fair trial and at the end of it, in 1637, Anne was convicted of 'antinomianism'. It meant she was guilty of believing that Christians were not bound by man-made moral laws.
Background Image

End

Since Anne refused to recant, she and her family were excommunicated and ordered to leave the colony. Together with many of their friends and supporters, they left and, in 1638, settled at what is now Portsmouth on the island of Aquidneck.
Background Image
Will Hutchinson died shortly after the move in 1642, and the very next year in 1643, the new settlement was unfortunately attacked by Mahican Indians. Except one of the Hutchinson children and a few others, everyone was brutally killed.
Background Image
When this news reached the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the upright folks there, took it as a sign of proper and just divine retribution. Hereafter, dissent became harder and the path to tyranny and repression smoother.