Anne Hutchinson

Born Anne Marbury in 1591 Lincolnshire England, after her Puritan minister father passed away, she married William Hutchinson in 1612, working as a midwife and herbalist while holding Bible sessions in her home for other women. A staunch follower of Puritan minister John Cotton, when King Charles I began a systematic persecution of Puritan sects that had strayed from the sanctioned teachings of the Church of England, Cotton fled to the Boston, followed by the Hutchinson’s and their ten children. Working as a midwife and healer, Hutchinson held religious meetings in her home, expanding upon her belief that heaven was attainable, not by good behavior or sinless acts, but by worshipping God directly with heartfelt purity.

Packed Schedule

Holding two meetings a week with up to 80 people at each meeting, John Cotton and other Puritan clerics saw Hutchinson as a source of possible separatist dissension within the Massachusetts Bay Colony. After sending spies to her sermons, Cotton and other concerned clergymen passed resolutions forbidding Hutchinson from holding meetings in her home. After she ignored repeated orders to cease and desist, in 1637—several months pregnant—she was called before a General Court, where for the next two days, her Biblical prowess was challenged by a group of men led by Cotton. Although her Biblical knowledge was impeccable, her fate was sealed when she claimed that God had prophesied to her that the men before her would soon face ruin in retribution for their persecution of her religious beliefs and religious freedom—the same brand of persecution that brought the Puritans to North America.

Banished from MA Bay Colongy

Charged with heresy and banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony—along with anyone else who supported her beliefs—Hutchinson lived under house arrest until the springtime, when she and 30 other families moved to the island of Aquidneck, where together they founded Portsmouth Rhode Island. Losing her child to a miscarriage, Cotton would preach that Hutchinson’s stillbirth was punishment from God, while Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor John Winthrop recounted physical descriptions of many children delivered by Anne as devil-like, clawed creatures. Unable to escape their unending wrath, after her husband passed away she moved to shores of Long Island Sound near New Amsterdam, where she lived until her death in the summer of 1643, when she and fifteen others were brutally slain in an attack by Siwanoy warriors, making the life and preaching of Anne Hutchinson, one of the most outspoken women in early American history.