Anne Hutchinson was the mother of fifteen children and a recognized midwife in the young Massachusetts Bay Colony, attending women in childbirth without charge. It was in that domestic life, listening to the sermons of the preacher John Cotton, that she began gathering neighbors in her home to talk about faith, a simple habit that would carry her to the center of colonial America’s first great religious crisis.
Born in Alford, England, the daughter of clergyman Francis Marbury, she received an unusual education for a woman of her time. She married the merchant William Hutchinson in 1612 and, following Cotton, sailed with her family for Boston in 1634 aboard the ship Griffin.
In Boston, Anne’s weekly meetings grew beyond expectation: dozens of women, and later men too, among them Governor Henry Vane, began attending her home to discuss the sermons and the doctrine of grace. Her insistence that salvation comes by grace alone, apart from works, pleased many and unsettled the established clergy.
Anne went beyond pointed criticism: she declared publicly that most of the colony’s ministers preached a covenant of works, not of grace, and claimed to have received direct revelation from the Spirit. That claim, which contradicted the Puritan doctrine that revelation had ceased with Scripture, gave the magistrates the argument they were looking for against her.
Tried in 1637 for defaming the ministers, Anne endured two days of interrogation with theological skill, citing Proverbs and Titus in her defense. In the heat of questioning, she went so far as to warn the court that divine judgment would fall on the colony and its descendants if they condemned her, a statement that, in the eyes of her own contemporaries, weighed against her as heavily as the magistrates’ intransigence. Her claim of immediate revelation sealed her condemnation: she was declared unfit for the colony’s society.
In 1638, a second trial, this time ecclesiastical, ended in excommunication. Banished, she moved with her family to Aquidneck and helped found Portsmouth, in Rhode Island, a colony that would become a pioneering symbol of liberty of conscience in English America.
Widowed in 1642, she sought refuge still farther south, on the frontier of New Netherland. In August 1643, Anne, six of her children, and other members of her household were killed in an attack during Kieft’s War, between colonists and the Siwanoy people; only one daughter, nine years old, survived, taken captive.
Anne Hutchinson’s story remains a reminder that reading and discussing Scripture was never the privilege of the few. Her insistence that laypeople, including women, could study the Bible and testify to their faith still echoes wherever communities gather today, without clergy, to read and apply the Word.
