Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson was a Puritan spiritual advisor, religious reformer, and an important participant in the Antinomian Controversy. Her strong religious convictions were at odds with the established Puritan clergy in the Boston area. She was eventually tried and convicted, then banished from the colony with many of her supporters. Hutchinson is a key figure in the history of religious freedom in England’s American colonies.

About Anne Hutchinson in brief

Summary Anne HutchinsonAnne Hutchinson was a Puritan spiritual advisor, religious reformer, and an important participant in the Antinomian Controversy. Her strong religious convictions were at odds with the established Puritan clergy in the Boston area. Her popularity and charisma helped create a theological schism that threatened to destroy the Puritans’ religious community in New England. She was eventually tried and convicted, then banished from the colony with many of her supporters. Hutchinson is a key figure in the history of religious freedom in England’s American colonies. She is honored by Massachusetts with a State House monument calling her a \”courageous exponent of civil liberty and religious toleration\”. She has been called \”the most famous—or infamous—English woman in colonial American history\”. Anne Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, and baptised there on 20 July 1591, the daughter of Francis Marbury and Bridget Dryden. Her 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. In 1578, he was given a public trial, of which he made a transcript from memory during a period of house arrest. He later used this transcript to educate and amuse his children, he being the hero and the Bishop of London being portrayed as a buffoon. For his conviction of heresy, Marbury spent two years in Marshalsea Prison on the south side of the River Thames across from London.

Within a year of Marbury’s first wife’s death, his first wife, Elizabeth Moore, bore three children, then died within a year. Hutchinson’s father was the grandfather of John Dryden, Erasmus Poet, and Laureate Poet Laureate of the Poet’s Court. He was also the brother of John Herasmus, the playwright and playwright of John Poet Poet. He died about 140 miles north of Alford in 1585. He moved to the remote market town of Saint Wilfrid’s, north of London, and became the local curate and schoolmaster at the Free Grammar School, one of many public schools, begun by Queen Elizabeth II. Hutchinson was married to William Hutchinson, a friend from home, and the couple moved back to Alford where they began following preacher John Cotton in the nearby port of Boston. She soon became well established in the growing settlement of Boston and soon became a midwife and helpful to those needing her assistance, as well as forthcoming with her personal religious understandings. In August 1643, Hutchinson, six of her children, and other household members were killed by Siwanoys during Kieft’s War. The only survivor was her nine-year-old daughter Susanna, who was taken captive. Five of her older surviving children remained in England or in England, while she settled with her younger children near an ancient landmark, Split Rock, in what later became The Bronx in New York City.