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Court and synod
Four days after New England ministers held a relatively successful synod to determine theological truths, the General Court decided to eliminate the Opinionist movement – however necessary. It kicked out wavering or pro-Opinionist members, and then put John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson on trial for sedition. Then it gave their followers the choice between renouncing the movement and joining them in exile. Then, it threatened Cotton.
In acting so decisively, the Court had helped create a society in which unity trumped individualism. It also ensured New England’s final accepted theology was much more works-based than it had been before the controversy (and even Cotton had to give up fighting for the notion of Free Grace for the foreseeable future). Works-based leaders like Eliot and Shepard started evangelizing the Indians, and new themes and rituals started to emerge in New England religious life.
Transcript
By August, 1637, the Antinomian Controversy had grown so heated that people as far away as Barbados were writing about it. And to help resolve it, Massachusetts Bay planned to hold the Synod which Shepard and Cotton had been discussing for months.
Introduction
Hooker, who was comfortably settled in Connecticut, didn’t approve of using a synod to determine who was right in a controversy, arguing that since the people presiding over the synod would have their own opinions, it was an improper and unreasonable way to establish the truth. Hooker felt that each town should deal with the issues on its own, and then send delegates to a colony-wide meeting where each would put forward its ideas and concerns. Such a system may be harder to control, but in cases as controversial as this, even determining simple truths could cause needless division and make things worse than they are. The Synod went forward, though, and despite Hooker’s reservations, he went to Boston to prepare to participate.
The Synod was held at Newtown, open to the public, and all the magistrates attended along with 25 ministers, including Hooker and New Haven’s Davenport. Cotton was too involved in the crisis to be objective, so they chose Hooker and Bulkley as moderators.
As the Synod began, Davenport gave a lecture, emphasizing the nature and danger of division, and showing his opposition to the new Opinions. In his speech, he also said that only the children of Church members should be allowed to be baptized. This wasn’t something that had gone on in New England up until this point, but it would actually become an enforced policy when Puritans took control of England and its colonies after the English Civil Wars. Another post-War development which was first discussed at the Synod was a confederation of New England colonies.
Cotton supported Wheelwright, and again the two were alone. Shepard and a handful of others wanted to heal the divisions. Weld and Peters, though, led the majority, ready to stamp out heresy. It wasn’t long before they’d listed 82 ways in which the Opinionists differed from the norm. Some of these opinions, they said, were blasphemous, others erroneous, and all unsavory. They’d also listed 9 “unwholesome expressions” used by the Opinionists. Weld published the errors, and then they drew up an official document condemning the opinions as erroneous, and asked each minister to sign it.
The biggest problem Massachusetts had with the Opinionists wasn’t their denial of the doctrine of preparation. The problem was that the basis of their denial was personal, spiritual revelations rather than scripture. This emphasis diminished the necessity of the Bible and the Law, and some Opinionists specifically said that “the Law and preaching is of no use at all to drive a man to Christ.”
Cotton was actually more dedicated to the importance of the Law than most of the ministers who opposed him, but he also believed that he still had control over the majority of the Opinionists. Plus, they’d drawn attention to issues he’d been fighting for years. Sure, a few wayward enthusiasts may have gone to the extreme, but they were in the minority and he could still show them their errors.
Cotton saw some of the opinions as heretical, but some of them were ideas he’d been trying to advocate for years. To condemn the ones he disagreed with, he was being forced to condemn things he believed in. That wasn’t something he was prepared to do, so he refused to sign the document.
Wheelwright was quiet. He wasn’t going to back down, but he didn’t have Cotton’s reputation in the colony, and Hutchinson had used him to defend even the most unacceptable of Opinionist ideas – many of which he didn’t even agree with. He wasn’t in a position to convince people of his own ideas, so he’d been growing quieter for months, and he just wanted to get through the Synod without further damage or humiliation. So, when presented with the list, he simply evaded, saying the proposed list of heresies was none of his business because they weren’t blaming him for the ideas. The Bostonians in the crowd started to protest the proceedings, and some walked out, but Wheelwright stayed put.
The synod went on for 24 days, and Winthrop did his best to keep the assembly civil, adjourning any time the debate got too heated, hoping that people could live in peace even if they couldn’t agree. By this time, Winthrop was the hero of most of the colony, and even in Boston he’d managed to rebuild his reputation through his moderation and amiability.
Over the course of the synod, Cotton started to see that the movement had gone beyond his control, and far outside the bounds of acceptable theology. Some of the Opinionists present even argued against him on the subject of the Law. He finally accepted the document, saying that even the Opinions he agreed with were poorly expressed. He still wouldn’t sign it, but said he was fundamentally in alignment with the majority, and was prepared to actively speak against the worst of the Opinions. When he did, yet more members of the Boston Church left in disgust.
Wheelwright still refused to align with the majority, but he was alone. There was no point in dragging it out any longer, so they ended the Synod. There were still some disagreements, of course, but at there was no more productive discussion to be had. The opinionist cause had been dealt a major blow, the discussion had been civil, and they had laid the foundation for future unity without increasing antagonism.
The Court wasn’t ready to be as accommodating of disagreements. Four days after the synod ended, it dissolved itself and ordered a new election. The new Court was completely different. Only 12 magistrates had been re-elected, and 21 were elected who’d never served before. Three members of the Opinionist party were elected – Coddington, Aspinwall and Goggeshall – but on the whole the new Court was ready to do whatever it needed to to eliminate the troublemakers and put a stop to Hutchinson’s movement. And they started with the Boston Remonstrance, the petition submitted the previous march to protest Wheelwright’s treatment. The new court declared the Remonstrance seditious, and prepared to convict anyone involved of sedition. If Wheelwright and Hutchinson didn’t stop preaching and holding meetings, they would be banished. And if the signers of the Remonstrance didn’t renounce their error, they could join them.
As they prepared to conduct the trial, the Court eliminated dissenting voices. Cogeshall and Aspinwall had either signed or justified the Remonstrance, so the Court dismissed them and sent them back to Boston with orders to send replacements – which the Court had named. Cotton thwarted the plan by sending a message ahead of them, explaining the situation to Bostonians. So, when Bostonians received the orders, they chose two of their own replacements and sent them to Newtown. One of the two had signed the Remonstrance, so the Court refused him permission to take his seat, and ordered that another person be sent instead. By the time the trial occurred, the Court had gotten its way and Coddington was the sole Opinionist voice left.
Prepared to charge dissidents with sedition, they summoned Wheelwright, and Wheelwright again refused to confess his errors or back down on the issue of his fast-day discourse. They blamed him for Massachusetts’s internal strife, and he fought them through the night. The next day, they sentenced him to disfranchisement and exile. He told them that if he truly was guilty of sedition, the sentence should be death. If, however, the court elected to continue its proceedings against him, he would appeal to the King. And I mean, that’s just how weird this situation had gotten. A Puritan who had been silenced by the King’s Church appealing to the King about being silenced by other Puritans. He withdrew his appeal, though, and accepted banishment. This was November, so Court allowed him to stay in the colony until March, when the harshest part of winter would be over, but he would be silenced as a preacher in the meantime. This Court wasn’t playing around, and it didn’t care if it was compared to Laud’s Star Chamber. They ordered Wheelwright to be silent, but he refused. So, the Court gave him two weeks to leave, and again ordered him not to preach in that time. Again he refused, but it wasn’t worth pressing the issue. It was a particularly severe winter, and he spent it with the Indians, buying some land from them the next spring to found Exeter with a group of friends and family, including those turned away under the Alien Law. There was a minor land dispute between a group of settlements, including Exeter, and the Massachusetts Colony, because Massachusetts claimed their land on the basis of having built a house there two years before. The settlers actually living there said they’d bought the land from the Indians, giving them the right, and Massachusetts responded that the Indians only had a natural right to as much land as they could improve. The dispute was ultimately left un-fought, but that was a rather new approach to the issue of land ownership. Buying from Indians had been a convenient substitute for getting charters from the King, and now they were saying they didn’t even have to do that. They had the strength to take what they wanted, and they argued they had the right, too.
It was only a matter of time before Massachusetts did claim the land, and when they did, Wheelwright went to Maine for a while before asking Winthrop to allow him back into the colony. Winthrop agreed, and he moved back to Exeter before returning to England during the Interregnum, but moved back to Massachusetts after the restoration, and lived there the rest of his life, received a full pardon, and outlived all of his contemporaries.
Wheelwright out of the way, the Court turned its attention on Hutchinson. They summoned her to Newtown. All of the clergy were there, as well as the Court, and the trial had the highest public attendance of any event in Massachusetts History to this point. There wasn’t a strict division of prosecutors, defense and witnesses, and Hutchinson had no counsel. When she appeared, she was badgered, insulted and sneered at, and though she was pregnant she wasn’t even asked to sit down until it looked like she might collapse. Witnesses ready to defend her were intimidated until they were silenced, and she was even pushed to give evidence against herself. The time for decency was over, even Winthrop thought so.
Winthrop laid out the accusations. She had held unlawful meetings, and supported Wheelwright’s seditious sermons, and though she hadn’t signed it, the Boston Remonstrance. By supporting the Remonstrance, she had dishonored her father. Magistrates were, after all, the fathers of the commonwealth, and the Remonstrance dishonored them. This bent the law more than Laud had ever dreamed of doing.
At first, Hutchinson responded politely and meekly. She didn’t think she’d ever dishonored the magistrates. All she’d done was hold meetings to instruct younger women, which was something instructed by the scriptures. Peters and Weld started to give their evidence, and Hutchinson noted that she was being persecuted for private discourse. She’d never signed the remonstrance, nor preached sedition. She’d held meetings, and she was being criminally prosecuted, for things she’d said at those private meetings. She also denied that she’d ever accused the other ministers of being under a Covenant of Works. She’d only said they’d preached one, like the apostles did before the Ascension. She turned to Cotton and asked him to tell the Court what he remembered of her speeches, and he responded that he only remembered the parts which had made an impression on him. He told her he had been grieved that she would make such a comparison between him and his brethren, but he’d always assumed she only meant it was a small difference, not a fundamental one.
The Court emphasized the fact that Cotton considered himself to be more similar to than different from the rest of the elders. When Cotton questioned her, though, it was also clear that he still sympathized with her cause, and that he still didn’t believe she’d committed heresy. And, pretty soon, he’d gotten a lot of the room on his side. He had very successfully defended her, and for a minute it looked like she’d get off, but it was in this position of strength that she started to speak her mind. And, she insisted that she’d had revelations from God, which, again, Puritans didn’t accept. Suddenly, not only was she vulnerable again, but she also made Cotton look bad, and she showed Cotton just how far she had deviated from his doctrine. He still defended her, arguing that though some revelations were the result of deception, some revelations were necessary, and trying to divide her statements into two categories, the dangerous and fantastical ones, versus the ones “flying upon the wings of the Spirit.”
This was an uphill battle, and they began to attack Cotton for defending her. Dudley was the first. He demanded that Cotton tell the Court whether he approved of Hutchinson’s revelations as she had explained them, and Cotton responded that he wasn’t sure he understood her. When Dudley pushed, he said he couldn’t bear witness against whatever providence she had from God. “Sir, you weary me and do not satisfy me,” was Dudley’s response. Coddington tried to defend both Cotton and Hutchinson by saying the only thing the Court could prove against Hutchinson was that she had asserted that other ministers didn’t teach a Covenant of Grace as clearly as Cotton, and that they were in the state of the Apostles before the Ascension. Winthrop replied that her delusions were worse than the enthusiasts’ and Anabaptists’, and that her own speech, which she’d just made in the Court itself, was ample ground to proceed even if nothing more had been proven.
Coddington was adamant that she hadn’t broken any law, neither of God nor of the country, and that therefore it was wrong to censure her.
But, Coddington was up against more than numbers at this point. He was up against exhaustion and hunger. He defended her against more testimony from Weld, Eliot and Peters, but while Dudley complained “We shall all be sick with fasting!” Winthrop dismissed his defense by saying “Well, we see in the Court that she doth continually say and unsay things.”
So, Winthrop put up the question of whether or not to banish her, and all but three voted to banish. When he asked who disagreed, only two raised their hands. The third, Jennison, said he couldn’t raise his hand for either side, and that if the Court required it, he’d give up his seat. The Court didn’t require it. They sentenced her to banishment, and in the meantime put in prison in Roxbury under Weld’s watch.
“I desire to know wherefore I am banished,” she protested, and Winthrop simply responded “Say no more. The court knows wherefore, and is satisfied.”
With Wheelwright and Hutchinson gone, the Court expelled each of the guards who had refused to accompany Winthrop, disfranchised them and fined them 20 pounds each, except Edward Hutchinson who was fined 40 pounds. They wouldn’t have to pay the fines, though, if they left the colony. Then, the Court summoned every person who had signed the Boston Remonstrance and gave them a choice. Either they could acknowledge their error and withdraw their names from the document, or they could be exiled. 10 recanted, but 5 of those were immediately disenfranchised.
Then they turned their attention to Cotton. Cotton was the most respected minister in Massachusetts, and he had a choice to make. He could back down, and be the central minister of the New England experiment, or he could get swept away with Vane, Hutchinson and Wheelwright. He decided to back down. He altered his preaching, and lamented his former sloth and gullibility. He did, however, make one last attempt to save Hutchinson.
After the Court trial came the Church trial, and after a 10 hour trial, she was excommunicated, but thanks to Cotton’s influence she was allowed to stay with him and Davenport over winter, instead of with Weld at Roxbury. While she stayed at his house, he and Davenport worked to try to convince her of the error of her ideas. If she publicly recanted, she could remain in Boston and a member of the Boston Church. Finally, she acknowledged that she’d been wrong and agreed to do just that.
The Church held a meeting to hear her statement, and Wilson came down hard on her. He pushed her to say whether her judgment was altered, or just her expression of her beliefs. Finally, she gave an answer. It was only the outward expression which had changed. She still had the same core beliefs, it was only the manifestation which was different.
Cotton now saw that, not only could he not help Hutchinson, she wasn’t open to correction from anybody, and she put him in a position of danger, weakening his ability to advocate for his ideas, not strengthening it. She didn’t believe in the finality of Scripture or the importance of the Law, and these were non-negotiable. Denying preparation had been good, but preaching divine illumination at the expense of Biblical supremacy was another thing entirely. He had tried that very day to correct her errors, but she proclaimed, “I do not acknowledge any graces in us accompanying salvation before conversion.” He could only respond, “I confess I did not know you held any of these things, but maybe it was my sleepiness and want of watchful care over you.”
Then he turned to the rest and said he favored excommunication and banishment. The Church should consider whether it would be for the honor of God and the Church to bear with patience so gross an offender. They had tried to convince her of her errors, and they in fact thought they’d succeeded. She didn’t even seem to fully believe in the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ. And, after a few others spoke, he pronounced the sentence. He said he remembered how good she had been when she first came, and how well she had fought the doctrine of preparation, and he told her that by falling into these errors she’d lost the honor of her former service. He said he hadn’t wanted to believe the accusations, but they had been affirmed.
The crowd stood by silently, almost in shock. She walked through the crowd to leave the building, and her friend and disciple Mary Dyer joined her, saying “the Lord sanctify this unto you,” to which Hutchinson replied “The Lord judgeth not as man judgeth. Better to be cast out of the Church than to deny Christ.” Her family was already in Rhode Island building a new house, and she moved to be with them. The baby she had been carrying died, and after her husband also died she moved to Dutch Country, to what’s now the Bronx, where they lived for a year before she and her whole family, with the exception of one daughter, were killed by Indians.
After Hutchinson’s expulsion, the Court required 60 of Boston’s citizens to deliver their arms and the ammunition at the town’s forts. It also passed a law making the criticism of court sentences a crime punishable by fine, imprisonment or banishment. Lots of Bostonians left for Rhode Island, some banished and others voluntarily. As Winthrop had noted, though, many of them hadn’t been particularly dedicated to the most controversial Opinions. They’d simply gotten caught up in the mob mentality surrounding opinions that seemed to be derived from their core beliefs. With the movement’s leaders gone, they were allowed to return if they renounced their opinions, and many went on to be prominent citizens.
Finally, it threatened John Cotton. Dudley and Peters in particular wanted to bring him to trial, but Winthrop protected him. They represented a group of people who felt that he hadn’t truly repented of his erroneous beliefs, and instead simply hidden them, or who called him a Trojan Horse through which the disputes of the country came. At a fast in December 1638, he lamented his spreading of dangerous ideas, and said he’d been deceived by the Opinionists because they spoke in words so similar to the ones he’d preached. They also hadn’t consulted him. Hutchinson and Vane had never really consulted him, or discussed the issues with him. Even when she’d met with him, she’d left quickly. He had made a mistake. They forgave and forgot, and he spent the rest of his life as the most respected minister in America.
He did consider moving to New Haven, but Winthrop persuaded him to stay, saying that his leaving would weaken Massachusetts’s influence on England, by showing the mother country that the colonists weren’t theologically united. He agreed that he should compromise on doctrine for the sake of the Holy Commonwealth.
A few months later, Lord Saye pushed for Vane to be elected governor of Connecticut, but the people refused. Vane, they said, was young, inexperienced and simultaneously obstinate. They changed the rules so that no man could be elected unless he’d been in New England for at least a year, and they said that he was dangerous. He didn’t know the art of government, and he “thinks it not enough to set the house on fire, but must add oil to the flame.” By his aspect, you’d judge him a good man, but he’d caused problems which wouldn’t go away for years. Not all men are fit for government, and none are as dangerous as the one which makes his affection his rule. Vane went on to become a prominent Parliamentary leader, but had a falling out with Cromwell after the King’s execution. When Charles II was restored to the throne, he summoned Vane to try to make peace with him. At the meeting, he decided that Vane was dangerous in the way New England had said, and Vane became one of only a handful of non-regicides executed by the new king.
After a year of controversy, the colony had moved quickly and ruthlessly to eliminate the Opinionists. Some sociologists have noted that the colony’s reaction was a pragmatic one. It helped create a structured society free from the chaos of individualism. The enforcement of group unity against dissenters is a prerequisite to social cohesion. Winthrop in particular wanted unity, and though he initially tried to achieve it using amicable moderation, when he realized that severity, was the way to unify the colony, he allowed the strictest of punishments to Hutchinson and her followers.
The colony started to go back to normal, but it was a new normal – permanently changed by the heated controversy. The affair solidified a model of government which distributed Church power among different groups and ranks of people. It was neither a purely democratic system, nor one which gave Church elders and ministers exclusive control. This was Cotton’s plan for Church governance, and focused on the idea of the Church as a covenant among people, independent from the State, filled with people who expressed a personal connection to the Gospel, and neither too big to meet in one place, nor too small to effectively carry on Church work.
The affair also altered New England theologically, making it more works-oriented rather than less. It was in this works-oriented time that John Eliot, one of the main opponents of the Opinionists, became known as the Apostle to the Indians. He and Shepard wrote the first American books on Puritan missions, and Eliot in particular emphasized works prior to Grace in the way Hutchinson had accused him of. The colony began to preach more and more the uncertainty of salvation, ultimately arguing that even the certainty you were saved was a sign that you weren’t, and developing a unique set of rituals to emphasize the uncertainty that they were predestined for Heaven.
The doctrine of preparation remained an important debate in the colony, especially in the aftermath of the English Civil War, as Puritans took over the government in England and America.
Dramatic as it was, the Antinomian Crisis was only one of two existential crises facing the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636-7. The colony was also dealing with the Pequot War, and next week we’ll go back a couple years and examine that.