Protestants, Jews, and Turks may be embarked in one ship; upon which supposal I affirm that all the liberty of conscience that ever I pleaded for turns upon these two hinges: that none of the Papists, Protestants, Jews, or Turks be forced to come to the ships’ prayers or worship, nor be compelled [restrained] from their own particular prayers or worship, if they practice any.15
Williams’s notoriety reached John Locke, who was impressed by this fearless promoter of religious toleration. Locke was a thinker, while Williams was a doer, pushing for colonial laws that embodied liberal values—much to the horror and disgust of his fellow governors.16
Williams’s own errand in the wilderness carried a stunning portent of America’s destiny. He leaped ahead of the abstract thinkers back in the land of his birth, transforming their ideas into a whole new way of governing. He guided Rhode Island wisely and compassionately, under the authority of a charter to establish religious freedom, the first in the New World.17
He was an early convert to the cause of abolition of slavery and taught himself several tribal languages to enable him to cooperate fairly with Native Americans. Celebrated and detested, in life and after his death at seventy-nine, he was one of America’s first liberals, long before that hardy skein was woven into the American political tapestry.
Despite the religious, ethical, and political gulf between Williams and Winthrop, the radical considered the conservative a friend who offered him a new opportunity to pursue his mission. For years after their parting, Williams kept up a correspondence with Winthrop, effusive with gratitude and respect.18
That Williams could move to another jurisdiction more receptive to his views was an option unlikely to be found in England. This demonstrated yet another advantage of the dangerous, hardscrabble, and vast New World: it was far more accommodating to individualists.
Anne Hutchinson was among those intrepid, strong-minded figures. Like Williams, she was a deeply religious maverick and crusader for those who shared her ideas about worship and salvation. And, like Williams, she came under fire for challenging the authority of the Puritan church. But unlike Williams, she became a fierce and lasting enemy of Winthrop.19
Despite the disapproval of the authorities, she ministered to women in Boston, first as a nurse and midwife, providing care for those who were sick or in labor. She held meetings at her home so women of the community could discuss the week’s sermon, pray together, and enjoy a rare opportunity to socialize.20 Hutchinson’s gatherings soon attracted people from surrounding villages, who came to hear her divergent religious views and critiques of the local ministers’ sermons. To Winthrop’s fury, prominent townsmen became curious and began to attend, disrupting what Locke called the “received doctrines.” Hutchinson preached that salvation was received “not by conduct, not by obeying the commandments, by giving alms, praying, fasting or wearing a long face.” Instead, she urged accepting “God’s spirit within,” much along the lines of Williams’s freethinking.21
Hutchinson was bound to get into trouble, and Winthrop was the chief prosecutor for her trial on charges of speaking “in derogation of the ministers” of the colony and “[troubling] the peace of the commonwealth and churches.” She handled her own defense vigorously, matching her all-male interrogators in her knowledge of scripture and church doctrine. But when Hutchinson referred to her “immediate revelation”—a personal communication from God, who vowed to curse the Puritans and their descendants if they harmed her—the judges pounced, charging that she was a danger to civil order and “a woman not fit for our society.”22 The verdict echoes down the centuries of misogyny in America. Today she might be shunned as a “nasty woman.”
When she was exiled from Massachusetts, Roger Williams invited Hutchinson and her husband William, a former member of the General Court, her younger children (she had fifteen, with the older ones back in England), and a group of followers to settle in Rhode Island. There she found more than refuge: she became the first—and last—female cofounder of an American colony.23
Even after Hutchinson left the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop kept track of her so he could vilify her from afar. When he learned that she had suffered a molar pregnancy, he declared, “See how the wisdom of God fitted this judgement to her sin every way, for look as she had vented mishapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.”24
When Hutchinson’s enemies in Boston threatened a takeover of Rhode Island, she moved her family down the coast, near New Amsterdam, a town on the southern tip of Manhattan Island where Dutch settlers congregated. The Dutch colony was in a simmering conflict with a local tribe. In 1643 it boiled over. Hutchinson and all but one of the younger members of her family who were living with her perished in a massacre aimed at terrorizing the white settlers. When word reached the Bay Colony, its leaders saw it as the “just vengeance of God.”25 Winthrop concurred.
Three hundred years later, Eleanor Roosevelt extolled Hutchinson as the first of America’s foremothers—and literally so, since she was an ancestor of Franklin D. Roosevelt and George H. W. and George W. Bush.26
John Winthrop’s health declined on the threshold of his seventh decade. When he died peacefully, still in office, he was widely mourned. The same could not be said of the Puritans’ royal nemesis. Two months before Winthrop’s death, King Charles I had been beheaded for treason. His marriage to a French Catholic princess had stirred protests among Anglicans and other Protestants, and his claim of absolute power under the divine right of kings clashed with the English and Scottish Parliaments, who were jealous of their own prerogatives.
Civil war erupted in 1642, ending with Charles’s defeat and capture. He refused demands for a constitutional monarchy, and he spent most of his last days imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, where the Arbella and its fleet had set sail nineteen years earlier. He was executed on January 30, 1649.
The principal signatory of the warrant for the king’s execution was Oliver Cromwell. As Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he was the most powerful Puritan of all time and virtual dictator of the country that Winthrop and others had left for a new life in a new land.
Crossings of the Atlantic were slower and more dangerous in winter, so when the news of the regicide arrived, many of the members of the Great Migration rejoiced. Winthrop’s son Stephen returned to England to serve in Cromwell’s government. John Endecott and Richard Bellingham, then governor and deputy governor, respectively, of the Bay Colony, wrote to Cromwell, thanking him for his “continued series of favours” to “us poor exiles, in these utmost ends of the earth.”27
The Cromwell Protectorate had lasted only six years before it collapsed, soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658. His son and successor, Richard, was ousted by the military, and the royalists returned to power. Now it was Cromwell’s turn to be convicted of treason, albeit posthumously. His body was disinterred from Westminster Abbey and hanged, by tradition, on the Tyburn gallows for the public to gawk and cheer, “Long live the King!”
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