Puritans Condemn Good Woman as "Instrument of the Devil"

The Sinner

1634 - 1638

On March 15, 1638, Anne Hutchinson is summoned to a second trial, this time in the meetinghouse. No persecution is more devastating than denunciation by her once-beloved minister, John Cotton. He accuses Anne of filling the minds of Boston’s young women with promiscuous opinions that open the door to free love.

 

Reverend John Cotton

 

Thomas is mortified to see his mother sitting on one side of Anne; Mary Dyer, the milliner’s wife, is on the other side. From ten in the morning until eight at night, Anne is subjected to the harangues of vituperative black-coats. When the hearing adjourns, she can barely walk by herself. She’s led to the house of John Cotton, where her persecutors make one last attempt to browbeat her into admitting her errors.

A week later, Anne returns to the meetinghouse to hear John Wilson deliver the ultimate condemnation against an “instrument of the Devil.”

 

 

Detail of a 16th-century painting by Jacob de Backer
 in the National Museum in Warsaw. via Wikipedia

 

“In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the name of the Church, I cast you out and deliver you up to Satan . . . I do account you from this time forth to be a Heathen and a Publican . . . I command you in the name of Christ Jesus and of this church as a Leper to withdraw yourself.”

Thomas is standing with Winthrop when Anne leaves the church with his mother and Mary Dyer. The governor doesn’t recognize Mary Dyer and asks Thomas who she is.

“The woman who bore the monster,” Thomas blurts out. On further questioning, he reveals his mother’s involvement in the secret burial of the stillborn child.

Five days after Anne leaves Massachusetts, Winthrop and Thomas supervise the exhumation of Martha Dyer’s daughter. The governor describes the infant in his diary:

“It had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp . . . It had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.”

Agnes is hauled before the General Court. Two magistrates are in favor of expelling her from the colony, but Winthrop extends mercy toward his clerk’s fifty-eight-year old mother. Agnes is forbidden to meddle in surgery or physic and cannot question any matters of religion, except with the elders of the church. Should she disobey the gag order, she will face excommunication and banishment.

Deeply ashamed at betraying his mother, Thomas flees Boston aboard a vessel sailing for England. Even as the Jewel departs, another ship beats into the bay, bringing Nat Steele home from the Caribbean.

 

View of Boston in 1723