The Life of Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson, born to an Anglican family in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, 1591, moved to the Puritan colony of Boston soon after her conversion to the new faith after marrying her husband, William Hutchinson.

Though Anne was originally from Alford in the northern province of Lincolnshire of England, she and her family moved to London after her father had received a promotion in the Anglican church. She would later go on to meet her future husband, whom was also from the same village of Alford, in London, only to be married to him in short years time, and convert to puritanism. Puritanism was a protestant church, which wanted to purify the Anglican church off of anything Catholic, rituals, saints, and scripture. As both got married, the couple moved back to Alford only to meet John Cotton, the Puritan minister of the city, in which Cotton believed that to connect with God required no laws or rules, but on ones belief in God. Anne would soon find herself attracted to the new religion, she was attracted to Cottons ideas, and believed that in this Purified church, belonged to no gender, but made both equal.

In 1633, John Cotton and the Hutchinson family left England in exile as the religious minority was to no longer be tolerated in the kingdom, as they were dissidents to the English crown and church. They found refuge in the Massachusetts colony in Boston were Anne would host daily and regular meetings with other women from the colony to talk about religion. As her popularity grew in the New World, Anne began to attract many colonists from across Boston to hear about her ideas on God and religion. Anne believed that God's chosen people can recognize each other and to be able to point each other out in the community.

Anne Hutchinson on Trial

Local church ministers, along with them, John Winthrop soon began to grow weary of them, only to have them exiled from the Massachusetts bay colony as tensions grew between both factions. In 1637, the Antinomian controversy brought an end to the Hutchinson presence in the colony, and ultimately exiled them from Boston, ironically suffering from religious persecution in foreign lands and not in England. They would later establish a new colony in Portsmouth, Rhode Island to those excommunicated from the Puritan faith. Anne and her family would later die in modern day Bronx, New York, after a native american tribe ravaged the village, leaving only one of eleven Hutchinson children alive.