Anne Marbury was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, the eldest daughter of a strong-willed Anglican priest who had been imprisoned and removed from office because of his demand for a better-educated clergy.
In 1605 the family moved to London, where her father was reinstated to the clergy.
Father gave her a far better home education than most other girls received.
Adopting Puritanism, she often journeyed to St. Botolph's Church in Boston, England, to hear John Cotton, one of England's outstanding Puritan ministers.
The Hutchinson family was well received in Massachusetts.
She began by reiterating and explaining the sermons of John Cotton but later added some of her own interpretations, a practice that was to be her undoing.
While the Puritans believed that salvation was the result of God's grace, freely given to man, they also maintained that good works, or living the moral life, were important signs of that salvation and necessary preparation for the realization that one had received God's grace.
But grace and works had to be kept in proper balance.
To overemphasize works was to argue that man could be responsible for his own salvation and thus would deny God's power over man.
While Cotton had maintained his balance in this most difficult of issues, Hutchinson did not, and she finally came to stress grace to the exclusion of works in determining salvation.
The origin of her views is difficult to discover.
Certainly Cotton had influenced her.
She probably held her beliefs prior to her arrival in Boston, but she evidently did not advance them until the meetings in her home.
Many of these were town merchants and artisans who had been severely criticized for profiteering in prices and wages; they saw in Hutchinson's stress on grace a greater freedom regarding morality and therefore more certainty of their own salvation.
But others came in search of a more meaningful and personal relationship with their God.
The Puritan orthodoxy began its assault on the dissenters in the May 1637 election.
Anne Hutchinson Banished The court then moved against Hutchinson.
It was a difficult situation.
As a woman, her words had not been public and she had not participated in the political maneuvers surrounding the controversy.
Called before the court, she was accused of sedition and questioned extensively.
She defended herself well, however, demonstrating both biblical knowledge and debating skill.
She returned the next morning to be aided by John Cotton's testimony about her beliefs, which differed from the report of the clergymen who had spoken for the court.
This assertion of direct communion with God was regarded as the vilest heresy by all, and it sealed her doom.
After her sentencing, Hutchinson's importance waned.
Her strongest supporters had either left Massachusetts or been banished, and her idol, John Cotton, had finally allied himself with the orthodoxy.
The result of her investigation by the Boston congregation was a foregone conclusion.
Her attempt to renounce her former errors was taken as incomplete by the clergy, and she was excommunicated for the sin of lying.
In 1642 her husband died, and Hutchinson moved with her six youngest children to Long Island and then to the New Netherland (New York) mainland.
In the late summer of 1643, Hutchinson and all but one of her children were killed in an Indian attack.
It was a sad end for an important religious figure.
Hutchinson is a key figure in the development of religious freedom in England's American colonies and the history of women in ministry, challenging the authority of the ministers. 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.
Hutchinson played an important role in the formation of religious freedom in the British American colonies. She advocated the active role of women in Puritan society and organized a home club to study the Bible for them. She has been placed at the center of the Antinomian Controversy - a religious and political conflict in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
As a follower of Cotton, she espoused a "covenant of grace, " while accusing all of the local ministers (except for Cotton and her husband's brother-in-law John Wheelwright) of preaching a "covenant of works. " Many ministers began to complain about the opinions coming from Hutchinson and her allies, and the situation erupted into what is commonly called the Antinomian Controversy, resulting in her 1637 trial, conviction, and banishment from the colony. This was followed by a March 1638 church trial in which she was excommunicated.
Quotes from others about the person
Modern historian Michael Winship calls Hutchinson "a prophet, spiritual adviser, mother of fifteen, and important participant in a fierce religious controversy that shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638", upheld as a symbol of religious freedom, liberal thinking, and Christian feminism.
She married William Hutchinson, a familiar acquaintance from Alford who was a fabric merchant then working in London. They had 15 children.
