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Few American students have the opportunity to investigate Thurlow's State Papers, or Rushworth, Whitelocke, Dugdale, or Mrs. Hutchinson. CHAPTER
Thus Hutchinson, one of the earliest of the symbolic writers of England, shows a very competent conception for the age in which he lived of the mystical meaning of the temple; and later writers have improved upon his crude views.
Said that since coming to the town he had seen a Newbury man, who told him that old Mr. Wheelwright, of Salisbury, the famous Boston minister in the time of Sir Harry Vane and Madam Hutchinson, was now lying sick, and nigh unto his end. Also, that Goodman Morse was so crippled by a fall in his barn, that he cannot get to Boston to the trial of his wife, which is a sore affliction to him.
She was a nonconformist among those who, refusing to conform to the Church of England, had now themselves become conformists of the strictest type. To Mrs. Hutchinson the "vexatious legalism of Puritanism" was as abhorrent as had been the practices of the Roman and Anglican churches to the Puritans, and, though the latter did not realize it, they were as unjust to her as Laud had been to them.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine.
If the Government had asked counsel of the Ministers before the trials commenced, it is inexplicable and incredible, besides being inexcusable, that the Ministers should have delayed their reply until after the first act of the awful tragedy had passed, and blood begun to be shed. Hutchinson expressly says: "The further trials were put off to the adjournment, the thirtieth of June.
The colonists were too free, too proud of their charters and constitutions. Hutchinson and Oliver, with that fine superiority to charters and constitutions which characterized so many a royal governor, insisted that very considerable changes of government, all in the direction of coercion, were necessary, in order to make the conceited colonists know their place and to keep them in it.
He married her as soon as she could leave her chamber, when she was so deformed by small-pox that "the priest and all that saw her were affrighted to look at her; but God recompensed his justice and constancy by restoring her." The following are some of the admirable sentences that prove Lucy Hutchinson a woman of letters in a far more serious sense than our own time uses.
From the mire of the street there was afterwards picked up a manuscript history of Massachusetts which is preserved to this day, the soiled pages of which may still be seen in the Boston library. Mr. Hutchinson was no friend of the Stamp Act; but he was a rich man, Lieutenant-Governor of the province, and brother-in-law of Andrew Oliver.
What was it, for instance, but his subtlety which, speaking through the lips of Madame Hutchinson, confuted the "judges of Israel" and put to their wits' end the godly ministers of the Puritan Zion? Was not his evil finger manifested in the contumacious heresy of Roger Williams?
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