American Heroes (13 page)

The fact is that the Cookes had not played their cards so well as the Paiges. Elisha Cooke, son and successor to old Richard, had chosen the wrong side in the struggle—as far as worldly success was concerned. He had never made friends with Randolph. Instead, he had led the opposition party, the one that favored resistance to Randolph, resistance to Dudley, resistance to Andros, resistance even to the new charter that Increase Mather obtained in 1691. Consequently it had been no great matter for Paige to procure a judgment returning the lands. As soon as the old charter was revoked in 1685, the old county courts dissolved, and a new system set up under control of Dudley, the Paiges entered an action against Cooke. The jury was handpicked by Paige's friends; the judges were Paige's friends; the result was inevitable: Paige got the lands (August 5, 1686). When the verdict had been rendered, Cooke appealed to the council, presided over by Dudley, then residing in Paige's house. The result again was inevitable, and when Cooke appealed to the king in council, Dudley required him to give bond of a thousand pounds to Paige to prosecute the appeal (November 2, 1686). This was too much, and Cooke had to abandon the case (December 20, 1686). When he tried to reopen it under Andros, he met with a quick rebuff.

After the new charter had been established—over his protest—Cooke tried again, but was nonsuited. As a last resort he introduced a special bill in the General Court (February 26, 1701/02) to allow him to have the case reviewed. At the time when he introduced the bill, the governor's chair was vacant, but before the General Court took any action, Joseph Dudley was made governor. Needless to say, the bill received no further consideration.

In the meantime, since the recovery of the estate, Anna had become the great lady that she must have wished to be when she first married Edward Lane. Paige was now Colonel Paige, with a coat of arms. He had purchased a coach for her and negro servants in livery to attend upon it, a luxury that even the wealthy Samuel Sewall felt himself unable to afford. She and Nicholas moved out to the farm at Rumney Marsh and there lived in regal style, entertaining guests in the most elegant manner. Samuel Sewall, who dined there on November 4, 1690, spoke of the “sumptuous Feast” that he had enjoyed. He had already had occasion to admire Anna's coach, for he had recorded on September 12, 1688, “Rid to Cambridge Lecture, being rainy in the afternoon, Madam Paige invited me, and I came home in her Coach, with Mr. Willard and his wife, and Mrs. Paige's Boy rid my Horse.”

Apparently Boston had agreed to forgive Anna for her scandalous past and to accept her as one of the elite. The Mr. Willard to whom Sewall refers was the minister of the Old South Church, which Anna had joined in 1670. Although her husband never joined, that fact was not held against him socially, for by the close of the seventeenth century a large proportion of Boston's leading citizens were in the same category.

Thus by shrewd political maneuvering Anna and Nicholas Paige overcame the social and economic handicaps with which their wedded life began and won for themselves a position of the highest rank in Boston society. Anna lived to enjoy her success until June 30, 1704. When the news of her death at Rumney Marsh reached Boston, it caused the whole colony to pause. Sewall recorded the event: “As the Governor sat at the Council-Table twas told him, Madam Paige was dead; He clap'd his hands, and quickly went out, and return'd not to the Chamber again; but ordered Mr. Secretary to prorogue the Court till the 16th of August, which Mr. Secretary did by going into the House of Deputies.”

A year before she died Anna had assisted her husband in making a will, the terms of which bring this story back to where it began. The will provided that all the property of Nicholas and Anna, except for a number of small legacies, should be given to their kinswoman Martha Hobbes, who was also to be executrix. The overseers of the will, however, among whom was Governor Dudley, must “Advise and Council this our Executrix in her Marriage with any Person that she may Marry withall And we do hereby leave it as a Solemn Charge upon her and as our dying request that she do take your Advice therein And be very Carefull how she doth dispose of her self in Marryage, And that she match into a good Familly and with one that feareth God, that so neither she and so fair an Estate be not thrown away in her Match.”

—1942

T
HE
P
URITANS WHO FOUNDED
the New England colonies are sometimes portrayed as having fled from persecution in order to enjoy religious freedom. It would be fairer to say they had been unable to capture control of the English government and church in order to establish their way as the only way of worshipping God. They believed that absolute truth, of which, they said, nature gives only a hint, was revealed to man once and for all in the Word of God, the Bible. At the Reformation, Calvin had rejected the interpretation of the Bible used by the Catholic Church and had made a complete interpretation of his own. Since that time, two generations of Puritans had been revising Calvin's interpretation, and this revision for them was absolute truth, divine and unquestionable. It was not merely the statement of things as they are in the world; it was truth eternal, unlimited by time or space. It was the way of salvation. By it the Puritans had determined to mold their daily lives, their church, and their state. And to make this determination a reality, they had crossed the Atlantic and had settled on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.

It is a little surprising that people so sure of themselves could have agreed with one another long enough to establish churches and governments that lasted for generations. They had been dissenters in England, but they did not regard dissent itself as valuable in the way that we have come to do. We tend to sympathize with the people they expelled for disagreeing with them. One who stands out is Anne Hutchinson, whose disagreement gathered followers to threaten the Massachusetts enterprise. In 1637 they expelled her, after a trial in which, as will be seen, she actually outwitted her judges. In later centuries she was hailed as a heroine for her courage in standing up for her beliefs. But if we wish to understand what was at stake in her trial and its outcome, we must consider the other side of the story.

The founders of Massachusetts had been there only four years when Hutchinson joined them. At first she was welcomed as the godly wife of a pious and successful merchant; but before she had been long in Massachusetts, she broached a doctrine that was absolutely inconsistent with the principles upon which the colony had been founded. She began to affirm a new basis for absolute truth: immediate personal communion with the Holy Ghost. If this communion had been merely for the purposes of illuminating the meaning of Holy Scripture, the Puritans might have had no quarrel with her. The communion that she described, however, was one that resulted in immediate revelation apart from the Word. To accept her doctrine would have meant the abandonment of the fundamental belief for which the Puritans had crossed the water—the belief that truth for man was to be found in the Bible. It would have meant a complete change in their daily lives, in their church, and in their state.

As for their daily life, the Puritans saw that the new doctrine would probably encourage or condone indolence and loose living. In the communion described by Hutchinson, the believer was completely passive. He did not scrutinize his life to see whether it was in accord with the precepts of the Bible; he merely waited for the Holy Ghost. As Thomas Welde, one of her judges, put it, “he is to stand still and waite for Christ to doe all for him…. And if he fals into sinne, he is never the more disliked of God, nor his condition never the worse.” This would remove all the rational basis for moral endeavor that the Puritan theologians had been painfully constructing since the time of Calvin. The magistrates of Massachusetts found an example of what acceptance of this heresy meant in the refusal of Hutchinson's followers to join the expedition against the Pequot Indians, who were threatening the colony.

As for the church, the Puritans must have realized that Hutchinson's dogma destroyed most of the reasons for its existence. For in the list of eighty-two errors refuted by a synod of New England ministers, and declared by most members of the court that condemned her to have sprung from her doctrine of revelation, are found these two statements:

In other words, the minister and the church were no longer needed, “unlesse it be in some circumstances,” since God, according to Hutchinson, preferred to deal with His children directly.

In the same way she would have done away with the state as it then existed. Her view might have been compatible with a state concerned only with secular ends, but to the Puritans such a state would have seemed a sorry affair. Their community was a spiritual association devoted primarily to spiritual ends; and it found its laws in the general principles deducible from the Bible and from a rational observation of God's governance of the world. Her insistence on revelation apart from the Word as the source of truth had the corollary “that the will of God in the Word, or directions thereof, are not the rule whereunto Christians are bound to conforme themselves, to live thereafter.” Therefore, the laws that the Puritan state was enforcing could have no divine validity for her. If the state were to exist, it would have to be simply as a secular association; and that was a concept which the founders could not entertain and for which they had exiled Roger Williams the year before.

These results of Hutchinson's doctrines became apparent before the members of the orthodox group knew for certain what those doctrines were, for Hutchinson had carefully refrained from committing herself in public. It was clear to the magistrates of the Bay Colony, however, that the nub of her teaching had to consist in the idea of personal revelation, and that its consequences were at war with the ideals of Massachusetts. Because the Puritans had undergone great hardships in order to put those ideals into practice, it was only to be expected that they should do their utmost to maintain them. This we of today can readily understand. What is more difficult for us to comprehend is that the Puritans did not regard Hutchinson's attack on their ideals as a difference of opinion. The elected governor of the colony, John Winthrop, could not regard the case as that of one opinion against another; it was personal opinion against truth. And the terrifying fact was that this personal opinion was gaining ground; the Word of God was being undermined by a woman. Winthrop saw the commonwealth that he had done much to found—which had been consecrated to absolute truth—rocked to its foundations by the seductive teachings of a clever lady. He could not help regarding that woman as an enemy of God. As governor he was bound to do his utmost to protect the Word and the state from this instrument of Satan.

To appreciate Winthrop's sense of responsibility, it is necessary to recall the Puritans' conception of the magistrate's office. This requires an examination of that classic of Protestant political theory, the
Vindiciæ Contra Tyrannos
. Here we find the origin of the state described in these terms:

The
Vindiciæ
explains that in these covenants “kings swear as vassals to observe the law of God,” and subjects promise to obey them within the limits thus set.

From numerous statements of the Puritans, it is clear that the theories of government outlined in the
Vindiciæ
were those followed in Massachusetts. Although the foundation of the government was the charter from the king, all who came into the community were by tacit assumption regarded as “bound by soleme covenant to walke by the rule of Gods word in all their conversation.” Winthrop explained the origin of the government in this fashion:

It was pursuant to this social compact that the oath administered to officers of the government provided that they should act “according to the Laws of God, and for the advancement of his Gospell, the Laws of this land, and the good of the people of this Jurisdiction.”

That the compact was not merely between the people themselves and the magistrates whom they set up, but also between the people, the magistrates, and God, is indicated by the language in which the Puritans spoke of themselves. Always they were the “People of God,” and frequently they referred to their commonwealth as Israel. Furthermore, they believed the consequences of their compact to be those specified by the author of the
Vindiciæ
. The latter pointed out that according to the compact, “the king himself, and all the people should be careful to honour and serve God according to His will revealed in His word, which, if they performed, God would assist and preserve their estates: as in doing the contrary, he would abandon, and exterminate them.” In like manner the Puritan ministers explained to the people of New England that they were a chosen people and could not “sin at so cheap a rate, or expect so few stripes for their disobedience” as those who had no covenant with the Almighty:

So, while the Puritans were submissive and obedient to God—that is, as long as they submitted to His will as expressed in the Word—He would prosper all their affairs. But if they strayed and fell to open sin, He would let loose His wrath upon them. As the
Vindiciæ
points out, there are two respondents to God's covenant:

The implications of this theory are numerous. Probably the most important is the doctrine that subjects must rebel when the magistrates command something contrary to the Law of God. More to the point in the present instance, however, is the notion that if the ruler does not punish outward breaches of that law, the whole people may suffer punishment at the hands of the Almighty Himself. Solomon Stoddard, the minister of Northampton, put the case as late as 1703:

Increase Mather had the same doctrine in mind when in 1677 he exhorted the governors,

This was doubtless the reason that Massachusetts gave to Plymouth Colony after imprisoning John Alden for alleged complicity in a murder on the Kennebec in Maine. For Governor Bradford, after expressing dissatisfaction with the action of Massachusetts, apparently refers to such a justification:

Bradford records also the testimony of several ministers who had been questioned concerning the duty of the magistrate in seeking out instances of disobedience of the Mosaic laws regarding adultery and sodomy. The answer of one of them is typical. He declared that the magistrate must follow up every suggestion of indulgence in these crimes in order to punish them, “or els he may betray his countrie and people to the heavie displeasure of God.”