Trial of Anne Hutchinson: Charges, Verdict, and Excommunication

The trial of Anne Hutchinson took place in November 1637 before the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s General Court at Cambridge, where Governor John Winthrop and roughly forty magistrates and deputies convicted her of defaming the colony’s ministers and holding unauthorized religious meetings in her home. She was banished from the colony, held under house arrest through the winter, and then excommunicated at a separate church trial in March 1638. She had no lawyer, faced Winthrop as both prosecutor and judge, and sealed her own conviction on the second day by telling the court that God spoke to her directly.¹

The Charges

The General Court brought three accusations. The first was that Hutchinson had broken the Fifth Commandment by dishonoring the “fathers of the Commonwealth,” a reading that stretched the biblical command to honor one’s parents to cover civil and religious leaders. The second was that she had defamed the colony’s authorized ministers by saying they preached a covenant of works rather than a covenant of grace. The third was that she had improperly hosted religious meetings in her home.²

The meetings were the visible offense. Women in the colony could not speak in church, vote on church matters, or preach. Small private groups where women reviewed the previous Sunday’s sermon were common and tolerated. Hutchinson started hosting one around 1635, drew a following, and added a second weekly session. Trouble came when she stopped merely reviewing sermons and started challenging the ministers’ theology directly.¹

Winthrop made clear from the opening that her sex was part of the offense, telling her she had held “a meeting or general assembly in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable or comely in the sight of your God nor fitting for your sex.”³

A Court With No Separation of Powers

The proceeding opened on November 7, 1637, inside a thatched-roof meetinghouse in Cambridge. Winthrop presided as chief prosecutor and chief judge at once. The General Court blended legislative, executive, and judicial functions in a single body, and Hutchinson stood in front of it without counsel. That was normal for the time. The legal profession barely existed in the colonies, and the culture distrusted professional advocates.¹

Day One: Hutchinson Holds Her Ground

She fought the charges hard. When Winthrop laid them out, she answered, “I am called here to answer before you, but I hear no things laid to my charge.” She pressed the magistrates to produce specific evidence and to name the law she had broken. On the accusation that she had traduced the ministers, she asked, “Can you find a warrant for yourself and condemn me for the same thing?” Historians generally credit her with outmaneuvering Winthrop on the first two charges, with the governor falling back on his authority rather than the strength of his arguments.⁴

Seven ministers testified that Hutchinson had told them, privately, that they preached a covenant of works and were not able ministers of the gospel. Her own minister, the Reverend John Cotton, then took the stand on the second day and softened the picture. Cotton was the one preacher Hutchinson consistently exempted from her criticism, and he told the court he understood her meaning to involve only “a gradual difference” between his preaching and the other ministers’. His testimony brought her close to acquittal.⁵

The Claim That Turned the Trial

Instead of taking the opening Cotton had given her, Hutchinson volunteered that God had spoken to her directly. She told the court that “the Lord did give me to see that those who did not teach the New Covenant had the spirit of the Antichrist,” and that she had received this “by an immediate revelation” from God, “by the voice of his own spirit to my soul.”¹

The room turned. A private line to God bypassed scripture and the ministers who interpreted it, and if any layperson could claim one, the clergy and the laws they blessed lost their foundation. Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley said on the spot, “I am now fully persuaded that Mrs. Hutchinson is deluded by the Devil.” Winthrop called the revelation “the ground of all these tumults and troubles” and “the root of all the mischief.” Cotton, seeing where things were going, retreated into vague answers when Dudley pressed him on whether the revelations were true, and then withdrew his support.⁵

Hutchinson answered with a warning of her own: “I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity and the whole state!” To a court already persuaded she was dangerous, the threat only confirmed the point.

Verdict and Sentence

Winthrop called for a show of hands. He asked whether it was “the mind of the court that Mrs. Hutchinson for these things that appear before us is unfit for our society, and if it be the mind of the court that she shall be banished out of our liberties and imprisoned till she be sent away.” Out of roughly forty members, only two voted against banishment. One minister abstained. Cotton was not among the dissenters.¹

Winthrop then pronounced the sentence: “Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away.” She asked, “I desire to know wherefore I am banished?” Winthrop answered, “Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”³

Winter had already set in, so the court did not force her out immediately. She was placed under house arrest at the Roxbury home of Joseph Weld and held there until her church trial the following March.⁶

The Church Trial and Excommunication

In March 1638, Hutchinson stood before a second proceeding at the First Church of Boston. This one dealt with her standing as a church member rather than her civil offenses. Church leaders examined her beliefs about the soul and the resurrection and judged them inconsistent with accepted doctrine.

Cotton, who had nearly saved her in November, prosecuted her this time. He acknowledged her early service to the colony’s spiritual life and then told the congregation that her errors had erased whatever good she had done. When she tried to retract some of her more extreme statements, he cut her off: “I confess I did not know you held any of these things…but it may be it was my sleepiness and want of watchful care over you.” That was the end of his protection.⁵

The Reverend John Wilson pronounced the excommunication. “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and in the name of the church, I do not only pronounce you worthy to be cast out, but I do cast you out. And in the name of Christ, I do deliver you up to Satan that you may learn no more to blaspheme, to seduce, and to lie.” He ordered her to “withdraw yourself out of the congregation” as a leper, and told the brethren and sisters to treat her as “a heathen and a publican.”⁷

With no civil standing and no church membership, Hutchinson had nothing left to hold in the colony. She left Massachusetts before the end of March 1638.

After the Trial

Hutchinson and her family traveled south to Narragansett Bay, where Roger Williams helped arrange the purchase of Aquidneck Island from the Narragansett people. She helped settle what became Portsmouth, Rhode Island. After her husband died around 1642, she moved with her younger children to New Netherland, in what is now the northern Bronx. A Lenape war party attacked her homestead in the summer of 1643 during a wider conflict with Dutch settlers, and Hutchinson and most of her household were killed. Only her young daughter Susanna survived, taken by the Lenape and later returned to New England.⁸

Why the Trial Is Remembered

Winthrop silenced a woman who had embarrassed the colony’s most powerful men in open court. The wider result cut the other way. Dissenters left Massachusetts, helped build Rhode Island, and gave later colonial America a working example of religious tolerance to point to.¹

The proceeding is also cited as an early record of what a trial looks like without basic procedural protections. The prosecutor was the judge. The defendant had no lawyer. The charges were vague enough that Hutchinson could reasonably ask what she was being accused of. When she asked why she was banished, the governor told her to stop talking. None of that was unusual for the seventeenth century. All of it became part of the record that later generations drew on when arguing for due process, separation of powers, and the right to counsel.

1
Famous Trials. The Trial of Anne Hutchinson 1637 An Account
2
The First Amendment Encyclopedia. Anne Hutchinson
3
Famous Trials. The Examination of Anne Hutchinson November 1637
4
Encyclopedia.com. Anne Hutchinson Trials 1637 and 1638
5
Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Cottons Dilemma Another Look at the Antinomian Controversy
6
Boston History Company. Anne Marbury Hutchinson
7
Famous Trials. The Trial of Anne Hutchinson Order of Excommunication
8
National Park Service. Anne Hutchinsons Brief Residence Near St Pauls Church