In May, elections were moved so that fewer of the men in Anne Hutchinson's party voted, and Henry Vane lost the election to deputy governor and Hutchinson opponent John Winthrop. Another supporter of the orthodox faction, Thomas Dudley, was elected deputy governor. Henry Vane returned to England in August.
That same month, a synod was held in Massachusetts which identified the views held by Hutchinson as heretical. In November, 1637, Anne Hutchinson was tried before the General Court on charges of heresy and sedition.
The outcome of the trial was not in doubt: the prosecutors were also the judges, since her supporters had by that time been excluded (for their own theological dissent) from the General Court. The views she held had been declared heretical at the August synod, so the outcome was predetermined.
After the trial, she was put into the custody of Roxbury's marshal, Joseph Weld. She was brought to Cotton's home in Boston several times so that he and another minister could convince her of the error of her views. She recanted publicly but soon admitted that she still held her views.
In 1638, now accused of lying in her recantation, Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated by the Boston Church and moved with her family to Rhode Island to land purchased from the Narragansetts. They were invited by Roger Williams, who had founded the new colony as a democratic community with no enforced church doctrine. Among Anne Hutchinson's friends who also moved to Rhode Island was Mary Dyer.
In Rhode Island, William Hutchinson died in 1642. Anne Hutchinson, with her six youngest children, moved first to Long Island Sound and then to the New York (New Netherland) mainland.
There, in 1643, in August or September, Anne Hutchinson and all but one member of her household were killed by Native Americans in a local uprising. Her youngest daughter, Susanna, born in 1633, was kidnapped in that incident, but the Dutch ransomed her.
Some of the Hutchinsons' enemies among the Massachusetts clergy thought that her end was divine judgment against her theological ideas. In 1644, Thomas Weld, on hearing of the death of the Hutchinsons, declared "Thus the Lord heard our groans to heaven and freed us from this great and sore affliction."
In 1651 Susanna married John Cole in Boston. Another daughter of Anne and William Hutchinson, Faith, married Thomas Savage, who commanded the Massachusetts forces in King Philip's War, a conflict between Native Americans and the English colonists.
Bibliography:
Helen Auguer. An American Jezebel: The Life of Anne Hutchinson. 1930.
Emery John Battis. Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 1962.
Thomas J. Bremer, editor. Anne Hutchinson: Troubler of the Puritan Zion. 1981.
Edith R. Curtis. Anne Hutchinson. 1930.
David D. Hall, editor. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638. 1990, second edition. (Includes records from Hutchinson's trial.)
Winifred King Rugg. Unafraid: A Life of Anne Hutchinson. 1930.
N. Shore. Anne Hutchinson. 1988.
William H. Whitmore and William S. Appleton, editors. Hutchinson Papers. 1865.
Selma R. Williams. Divine Rebel: The Life of Anne Marbury Hutchinson. 1981.
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