American Jezebel Read Free Page B

of their hats were lined in the brow with leather. The meetinghouse lacked a fireplace, and the bitter chill of winter had arrived early that year. Just the week before, in an early November ice storm, a young man had frozen to death while trying to cross the nearby Charles River in a skiff.
    Every judge but one took his seat on one of the wooden benches at the front of the hall that faced the crowd. The last judge to enter the hall was the governor, who approached the single desk and cushioned chair before the benches and sat down.
    Governor John Winthrop, a small man of forty-nine with a tense, worried mien, was not only the architect of this trial but also its leading magistrate, serving as both chief judge and chief prosecutor. Winthrop had been born in Suffolk, England, in 1588, attended Trinity College, Cambridge, for two years, during which he considered becoming a clergyman, and was trained as a lawyer in London. He worked as a government attorney and justice of the peace, and, as squire of the manor of Groton, in Suffolk, he was admitted in 1628 to the Inner Temple, one of the Inns of Court in London that train English lawyers. Although he was considered a strong candidate for Parliament, he never had a chance to run for office in England.
    In the late 1620s John Winthrop and other pious Puritans saw England as in a decline. Men were treated like cattle, he believed, and money trumped morals. He was increasingly offended by the “papist,” or Catholic, leanings of the Anglican Church under King Charles I, who had ascended the throne in 1625. True religion was about to expire, Winthrop feared. William Laud, whom Charles had chosen to become Bishop of London in 1628, leaned toward Arminianism—the belief, put forward by a Dutch minister named Arminius, that people by their own free will can achieve faith and salvation—which especially offended Puritans, who so emphasized divine grace as against the ability of humans to effect their own salvation. Furious at Bishop Laud, the Puritans appealed to Parliament, which decided to suppress his “popery” in the state church. As a result of this and similar parliamentary challenges to his rule, King Charles abrogated Parliament in March 1629, a decision that cost John Winthrop his government post.
    The following summer the forty-two-year-old gentleman barrister joined a company of Puritan gentry wishing to leave England and form a new colony in America, with the approbation of the king, who granted the colonial charter. The Massachusetts Bay Company, as it was called, chose Winthrop as its first governor, in recognition of his political and administrative skills, which Hawthorne noted in “Mrs. Hutchinson” (1830): “In the highest place sits Winthrop, a man by whom the innocent and the guilty might alike desire to be judged, the first confiding in his integrity and wisdom, the latter hoping in his mildness.” In Winthrop’s personal journal, which is now a primary source on early Massachusetts, the new governor saw himself as the Moses of a new Exodus, embarking on a second Protestant Reformation—withdrawing from the church of England as it had withdrawn a century earlier from the church of Rome. In the spring of 1630 he led a flotilla of eleven ships carrying nearly a thousand nonconformist Protestants like himself across the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the Separatists who nine years earlier had founded Plymouth Plantation, Winthrop aimed not to separate from his country but to extend its reach while purifying its church—hence the name New England.
    Now, in 1637, Winthrop had been elected to his fifth one-year term as colonial governor, after having lost the office for three years, most recently to the young Sir Henry Vane, a supporter of Hutchinson. Each spring, according to the royal charter, the governor was elected from among the members of the General Court by the members themselves. But in 1633 voting rights were extended to all male members of the state