Thomas More, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson

When Henry VIII in 1529 made Thomas More his Lord Chancellor he replaced the corrupt wheeler-dealer Cardinal Wolsey with a scrupulously honest lawyer. When Wolsey fell from royal favor, or perhaps tripped in his own maneuvers, Henry was attempting to rid himself of Queen Catherine in order to marry Anne Boleyn.

The final break with Rome came in 1533. After this it was more difficult for such a prominent person as More to keep his dissent private. Henry determined to have More take the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging Henry to be head of the church. For his refusal he was sent to the Tower in April 1534 and tried and beheaded in July 1535. When faced with the charge of treason for refusing to give assent to royal supremacy over the church, More submitted that silence itself is no crime, that treason is an overt act, that even if silence were construed as an act the presumption must be that it means consent rather than the reverse, that a loyal subject when in doubt will refer to his conscience, and that a loyal subject by definition cannot harbor seditious thoughts in his conscience.²⁶ While More acknowledged the king’s authority in secular matters and granted that the pope’s temporal authority was limited by English law, he did not believe national law could restrict papal authority in the church.

More’s trial in Westminster Hall is a clear-cut instance of a partisan trial, although More’s answers to his accusers stand in today’s light as an indictment of Henry’s regime. Since he was accused of treason, he was presumed guilty. He was not given a copy of the indictment and did not hear it read until he appeared in court. He was allowed neither counsel nor the right to call witnesses. The trial was held before a special commission of Oyer and Terminer instead of a regular court, and, instead of being independent, it was packed with royal favorites. Although one of the disputed matters was More’s opinion on the matter of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, Anne’s father, brother, and uncle were appointed to the nineteen-man commission. Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s secretary and More’s chief rival, and others close to the king were there too. They had all taken the oath and could be expected to think it only reasonable that More should as well.²⁷

The issue in More’s trial became the question of the obligation of conscience, a meaning which is not always clear. More had, after all, in speaking on behalf of the king told Parliament that Henry sought the divorce because of his conscience for the future of England, and Henry himself had told his Council that “I have asked the counsel of the greatest clerks in Christendom, and for this cause I have sent for this legate as a man indifferent, only to know the truth and settle my conscience, and for no other cause as God can judge.… These be the sores that vex my mind, these be the pangs that trouble my conscience, and for these griefs I seek a remedy.”²⁸ Further, could not More’s accusers, who had taken the oath, rest content with their consciences that in following their king they had done what was right?

What does conscience mean? More meant by conscience, according to G. R. Elton, “a recognition of…the truth established by a greater consensus than was available in one realm alone.” More made it clear that by conscience he did not mean everyone’s right to judge arbitrarily but, instead, the duty to accept a vision granted to the body of Christians.

In England the prototypical conflict over religion and loyalty is the collision of Thomas More with Henry VIII. The equivalent in America are the clashes Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson had with the Massachusetts orthodoxy. In all three struggles the central issues are the meaning of conscience and the rule of law. Although More was a devout Catholic whose mind operated in a medieval framework and Williams and Hutchinson were intrepid Puritans in tune with the revolutionary spirit of the seventeenth century, they would have agreed on the obligation of conscience and the necessity of opposing arbitrary authority.

As a teenager Roger Williams attracted the attention of none other than Sir Edward Coke, who at the time, around 1620, was doing battle on behalf of the common law against the claims of divine right by King James I. Coke and the Williams family were communicants of St. Sepulchre’s in London, and young Roger took shorthand notes for Sir Edward of sermons and also of proceedings in the Star Chamber. Coke became the patron of Williams’s education at Charterhouse School and then at Cambridge.³⁰

Williams became a minister but refused his first call because the Boston church had not separated itself from the Church of England.

Williams attacked the very idea of a royal charter. He had written that the Indians, not the English king, were the only lords of the soil. The “great sin” was that “Christian Kings (so called) were invested with Right by virtue of their Christianity, to take and give away the Lands and Countries of other men.” He accused the king with “a solemn public lie” in proclaiming himself the first Christian prince to discover “this land.” Williams, one of the few in New England to regard the Indians as equal human beings with a culture as valid as the European, contended that because the Indians “hunted all the Country over” and twice a year burned off the underbrush they had proof of their property which was as good as the king’s to his English forests.³¹ The spread of such ideas could easily endanger the colony’s royal charter.

But there is more. Williams also objected to the oath which required residents to swear their loyalty. By invoking the name of God an oath became an act of worship, Williams argued, which could not be forced upon the unregenerate without becoming a perversion of God’s worship.³² This idea, based on Williams’s conviction that forced worship is idolatry, challenged the very assumptions of the Holy Commonwealth and threatened the covenant the orthodoxy had, to their satisfaction, established with God.

In October 1635 the General Court, which had requested that all of the Bay ministers attend because of the importance of the case, heard arguments in the trial of Roger Williams and pronounced judgment:

Whereas Mr. Roger Williams…hath broached and divulged dyvers newe and dangerous opinions, against the aucthoritie of magistrates, as also writt letters of defamacon, both of the magistrates and churches here, and that before any conviccon, and yet mainetaineth the same without retraccon, it is therefore ordered, that the said Mr. Williams shall departe out of this jurisdiccon.³³

We have no trial transcript, but the controversy was carried on in a battle of pamphlets between Williams and John Cotton. Williams did not return to England for his exile, as expected, but instead he founded the colony of Rhode Island.

Two years later Anne Hutchinson faced the Massachusetts General Court and met with the same judgment Williams had: exile. In England she had been an avid follower of the preacher John Cotton whose scholarship and eloquent sermons were attracting the attention of many beyond his church in Boston, Lincolnshire. The authorities soon had him denounced for nonconformity and Puritanism before the Court of the High Commission in 1632. Cotton put on a disguise, took an assumed name, and fled for his safety to Boston in New England. Anne Hutchinson and her family followed.³⁴

The same ship which arrived with the Hutchinsons also brought a demand from King Charles I that the Massachusetts Bay Colony return its charter. This increased the pressure to prove to the English powers-that-be that New England knew how to handle dissenters and troublemakers. The trial was presided over by the founder of the Bay Colony, Hutchinson’s nearest neighbor and chief accuser, John Winthrop. He told her that she was accused of troubling “the peace of the commonwealth and the churches here,” of having spoken “divers things…very prejudicial to the honor of the churches and ministers,” and of maintaining a meeting “in your house that hath been condemned by the general assembly as a thing not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex.”³⁵

Hutchinson had supported her brother-in-law, Rev.

John Cotton was the major witness who spoke on Hutchinson’s behalf. He was in a ticklish position because his ardent disciple was on trial, in large part, for ideas he had promoted, and yet he had difficulty endorsing any dissent from this particular orthodoxy. Massachusetts was, after all, what he had long worked for, a true Bible commonwealth. When asked about Hutchinson’s attack on his colleague at the Boston church, the Rev. John Wilson (against whom she had led a walk-out during one of his sermons),³⁷ and about her claims that only Cotton and Wheelwright were able ministers, John Cotton admitted that he was uncomfortable at any such comparison. As for the issue in dispute with her opponents over the covenant of works, Cotton helped Hutchinson’s defense by observing that what she said did not seem “so ill taken” and that he “did not find her saying they were under a covenant of works, nor that she said they did preach a covenant of works.”³⁸

If the defense had rested at that point, as Richard Morris shows, Hutchinson might have been acquitted, but following Cotton’s testimony Hutchinson brought up an issue which hamstrung her case. She claimed that what she spoke from her conscience she knew to be true of “an immediate revelation” from God, just as Abraham had. To this she added a curse which unhinged her defense completely: “Take heed how you proceed against me, for I know that for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity, and this whole state!”³⁹ That ended it for Hutchinson. Even Cotton voted against her. She was banished “as being a woman not fit for our society.”⁴⁰

The argument raised by the Williams and Hutchinson trials did not end with their banishments. It continued on in an exchange of pamphlets between John Cotton and Roger Williams for another fifteen years. A treatise, A Model of Church and Civil Power, written by the ministers of Massachusetts and sent to the people in Williams’s Salem congregation at the time of his trial, plus several letters and books by Cotton constitute the case for the prosecution. The heart of the argument for the orthodox cause was stated by Cotton:

“That government, which by the blessing of Christ doth safely, speedily, and effectually purge out such grievous and dangerous evils, as threaten the wine of Church and State, that government is safely allowed, and justly and wisely established by any civil state.”⁴¹ Williams and Hutchinson, whose errors were judged “fundamental, or seditiously and turbulently promoted,” could not be tolerated because “evil it would be to tolerate notorious evil doers.” Although Cotton argued that no one should be punished for his or her conscience, he likewise held that an evil doer can be punished “for sinning against his [or her] conscience.”⁴²

Williams published his Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience nearly a decade after he was banished, while he was in England to secure a charter for Rhode Island from Parliament. Williams insists that we not confuse persecution with punishment. The distinction between punishment and persecution depends upon the difference between government under a rule of law and arbitrary government. If the rule of law does not prevail, “the law of arms, the sword and blood” will. Government under the rule of law can enjoin obedience. Such a state does not require conformity in spiritual matters, only in civil affairs. Civic duties can be fulfilled not out of fear but out of conscience, since the sword of civil justice is “for the defense of Persons, Estates, Families, Liberties” and the “suppressing of uncivil or injurious persons or actions.”⁴³

Arbitrary government, according to Williams, enforces an idolatrous civil religion. When they extend the sword to “spiritual and Soul-causes, Spiritual or Soule punishment,” the result is the bloody tenet of persecution. Even a true religion, if enforced with the civil authority as an established doctrine, is idolatry and comes under Williams’s strongest condemnation:

Yea it is most woefully found evident, that the best Religion (like the fairest Whores, and the most golden and costlie Images) yea the most holy and onely true Religion and Worship, appointed by God himself, is a Torment to that Soul and Conscience, that is forc’t against its own free love and choice, to embrace and observe it.⁴⁴

Punishment must be employed by governments under the rule of law for transgressions of civil order, such as murder and theft, which are “inconsistent to the…[relationship] of man to man,” and are contrary to the common good. Williams would extend the civil authority’s use of punishment beyond actions to lying and to advocating doctrines which violate the civil order, for example teaching the “abominable and most inhumane” practice of human sacrifice or urging wanton love “leading to ushering in laciviousnesse and uncleanness.”⁴⁵ But persecution differs in kind from punishment. It is inflicted for some spiritual matter. A person is persecuted for conscience when he or she is punished for refusing to accept or obey an established doctrine.⁴⁶ Punishment aims at the preservation of justice while persecution aims at spiritual uniformity. Yet the nature of persecution is such that it tends to corrupt the language. Williams pointed out that those who persecute avoid the word persecute, masking the practice as punishment: “Christ is a seducer of the people, a blasphemer against God, a traytor against Caesar, therefore hang him; Christians are schismaticall, factious, heretical, therefore persecute them; The Devill hath deluded John Hus, therefore crown him with a paper of Devils, and burne him.”⁴⁷

Just as Cotton and Winthrop cited the evils which befall a nation such as England when it did not follow the Biblical model of government, so Williams used England to illustrate the entanglements of hypocrisy that accompany the establishment of religion and the persecution of conscience:

True it is, the Sword may make…a whole Nation of Hypocrites.… What a most wofull proofe hereof have the Nations of the Earth given in all Ages?…Henry the 7. finds and leaves the kingdome absolutely Popish. Henry the 8. casts it into a mound half Popish halfe Protestant. Edward the 6. brings forth an Edition all Protestant. Queene Mary within few yeares defaceth Edwards worke, and renders the Kingdome…all Popish. Maries short life and Religion ends together: and Elizabeth reveth her Brother Edwards model, all Protestant.… It hath been Englands sinful shame, to fashion & change their Garments and Religions with wondrous ease and lightnesse, as a higher Power, a stronger Sword hath prevailed; after the ancient pattern of Nebuchadnezzars bowing the whole world in one most solemne uniformitie of worship to his Golden Image.⁴⁸

John Cotton made at least two additional claims: Persecution is in the real interest of the victims, for their own good, and the persecutors are the real victims. Williams regarded Cotton’s argument that a person cannot be persecuted for conscience but only for “sinning against his conscience” as, to use Williams’s words, “overturning and rooting up the very foundation and roots of all true Christianity.” Since persecution oppresses both true and erroneous conscience, in Williams’s opinion, it falls most heavily on those who are most godly and leads the persecutor to such arrogance “that he speaks so tenderly for his own conscience, hath yet so little respect, mercie or pitie to the like consciencious perswasions of other Men.”⁴⁹ Orthodoxy which contains a justification of persecution soon substitutes its idolatry for the common good and becomes the agent for dissolving the bonds of society. It creates a nation of hypocrites by compelling a people to “forsake their Religion which their hearts cleave to.”⁵⁰ It confuses the spiritual and civil realms by punishing a person both as a “heretick against the church [and] as a traitor against the king.” And, instead of unifying society, it sets society against itself: “If this be the touchstone of all obedience, will it not be the cut-throat of all civil relations, unions and covenants between Princes and people, and between the people and people?”⁵¹