American Jezebel (5 page)

The role of the clergyman was much debated during this period, in large part because the Protestant Reformation’s emphasis on grace over faith had changed the clerical role. When Luther and Zwingli, both Catholic clergymen, discarded their collars and took wives, they ended the special status of the Catholic priest as a vessel through which God gives humanity divine grace. In Reformed theology, grace is free to all who are chosen by God, even without priestly intervention. Each believer receives the body of Christ “only by his own personal faith,” Luther wrote. This new doctrine would lead to quarrels among Protestants and, in America, among Puritans over the proper role of the “faithful shepherd.” For early Puritans like Marbury, ministers were needed not to channel grace but to spread God’s word through prophecy, evangelism, and preaching.

Bishop Aylmer cut in to ask Marbury where the church would find money to train more priests: “Where is the living for them?”

“A man might cut a good large thong out of
your
hide, and the rest would not be missed,” Marbury retorted. “If a living be the default, they are to blame which have too much,” he added, implicating his judges. Over and over, Marburg told the consistory, he would give up everything to gain something for God. Underlying his defiance was a deep faith, which he would pass to Anne.

Archdeacon Mullins said the church could not ordain more priests until “nobler” men sought clerical work.

Marbury observed, “It is better to have nothing than that which God would not have.”

Bishop Aylmer asked, “How provest thou that God would not have them, when we can get no better?”

Marbury replied, “Doth he not say,” in Hosea 4:6, “‘Because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me’?”

“Thou art an overthwart proud Puritan knave!” the bishop cried. “Thou wilt go to Northampton, and thou wilt have thine own saying to die, but thou shalt repent it.”

“I am no Puritan,” Marbury said, for he considered himself a member in good standing of the Church of England, subscriber to all its doctrines. “I beseech you to be good to me. I have been twice in prison, but I know not why.”

Bishop Aylmer ordered the bailiff to “have him to Marshalsea,” a London prison that was notorious for the maltreatment of inmates. At Marshalsea, Queen Elizabeth’s henchmen took pleasure in throwing together the two diametrically opposed camps, Puritans and Catholics. “There,” the bishop gloated, “he shall cope with the papists.”

Marbury’s final words to the court, which his daughter Anne would hear and read innumerable times, were, “I am to go whither it pleases God, but remember God’s judgments. You do me open wrong. I pray God forgive you.”

The church court convicted Francis Marbury of the crime of heresy—corrupting the dogmas of Christ—for questioning the judgment of his superiors. Heresy was a shifting category, its meaning changing with the political tide. During the reign of Queen Mary, who was Catholic, the Puritan minister Hugh Huddleston said, “It is heretical or heresy for a woman to govern the state, for that were to make the woman above the man.” A few years later, when the Protestant Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, Huddleston’s nonconformist colleagues would have liked to strike that definition.

The punishment for Marbury’s crime was two years in jail. He spent them in Marshalsea prison, on the seamy south side of the Thames—the opposite bank from the city of London and Saint Paul’s—where prisons and other distasteful establishments such as brothels, taverns, theaters, and bear-and bull-baiting arenas were relegated.

In 1580, when he was twenty-five, the Reverend Francis Marbury was released from prison for the third time. He moved to the remote market town of Alford, Lincolnshire, where he was considered sufficiently reformed to be allowed to preach and teach. In this town his daughter Anne would be born and spend more than half her life.

Alford (pronounced “Olford”) lies 140 miles north of London and six miles from England’s central eastern coast. It is set, according to local historian Reginald Dudding, in “a wide-stretching valley, bounded on the west by the gentle slope of the Wolds,” hills that rise from the flatlands of eastern Lincolnshire. At that time inhabited by fewer than five hundred people, Alford consisted of a central market square, one state-run Anglican church, several dozen small, thatched-roof houses, and extensive surrounding arable fields. The sixteenth-century historian Leland described Alford as “all fact and reeded”—reed thatched—“and a brook runneth by.” The brook, which remains today, is a remnant of the ford that gave the town its name and its market status. A ford—part of a river so shallow that one can wade across—was in medieval times a gathering place, which led to barter, the mother of markets. In Marbury’s day the town’s population doubled every Tuesday and Friday as vendors gathered with their fish, flowers, produce, and baked goods, as they still do today.

Ascending the Wolds to the west of Alford, residents could see many windmills on the horizon and on a clear day, to the east, the North Sea dotted with passing ships, beyond which lay Holland, another hotbed of Puritanism. Residents of this English coastal region imagined—there appears to be no historical basis for it—that flotsam washing ashore here came from the 1588 destruction of the Spanish Armada, the mighty fleet of warships appareled with banners of the Virgin Mary that King Philip of Spain had sent into English waters. After a nine-day naval battle, the Spanish ships that had escaped English guns ran into a storm—the “Protestant wind”—which caused the most losses. Already in late-sixteenth-century Lincolnshire, there was a sense of a vast world beyond, and a world-encompassing battle between evil and good.

The Reverend Marbury was clearly capable, personable, and outwardly conforming, for he was soon appointed curate, or deputy vicar, of the local church. The vicar, or senior priest, of Alford then was the
Reverend Joseph Overton, of whom little is known. Preachers in Lincolnshire at the time were known for their verbal stamina, with sermons lasting two hours or longer. These clerics “exalted preaching above the sacraments,” according to the Lincolnshire historian Dudding, and their views were “chiefly Puritan and Calvinistic.”

The church of Saint Wilfrid’s, in which Francis Marbury preached, still stands on a slight rise beside the main road through Alford. Named for a seventh-century English bishop who preached to the Saxons and the Celts, the church was erected in the 1350s on the site of an earlier church. A handsome, airy building of naturally green sandstone, it has Gothic arches atop its windows and doors and a square tower containing large bells whose tolling announces services, as they did in Marbury’s day.

One enters the church through thick, oak-paneled Gothic doors studded with nail heads and decorated with a clover trefoil design, which open at the turn of the original round brass handle. Inside, 650-year-old octagonal columns line the aisles, and at the rear an ancient staircase leads to the bell tower. Despite oak pews and carvings, the church is pleasantly light. Its walls, originally covered with religious paintings, are whitewashed with lime, and the medieval stained glass was long ago broken, leaving most windowpanes clear amid delicate tracery. The fourteenth-century rood screen, the barrier between the nave and altar of a medieval church, survives, remarkably, despite the post-Reformation purification of English churches and minimal Victorian renovations (such as the addition of roof pinnacles) to this church. Carvings depicting the passion of Christ—a cock, a crown of thorns, nails, a cup, a tunic, a ladder, and tools—float above the altar, beside which a local knight and his wife lie in marble effigy.

During his first decade in Alford, Francis Marbury preached from the rood loft, an enclosure above the screen from which medieval priests preached. But King James I ordered in 1603 that every English church should have a pulpit, to bring the priest closer to the people. The rood loft in Saint Wilfrid’s was removed, although the start of the spiral staircase leading to it can still be seen behind the newer Jacobean pulpit. Made of dark oak, the pulpit is carved with arabesque figures of Adam and Eve, a medieval man and woman, flowers, rams, and horns. The Reverend Marbury had to ascend several steps to the
pulpit, raise its metal latch, and pass through its oaken half door in order to preach.

This pulpit is still used every Sunday morning, when the current vicar of Alford offers one of two weekly services at the church. The church was far busier in Elizabethan times: there were daily morning prayers and evensong, two sermons on Sundays, and one sermon each on Wednesdays, Fridays, and feast days. Holy Communion was given thirteen times a year, monthly and on Christmas Day. At the Lord’s Supper, Marbury offered his congregation wine along with the bread, one of the innovations of post-Reformation Anglicanism. The silver chalice that he sipped from, which was made in 1537 from melted-down medieval chalices, is now in a bank vault in Louth, thirteen miles to the north.

Along with his ministry, in 1585 the Reverend Marbury became schoolmaster at the Alford Free Grammar School, one of England’s earliest free schools. These were public schools, free to the poor, begun by Queen Elizabeth. The Alford free school began in 1570 with a fifty-pound grant from a local merchant. Marbury was its third master. During its early years the school was located above the church’s charming front porch. This schoolroom remains, atop a stone staircase leading up from a miniature version of the church’s main door, located just west of the larger door. Six days a week, from early morning until late afternoon, Marbury’s students, all boys, sat on wooden benches in the unheated schoolroom, scribbling on slates with chalk dug from nearby fields. The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, and biblical exegesis in the original languages of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, as well as English. The Latin Vulgate Bible had gone out with the Reformation, but most English boys studied Latin too, reading from Horace, Cicero, and Pliny. One of Marbury’s students, a John Smith of nearby Willoughby, born in 1579, would become Captain John Smith and found the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, and chart the coastline of New England.

Around the time Francis Marbury returned to work, he married Elizabeth Moore, a young woman of whom practically nothing is known. The couple lived up the road from the church in a small timber-frame house with whitewashed mud walls, a thatched roof, and one or two bays. Near the house was a barn “all of timber building and mud
walls” and enough arable land to cultivate crops, graze sheep and cows, and provide pasturage for the horse he needed for transport. The Reverend Marbury grew wheat, beans, root vegetables, and hay, and the family produced its own cheese, butter, and wool. His wife gave birth to three daughters—Elizabeth, in 1581; Mary, born in 1583 and deceased two years later; and Susan, in 1585—and then she died.

Within a year of his first wife’s death, Francis married Bridget Dryden, a midwife about ten years his junior from a prominent Northampton family of religious dissenters. Twenty-five-year-old Bridget, who joined Francis, his two daughters, and one or two servants in their cottage, had been born and raised in the manor of Canons Ashby, Northampton, where she likely heard her future husband preach. Bridget’s ancestors were said to include the eighth-century monarch Charlemagne, although such claims cannot be proven. It was a point of pride in the Dryden family that an uncle, Sir Anthony Cope, who opposed Queen Elizabeth’s efforts to steer a middle course between the Catholics and the Puritans, was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1587 for trying to revise along Puritan lines the state-approved Book of Common Prayer. Bridget’s grandfather John Dryden was a close friend of the humanist and theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467–1536), who had lectured at Cambridge and encouraged reading the Bible in the vernacular. Sir Erasmus Dryden, Bridget’s older brother, was grandfather to the seventeenth-century poet and playwright John Dryden, who was thus a first cousin once removed to Anne.

The first child of the marriage that would produce Anne Marbury Hutchinson was a girl named Mary, born in 1588. Two years later Francis and Bridget had a son, John, who died in infancy. In the midsummer heat of July 17, 1591, their third child, Anne, arrived.

At the time of Anne’s birth, all the Marbury children were girls—ten-year-old Elizabeth and six-year-old Susan, Anne’s two half sisters, and three-year-old Mary. The lack of sons may help explain why Anne’s schoolteacher father accorded her so much attention in a time when only boys were sent to school and taught to read and write. Another factor may have been the growing suspicion among the ruling class in Elizabethan England that girls and women could be schooled. The powerful female monarch, who at the time of Anne Marbury’s
birth had spent more than half of her fifty-seven years on the throne, knew French, Italian, Spanish, Welsh, Latin, and some Greek besides her native tongue and wrote eloquently in music and words. As the prominent London headmaster Richard Mulcaster put it, “That young maidens can learn, nature doth give them, and that they have learned our experience doth teach us. What foreign example can more assure the world than our diamond,” Queen Elizabeth, “at home?”