Massachusetts -- Church history; Massachusetts -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; Puritans -- Massachusetts
The court sat till eight at night, when “Mr. Cotton pronounced the
sentence of admonition ... with much zeal and detestation of her errors
and pride of spirit.” [Footnote: Winthrop, i. 256.] An adjournment was
then agreed on for a week and she was ordered to return to Roxbury; but
this was more than she could bear, and her distress was such that the
congregation seem to have felt some touch of compassion, for she was
committed to the charge of Cotton till the next lecture day, when the
trial was to be resumed. [Footnote: _Brief Apol._ p. 62.] At his house
her mind recovered its tone and when she again appeared she not only
retracted the wild opinions she had broached while at Joseph Welde’s,
but admitted “that what she had spoken against the magistrates at
the court (by way of revelation) was rash and ungrounded.” [Footnote:
Winthrop, i. 258.]
But nothing could avail her. She was in the hands of men determined
to make her expiation of her crimes a by-word of terror; her fate was
sealed. The doctrines she now professed were less objectionable, so
she was examined as to former errors, among others “that she had denied
inherent righteousness;” she “affirmed that it was never her judgment;
and though it was proved by many testimonies ... yet she impudently
persisted in her affirmation to the astonishment of all the assembly.
So that ... the church with one consent cast her out.... After she was
excommunicated her spirit, which seemed before to be somewhat dejected,
revived again and she gloried in her sufferings.” [Footnote: Winthrop,
i. 258.] And all this time she had been alone; her friends were far
away.
That no circumstances of horror might be lost, she and one of her most
devoted followers, Mary Dyer, were nearing their confinements during
this time of misery. Both cases ended in misfortunes over whose
sickening details Thomas Welde and his reverend brethren gloated with a
savage joy, declaring that “God himselfe was pleased to step in with
his casting vote ... as clearly as if he had pointed with his finger.”
[Footnote: _Short Story_, Preface, Section 5.] Let posterity draw a veil
over the shocking scene.
Two or three days after her condemnation “the governor sent [her] a
warrant ... to depart ... she went by water to her farm at the Mount ...
and so to the island in the Narragansett Bay which her husband and the
rest of that sect had purchased of the Indians.” [Footnote: Winthrop, i.
259.]
This pure and noble but most unhappy woman had sinned against the
clergy, past forgiveness here or hereafter. They gibbeted her as
Jezebel, and her name became a reproach in Massachusetts through two
hundred years. But her crimes and the awful ending of her life are
best read in the Christian words of the Rev. Thomas Welde, whose gentle
spirit so adorned his holy office.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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