They appeared; and Cotton, who had satisfied his brother clergymen of his orthodoxy, tainted for a space by his connection with the Antinomians, was set to examine Mrs. Hutchinson; “which was hard for him to do, and bitter for her to endure; for she had been his _protégé_.”[1001] This remarkable woman was now in her element. She was calm, and she was firm, and she was keen; for, “Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues.” But one bold avowal sealed her doom. “We have,” she said, “a new rule of practice by immediate revelations; by these we guide our conduct. Not that we expect any revelation in the way of a miracle; that is a delusion; but we despise the anathemas of your synods and courts, and will still follow the whisperings of conscience.”[1002] This speech caused wide-spread alarm. It seemed to squint towards anarchy. “The true parents of the brats began to discover themselves,” quaintly comments old Mather, “when the synod lifted the sword upon them.”[1003] An insurrection of lawless fanatics, “like a Munster tragedy,” seemed brewing. The magistrates decided that the danger was desperate; that Anne Hutchinson was “like Roger Williams, or worse;”[1004] and so, says Winthrop, “we applied the last remedy, and that without delay.”[1005] Anne Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and Aspinwall, were solemnly exiled as “unfit for the society” of the Pilgrims; and those of their followers who remained were ordered to deliver up their arms, lest they should, “upon some revelation, make a sudden insurrection.”[1006] Thus ended the _ecclesiarum prælia_.[1007] “And thus,” says Cotton Mather, “was the hydra beheaded—_hydra decapitata_.”[1008] “This legislation may be reproved for its jealousy, but not for its cruelty; for it condemned the “heretics” to a banishment not more severe than many of the best of the Pilgrims had encountered from choice.” But it is a sad chapter; and perhaps the old divine was right when he wrote, “What these errors were ’tis needless now to repeat; they are dead and gone, and buried past resurrection; ’tis a pity to strive to rake them from their graves.”[1009] The exiles, followed by great numbers of proselytes, on quitting Massachusetts Bay, wandered southward, “designing to plant a settlement on Long Island, or near Delaware Bay. But Roger Williams welcomed them to his vicinity,” and obtained for them a resting-place. They colonized Rhode Island, or _Aquitneck_, as it was then called. “It was not price nor money that got Rhode Island,” wrote Williams; “it was gotten by _love_; by the love and favor which that honorable gentleman, Sir Harry Vane, and myself, had with that great sachem, Miantonomoh.”[1010] Being thus held by the same tenure that Providence owned, Aquitneck was based upon the self-same principle of intellectual liberty; and though the two were not united in one state until after the Restoration, they clasped hands in equal brotherhood, and were buoyed by toleration.