A woman who occasioned much difficulty in New England, soon after its first settlement, came from Lincolnshire to Boston, 1635, and was the wife of one of the representatives of Boston. The members of Mr. Cotton's church used to meet every week to repeat his sermons, and discourse on doctrines. She set up meetings for women, and soon had a numerous audience. After repeating the sermons of Mr. Cotton, she added reflections of her own; she advocated her own sentiments, and warped the discourses of her minister to coincide with them. She soon threw the whole colony into a flame. The progress of her sentiments occasioned the synod of 1637, the first synod in America. This convention of ministers condemned eighty-two erroneous opinions, then propagated in the country. Mrs. Hutchinson, after this sentence of her opinions, was herself called before the court in November of the same year, and, being convicted of traducing the ministers, and advancing errors, was banished the colony. She went with her husband to Rhode Island. In the year 1642, after her husband's death, she removed into the Dutch country beyond New Haven; and the next year, she, her son Francis, and most of her family of sixteen persons, were killed by the Indians. |