Currently two competing models exist side-by-side to explain the “antinomian” or “free grace” controversy, in which Anne Hutchinson and her theology are said to have played a key role. The differences in these narratives appear to require a return to the sources and a careful examination of Hutchinson's own statements—as far as they can be reconstructed—in the context of her first interrogation by a group of clergymen in the autumn of 1636. Since one of the narratives casts doubt on John Winthrop's assertions of her manifest unorthodoxy at that time, a central question will be whether the views she expressed then deviated significantly from the mainstream of theology espoused by godly contemporaries in Britain and if so, in what particulars. Hutchinson's remarks at the outset of the controversy could then serve as a baseline in an investigation of how the dispute escalated and evolved over the following months.

The interpretation first outlined by David D. Hall in 1968 follows earlier accounts to a large degree and accepts John Winthrop's assertions that in the fall of 1636 Anne Hutchinson was spreading unorthodox “opinions” in Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop entered what he considered the two most dangerous of them in his journal, one of the most important contemporary sources.Footnote ¹ The newer assessment reaches a consensus that John Winthrop is not an entirely reliable source. Historians Michael Winship, Francis J. Bremer, and David Como have led the way in this shift.Footnote ² Winship refers to Winthrop's accounts of the doctrinal controversy in New England as “formidable spin control” and a “rewriting of history” and concludes that “there is no evidence” for the existence of the group of antinomians or “Hutchinsonians” that Winthrop described; nevertheless Winship regards Hutchinson as a radical with extreme views, some of which she did not reveal until late in the dispute.Footnote ³ In his biography of John Winthrop, Francis Bremer embraces much of Winship's perspective on this episode, and Como, after investigating antinomianism in England during the 1630s, argues that Hutchinson and her closest associates cannot be termed “genuine antinomians” in the same sense.Footnote ⁴

Winship argues persuasively that the positions taken by major players in the course of the controversy were not fixed but rather “political,” consisting of “personal agendas” and “shifting coalitions.”Footnote ⁵ This insight means that careful attention must be paid to chronology and to the possibility that participants— statements about the past—in particular statements of their own and others— motives—may not accurately reflect the situation in an earlier phase of the controversy. Instead they may represent an agenda and/or coalition that had evolved in the meantime. Winship's stress on shifting and evolving positions applies to Hutchinson herself as well.

After being found guilty in a trial before the General Court in late 1637, Hutchinson was immediately imprisoned in Roxbury near Boston and kept in solitary confinement over the winter.Footnote ⁶ It is apparent that her state of mind deteriorated during this time, and her nephew by marriage attested that she became markedly less rational, depressed, and subject to “strange fancies … attended with melancholy.”Footnote ⁷ She was also repeatedly visited by hostile clergymen—intent on gathering evidence against her for a planned church trial—who placed the worst possible interpretation on every statement or question of hers. By the time of that second trial in the spring of 1638 she appears to have been confused and far more uncertain than she had been at her interrogation in 1636. These circumstances underline the importance of assessing her beliefs at the beginning of the controversy, before she was subjected to such harsh treatment.

Writing in his journal under dates in late 1636, Winthrop accused Hutchinson of heading a conspiracy with her husband's brother-in-law John Wheelwright in order to take over the pulpit of the Boston church and promulgate unorthodox views. While leading the trial against her in 1637, however, Winthrop never referred to such a conspiracy. It plays no role whatsoever in that trial of 1637. (By that time Wheelwright had long since been found guilty of contempt and sedition, so in political terms that problem had been solved and the authorities— agenda had presumably shifted. The fact that Winthrop had abandoned his own earlier position on the conspiracy speaks volumes about the unlikelihood of its ever having existed.) By contrast Winthrop mentioned Hutchinson's meetings for women at the trial, but he had not referred to them in his 1636 journal entries. This casts some doubt on their centrality at the start of the controversy. (In a later written account, John Cotton also stated that he had sent female members of the congregation to listen to what was being said at the gatherings as soon as he was told he should be concerned about it; they reported back to him that nothing objectionable was going on.)Footnote ⁸

Even if Hutchinson was neither a genuine antinomian nor the leader of a large group of dangerously unorthodox “opinionists” who attempted to seize control of the Boston pulpit and congregation in late 1636, however, it appears indisputable from John Winthrop's journal entry dated 25 October 1636, and from the testimony given at her civil trial, that she was called in for questioning by a group of ministers at some point between late October and the end of December of that year. The fact that Winthrop reported the interrogation under an October date may speak for the earlier time, although his chronology is sometimes unreliable.Footnote ⁹ The key question is, of course, why the ministers summoned and questioned her if Winthrop's allegations in his journal lack a solid foundation. A possible answer to it is sketched below.

Once Winthrop's misrepresentation—made for whatever reasons—has been recognized, however, is it possible to acquire any reliable sense of Anne Hutchinson's religious views at the time of her interrogation in 1636? The crucial source for any effort to establish them is the testimony given at her civil trial. What follows is an examination of that testimony that offers some evidence for regarding her views as far less “radical” or “unorthodox” than they are usually depicted.

In this process it should be borne in mind that she was not a theologian. Her knowledge of religious doctrine and godly theology probably stemmed in the main from instruction by her father, Francis Marbury, who was a deacon with a license to preach during her childhood. In 1605, the year in which she turned 14, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁰ Later the preaching of John Cotton became an important influence, possibly combined with the reading of some sermons by popularizers such as John Preston. It is highly unlikely that Anne Hutchinson could read Latin, much less had the time at her disposal to read long learned treatises. Her statements should therefore not be measured against the most highly evolved reformed doctrine of the period among leading scholars; the important question is rather what an intelligent and well-trained laywoman of the time could have been expected to know.

The reference by a minister at her trial to her beliefs at the earliest point stems from Zachariah Simmes, who reported on conversations on board the ship taking them to Massachusetts Bay in the summer of 1634. The minister recalled specifically that a conversation about his own work and that of John Lothrop, a London clergyman on board who had served a prison sentence in England, had ended in agreement. That is to say that Hutchinson offered no objections, except that Simmes believed he had noted “a secret opposition to things delivered.”Footnote ¹¹ It seems unlikely that the minister would have “recalled” silent disagreement three years later if Anne Hutchinson had not been placed on trial in 1637; rather it looks as if Simmes wanted to locate himself on the side of the authorities—the prosecution rather than the defense—in that trial after his testimony was solicited.Footnote ¹²

Simmes further appears in that testimony to imply that Hutchinson had disagreed with him in 1634 on the meaning of 1John 3:14 that displaying “love of the brethren” in behavior indicated that a person was saved (justified), and also to take this disagreement as evidence of the “corruptness” of her beliefs. In this context it should be noted that before Hutchinson's trial John Cotton quoted at some length Calvin's exposition of this passage in a sense opposite to Simmes, and that at about the same time Thomas Shepard preached in Massachusetts Bay that displaying great “love of the brethren” not only did not indicate that a person was saved but probably indicated the opposite, since it revealed a diluted love for Christ.Footnote ¹³ Simmes— comment about the verse in 1 John hardly testifies to any obviously corrupt tenet in Hutchinson, since the Massachusetts clergy contemporaneously disagreed about its meaning themselves. Even Thomas Shepard, who never came under any suspicion during the controversy, disagreed with him.

Simmes went on to testify that his presence had also been solicited at the meeting when Anne Hutchinson applied for membership in the church in Boston. He appears to have registered some doubts about her orthodoxy there, but testified that he had received “full satisfaction” from John Cotton, who had known her in Lincolnshire. “Secret opposition,” a questionable attribution of “corrupt” opinion, and “full satisfaction” do not add up to substantiation of Hutchinson's unorthodoxy before her civil trial.

Thomas Dudley, who served as governor between May 1634 and May 1635, testified at this same trial that some fellow passengers on the Griffin had reported concerns about her religious views to him after their arrival; this may have been Simmes alone.Footnote ¹⁴ At that time, Dudley reported, he dealt “with the pastor and teacher of Boston and desired them to enquire of her, and then I was satisfied that she held nothing different from us.” In other words, in 1634 Dudley had no serious doubts and not just John Cotton was content but the Boston pastor John Wilson as well. Like Simmes's testimony, Dudley's words in late 1637 appear to reflect a later development, namely the bringing of formal charges against Hutchinson.Footnote ¹⁵

Hugh Peter testified that “she went under suspicion … from her landing,” but since he arrived in the colony more than a year after the Hutchinsons this statement can only have been based on hearsay.Footnote ¹⁶ Edward Johnson's even later account—dating from well after Hutchinson's convictions at both her civil and church trials—suffers from the flaw of postdating. Once a person has been found guilty, statements by someone claiming to have had prior knowledge (or a prior firm persuasion) of that guilt lack value as serious documentary evidence.Footnote ¹⁷

John Winthrop, leading the General Court, tried to establish that Hutchinson's own religious beliefs were aberrant because she allegedly “traduced” a number of ministers in the colony at her interrogation. A great deal of testimony was devoted to what she had said or not said on that occasion.

Several ministers testified that she had been summoned to a meeting at Cotton's house a year earlier because they had heard rumors that she was disparaging them and their preaching in comparison to Cotton and his preached theology. As noted above, it is significant that Winthrop did not enter this charge in his journal in 1636, and further significant that not all ministers had heard the alleged rumors. The Rev. George Phillips of Watertown testified that he had heard no such rumors as Hugh Peter alleged but was persuaded “to go along with them” in sending for her.Footnote ¹⁸ From the trial testimony it appears that Peter led the interrogation of Hutchinson while Wilson took notes; again it is probably significant in terms of a political agenda that the lead was taken by the two ministers with the closest ties to Winthrop.Footnote ¹⁹ Supposedly the rumors had reached Hugh Peter in relatively distant Salem while Phillips in Watertown, much closer to Boston and its congregation, knew nothing of them. This fact justifies some skepticism about claims that they were circulating in the colony in a general and disquieting way.

A noteworthy aspect about Hutchinson's interrogation as it emerged in the testimony is that the ministers do not seem to have asked any questions about Wheelwright and a conspiracy to take over the Boston congregation, nor did they question her about her meetings for women and the supposedly dangerous opinions she disseminated there. What the clergymen present did solicit insistently, led by Hugh Peter, was her views on how John Cotton's theology differed from that of the rest of the clergy in Massachusetts Bay. They do not appear to have displayed any particular interest in her own religious convictions at that point at all. Since Hutchinson was summoned in the course of the ministers— questioning of Cotton,Footnote ²⁰ it appears possible that the main person of interest to them was Cotton, and that'since Cotton himself had provided no evidence of significant doctrinal differences between his own preaching and that of the other ministers in the Bay—they decided to call in Anne Hutchinson in the hope that her answers to the same questions might prove more explicit and revealing. In modern terms, the evidence suggests that at this point in the developing controversy (late 1636) Hutchinson was more a source for than a target of their investigation.

While indisputable evidence exists that Anne Hutchinson was later brought to trial before the General Court, that was more than a year after her interrogation by the ministers at Cotton's house, and the record suggests that the ministers who accused her of disparaging them had to be persuaded to testify at her trial;Footnote ²¹ they did not figure as the original plaintiffs. What is most important, however—and usually overlooked in this context—is the fact that the first outcome of the meeting with Cotton and Hutchinson in the fall of 1636 was John Wilson's denunciation of Cotton as a dangerous theological deviant to the General Court in its December session shortly afterwards. While it is possible that Hugh Peter's testimony in 1637 concerning Cotton's remark that “he thought it not according to God to commend this [matter] to the magistrates”Footnote ²² referred to Hutchinson, the fact that the case of Cotton himself was brought before the magistrates long before Hutchinson suggests that the ministers were rather threatening to accuse him. If Cotton was worried about being reported to the political authorities, his concerns were certainly justified, for that is precisely what occurred.Footnote ²³

We now come to the crux of the testimony, namely Hutchinson's response to being asked to name specific differences between Cotton's preaching and that of the other ministers in the Bay. It is on the basis of this response that she was later accused of “traducing” them, and it has sometimes been taken of evidence of unorthodox beliefs on her part. In any event it reveals some fundamental categories in her understanding of godly religion and how it ought to be preached.

The testimony indicates that Hutchinson was very reluctant at first to make any distinction, probably because she sensed that to identify differences would not help Cotton. But then Hugh Peter became “vehement” and insisted,Footnote ²⁴ and finally he must have induced Hutchinson to lose her temper. She then replied—according to the testimony of two ministers under oath at her trial—that Cotton preached a covenant of grace, whereas the other ministers of the Bay preached a covenant of works. According to George Phillips, the minister from Watertown, and Thomas Leverett, an elder of the Boston congregation and a witness for Hutchinson, she said something different: that they did not preach a covenant of grace clearly or as clearly as Cotton did. John Coggeshall, another member of the Boston church, was prepared to testify to this as well but was not permitted to speak. Cotton himself testified on Hutchinson's behalf that she had not said they were “under a covenant of works.”Footnote ²⁵ From these circumstances, where witnesses testified or tried to testify to differing statements, it appears likely that Hutchinson actually said both—that she made a drastic assertion in the heat of the moment and later amended it to soften the distinction she had drawn.

The fact that Anne Hutchinson spoke in terms of two covenants, one of works and one of grace, places her squarely in the tradition of covenant or “federal” theology. This tradition had reached England from the Continent in the late sixteenth century in the work of William Perkins (1558–1602), who elaborated on it in 1590 in his Latin treatise Armilla aurea, translated into English as A Golden Chaine, or the Description of Theology the following year. Perkins, a leading churchman of his generation who was considered a moderate, seems to be the first to have formulated the concept of a “double covenant” as theologically fundamental to Christian doctrine. Both covenants, it must be stressed, were integral to the Christian religion in his view—hence the agreement at Hutchinson's first trial that she had not accused any of the clergy in Massachusetts Bay of preaching false doctrine. (It may well be true that the terms “works” and “grace” became particularly charged in Massachusetts as the dispute progressed and introduced a new and specifically colonial thread in the development of the doctrine. Sharp rhetoric and extreme statements of difference may be perceived in John Wheelwright's fast-day sermon preached in January 1637 and Henry Vane's writings from the 1640s and 1650s. Anne Hutchinson's remarks made in late 1636 should not be interpreted in their context, however, since those statements still lay in the future, in the one instance quite far in the future.)

In the British Isles, Perkins— ideas on the two covenants were adopted and further elaborated by the Scottish theologian Robert Rollock (1555–1599), the first principal of the newly founded University of Edinburgh. His Tractatus de vocatione efficaci (“Treatise on Effectual Calling”) was published in 1597, a Latin work intended for scholars that, building on Perkins— formulation, identifies the two covenants as the essential core of the Christian tradition and the foundation of salvation.

As Rollock presents it, the path to salvation for Christians begins with learning about the covenant of works, as it is reflected first in Genesis 17:1–2, in God's instruction given to Abraham (“Walk thou before me and be thou upright, and I will make my covenant with thee”Footnote ²⁶), and then in the Decalogue. From a Christian perspective, this covenant has always been impossible to fulfill on the human side after Adam's fall; humankind is too depraved to be upright or righteous in God's sight. The use or application of the first covenant is thus in Rollock's theology “to worke in us the sense of sinne and miserie, and to prepare men to receive grace.” Religious teaching thus began for him with the “legal” doctrine of works and the moral law, for human beings must first be made to feel “their owne corruption, and miserable condition” before they are ready to hear the second covenant. “The end and use of the promise in the covenant of grace is,” he concludes, “that men cast downe and humbled in the sight of their owne sinne and miserie by the legall covenant, might be raised by and comforted by hearing and receiving that righteousnesse and life, which is freely promised and offered to the beleevers in the Gospell.”Footnote ²⁷ In his Treatise Rollock anticipates the question of whether the “legal covenant” still applies to those who have received grace. Is the moral law, “which we call the Decalogue,” abolished for believers under the covenant of grace? In his answer he makes a crucial distinction:

But on the other hand, Rollock states emphatically, the same moral law gives rules for the works of grace, since there is only one rule for all good works, regardless of whether they proceed from nature or grace.Footnote ²⁸ In other words, according to federal theology it is essential for all Christian ministers to preach the covenant of works, as it is an indispensable first step to salvation; they would be remiss in their duty if they did not preach it.

In the early decades of the following century, Rollock's theology was popularized in England by John Preston, who also tended to soften the relatively harsh doctrine of predestination that had dominated reformed theology in the British Isles during the sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ Rollock had taken a step in this direction by favoring the term “effectual calling” over “predestination” and “election” or “the elect.” While this phrase was not new, its use in preference to the other terms conveyed a slight but significant shift in emphasis: since the promise of the gospel was preached to all, the crucial step could be seen in how a person responded to that call. “Effectual calling” carried an implication of positive activity on the part of a believer as central to salvation (even though divine grace was always seen as at work in the process). John Preston was a close friend and associate of John Cotton, and their doctrinal views and preaching styles were close as well.

What is crucial with respect to the views Anne Hutchinson stated in late 1636 is that the theology of the two covenants belonged to the mainstream of godly beliefs and remained so in England up to its formulation in the Westminster Confession of Faith in 1646.

Earlier scholars who accepted Winthrop's allegations concerning Hutchinson's unorthodoxy sometimes reasoned that she was set on a path of radical nonconformity by her father, who as a young preacher was sent to prison by the Court of High Commission for expressing highly critical opinions on the senior clergy of the Church of England and their practicesFootnote ³⁰ —yet such a conclusion does not square with his later career at all. Marbury indeed remained convinced of the need for good preaching and instruction of the laity in their faith; he taught catechism classes in Lincolnshire from which notes surviveFootnote ³¹ and surely did not neglect the instruction of his own children. Around 1600 he was associated with Saint Saviour's, a parish church in Southwark across the Thames from the City of London, known for its independent tendencies and its insalubrious location next to theaters, bear-baiting arenas, and brothels.Footnote ³² Far from continuing to attack the establishment, however, Francis Marbury had already joined it as a chaplain to the Cecil family, members of which acted as key advisers to both Queen Elizabeth and King James. Marbury was serving in that role for Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, as Salisbury prepared the way for King James VI of Scotland to succeed Elizabeth as king of England (James I). Marbury preached two surviving sermons setting forth the Privy Council's position on important issues during that period.Footnote ³³ As a chaplain to the Cecils, Marbury is extremely unlikely to have inculcated radically antiestablishment views in his daughter.

Rollock's Treatise of Effectual Calling discusses the specific doctrines alleged to lie at the core of the “antinomian” controversy and reflects much of Hutchinson's described position in terms accepted as perfectly orthodox by the mainstream of godly people in Scotland and England for more than thirty years preceding her trial. At the same time the possible objections to the doctrine that Rollock himself addresses show how it could easily have been distorted into “antinomianism” if someone were seeking a reason to do so. Was Anne Hutchinson familiar with this work? Is it perhaps no accident that so much of her religious vocabulary seems to echo Rollock's?

A partial answer may lie in the circumstances surrounding the English translation of Rollock's Tractatus, which was prepared by the vicar of a London church “for the benefite of the unlearned” and published in London in 1603. The text of A Treatise of Gods Effectual Calling is preceded by a note recommending it “To the Reader,” written by Francis Marbury.Footnote ³⁴ Marbury's endorsement has an explicitly political dimension, reflecting his connection with his patron Robert Cecil and Cecil's role in bringing King James to the English throne. Publication of a work of Rollock's in London in the year 1603 is especially fitting, Marbury observes, because Rollock (who had died in 1599) was a Scot. As the English welcomed their new king from Scotland it was also proper to strengthen the ties between the Scottish and English churches. “Let us take up the argument of Abraham: We are brethren,” wrote Marbury at the end of his brief introduction. “And as this is a work of vocation, so let us hold the comming of our King to be the worke of revocation, to call us back to unitie.” But Marbury does not merely note the suitable occasion for publication of a work by a Scottish theologian; he also praises the treatise's content, observing that “this worke itselfe is very acceptable with the translators godly labour.”Footnote ³⁵

A twofold connection can thus be established between the doctrines espoused by Anne Hutchinson and the tenets of federal theology. First, it is likely that she had read Rollock's Treatise: its language is reflected in hers; her father went on public record as endorsing it; also, it was the only concise summary of covenant theology published in English as she approached adulthood. Second, there is the known link between the teaching of John Cotton and John Preston, Rollock's popularizer in England.

A second question that arises after establishing that Anne Hutchinson was familiar with the core doctrines of federal theology is this: Do the surviving sermons of the Massachusetts Bay ministers in this period display any features that enable a modern reader to understand the distinctions she applied to them? Is it possible to obtain some sense of what she might have been driving at if it is not assumed from the outset that she was the unorthodox and divisive figure Winthrop described?

Not all the ministers present at her interrogation are documented by surviving sermons. The best-documented sermons are those of John Cotton and Thomas Shepard, and a comparison of works by each provides a useful contrast. In a sermon delivered at Salem in June 1636 Cotton preached the necessity of obeying the law in the form of the Ten Commandments in emphatic and unmistakable terms; by no means did he preach solely a covenant of grace during his years in New England.Footnote ³⁶ And Thomas Shepard certainly included the message of the gospel in his own sermons. The differences in their respective understanding of doctrine were largely matters of nuance, as the Massachusetts clergy's attempts to formulate them make abundantly clear. If one relegates these subtleties to the background for a moment, however, it can soon be seen that the works of the two men reflect different temperaments, preferences, and styles in the way they emphasized one phase or another in the agreed path to salvation.

Thomas Shepard's Sincere Convert, although not published until 1640, dates from before his emigration to New England. It is a theological treatise rather than a set of sermons, but the subtitle of this work alone suggests that Shepard tended to concentrate far more on corruption and humankind's need to comprehend its own vileness than on grace, for he called it Discovering the Paucity of True Beleevers and the Great Difficulty of Saving Conversion. After explaining the path to conversion in the first half of his text, Shepard spends the second half virtually removing the effect of that comfort by describing how extraordinarily rare a saving conversion is: “How few, then are to be saved, even among them that are hatched in the bosom of the church! … It is a wonderful hard thing to be saved.”Footnote ³⁷ His series of sermons on the parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25), begun in Massachusetts in June 1636, suggests a continuation of both theme and theological substance.

Thomas Shepard's theology in the early sermons of this series—those likely to have been delivered before Anne Hutchinson's interrogation—is in one sense scrupulously attentive to the covenants of works and grace as expounded by Perkins and Rollock. “The soul must be divorced from the law,” he states early on, and all outward performance of duties was more likely to be evidence against a good estate than for it, since “to perform any evangelical work from a man's self is a legal work; and you are under the life of the law.”Footnote ³⁸ The only source of salvation was faith in Christ and God's mercy and free grace. Shepard seems to have been aware that he could not admit works or outward performance of duties by themselves as evidence of a good estate (justification), and he preached this clearly. By temperament, however, he appears to have focused his preaching on punishment rather than reward, on doubt rather than assurance—preferring the stick to the carrot.

From the start, Shepard's exegesis of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins makes explicit that in his view the ten virgins stand for “the visible church” on earth, which in the context of Massachusetts Bay could have meant only the gathered congregations composed of people who had passed the relatively stringent tests for acceptance. Perhaps half of them, according to Shepard's expounding of the parable, would not number among the saved in the end: “All members seem to be espoused to Christ, yet there will be found desperate folly in some.” He insisted that while some who professed faith would be saved, others admitted to the churches in Massachusetts actually functioned only as servants to the elect and would be turned out when their work was done. These believers were the foolish virgins.Footnote ³⁹ One wonders what the effect of this pronouncement was on the seven colonists whom he had personally chosen as the founding members of his congregation the previous February and installed in a highly public ceremony.Footnote ⁴⁰ It cannot have provided much comfort to them as individuals or strengthened a sense of community.

Shepard went on to lay out the reasons why so many were not truly saved. A conversion experience, profession of faith, and acceptance of divine grace were no sure indication of salvation, since converts might backslide. Other hindrances were great love for a spouse or children, or great concern with providing for their material support: “The soul … prepared to meet Christ” must recover its affections “from the hands of all creatures that stole them away from Christ.”Footnote ⁴¹ And all subjective experience of assurance might be the work of Satan, who is ceaselessly active. In a letter to John Winthrop from this period Shepard once stated his view that true justification “is one continued act on God's part all our life time.”Footnote ⁴² It is truly a harsh view that suggests loving one's spouse and children or being concerned for their physical survival might be fundamentally unchristian.

The full title of John Cotton's Covenant of God's Free Grace (1645) reveals a very different concern, for it continues “ most sweetly unfolded, and comfortably applied to a disquieted soul.” The work offers an exegesis of 2 Samuel 23:5: “Although my house be not so with God, yet hee hath made with me an everlasting Covenant, ordered in all things, and sure.” In an echo of Rollock's language Cotton assures “those who are effectually called” that the Holy Spirit has created in them “indwelling spiritual gifts and graces” that will enable them to achieve salvation.Footnote ⁴³ They are not perfect, but perfection is not required under the second covenant: “Let us search what our own disorders, and the disorders of our families be,” Cotton writes,

Even these brief excerpts display some characteristic qualities of the two clergymen's approaches to fundamental doctrine. Thomas Shepard's theology, while strictly orthodox in adhering to the principles expounded by Perkins and Rollock, does seem to reject the notion of any subjective experience of assurance that believers can rely on. He must have regarded the claim that any church members in Massachusetts knew themselves to be “sealed with the spirit” as outrageously presumptuous. Shepard kept exhorting his congregation to try harder, even though a core doctrine of covenant theology is the inadequacy of all human striving.

By contrast, John Cotton in his Covenant of God's Free Grace uses the first person plural: “we.” As he speaks of the difficulties in striving for a righteous life, he does not except himself or his household. His message is one of encouragement, and it is inclusive. While Shepard uses the term “elect” as both a verb and a noun, Cotton avoids it, using “effectual calling” and stressing divine mercy rather than justice, in what may be a reflection of Preston's influence. In contrast to Shepard, the Boston clergyman appears to be addressing “saints” with whom he feels close ties and whom he addresses on a plane of equality, an attitude that pious members of the community must have appreciated. Cotton indeed makes divine grace seem more available.

Two circumstances are crucially important in reexamining the testimony at Anne Hutchinson's trial in the fall of 1637: first of all, Cotton had reestablished himself as a figure not worthy of suspicion by that time and was counted on as an ally of the authorities (a shift in the existing coalition from a year earlier),Footnote ⁴⁵ and secondly, Hutchinson had instigated her custom of walking out of John Wilson's portion of the services in the Boston congregation, followed by a number of other women, after his denunciation of Cotton to the General Court, that is, after her interrogation by the ministers. It is highly likely that, as a godly person in English terms, she deprecated in the extreme Wilson's dramatic referral of a church matter to the civil authorities, a disagreement that in the view of the godly ought to have been settled within the church among the participants themselves. This silent protest—the only form of public dissent available to women—undoubtedly contributed a great deal to Winthrop's animosity toward her because he had personally selected Wilson to accompany him to Massachusetts Bay, and the two men were close political associates. Winthrop stressed her departure when Wilson “began any exercise” in the very first paragraph in the section of the “Short Story” headed “The proceedings of the General Court.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Hutchinson's remarks at the 1636 interrogation had to serve as a basis for convicting her, even though the ministers who testified against her appeared to have taken no serious offence at the time, and their testimony was disputed by other witnesses including a ruling elder and a clergyman.

If we follow the independent transcript of Anne Hutchinson's civil trial rather than accepting Winthrop's allegations, it appears that she did not necessarily impute any kind of false doctrine to the majority of ministers in Massachusetts Bay, since everyone agreed that preaching a covenant of works was not only appropriate but essential. Rather she first offered resistance to Hugh Peter's vehement demands, then lost her temper and responded with an exaggerated characterization of the differences between Cotton's preaching and that of other ministers, and finally qualified her answer (according to her own witnesses) to say that the main difference consisted of a different emphasis on the two covenants. In other words, Hutchinson described the preaching styles of Cotton and Shepard, at least, with some degree of accuracy. One could argue that Shepard's relentless stress on the impediments to achieving saving faith amounted to significant de-emphasis of the promise contained in the covenant of grace. In a charged setting where exaggeration could be expected, Hutchinson's accusation that some ministers in Massachusetts were not preaching the covenant of grace clearly is at least understandable. Her remarks are consonant with a discussion that the clergymen were having or would soon have among themselves. Clearly they were also phrased in such a way as to give offense, but not so seriously that the clergymen could not let them pass—until it was necessary a year later to come up with grounds for punishing Anne Hutchinson as the leader of a silent protest against the actions of John Wilson at the General Court. At that point political considerations impinged on the purely religious.