and taught her partisans that it was their duty to follow the biddings of a supernatural light; and there was nothing which the orthodox Puritan so steadfastly abhorred as the anarchical pretence of living by the aid of a supernatural light.  In a strong and complex society the teachings of Mrs. Hutchinson would have awakened but a languid speculative interest, or perhaps would have passed by unheeded.  In the simple society of Massachusetts in 1636, physically weak and as yet struggling for very existence, the practical effect of such teachings may well have been deemed politically dangerous.  When things came to such a pass that the forces of the colony were mustered for an Indian campaign and the men of Boston were ready to shirk the service because they suspected their chaplain to be “under a covenant of works,” it was naturally thought to be high time to put Mrs. Hutchinson down.  In the spring of 1637 Winthrop was elected governor, and in August Vane returned to England.  His father had at that moment more influence with the king than any other person except Strafford, and the young man had indiscreetly hinted at an appeal to the home government for the protection of the Antinomians, as Mrs. Hutchinson’s followers were called.  But an appeal from America to England was something which Massachusetts would no more tolerate in the days of Winthrop than in the days of Hancock and Adams.  Soon after Vane’s departure, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends were ordered to leave the colony.  It was doubtless an odious act of persecution, yet of all such acts which stain the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, it is just the one for which the plea of political necessity may really be to some extent accepted.

We now begin to see how the spreading of the New England colonization, and the founding of distinct communities, was hastened by these differences of opinion on theological questions or on questions concerning the relations between church and state.  Of Mrs. Hutchinson’s friends and adherents, some went northward, and founded the towns of Exeter and Hampton.  Some time before Portsmouth and Dover had been settled by followers of Mason and Gorges.  In 1641 these towns were added to the domain of Massachusetts, and so the matter stood until 1679, when we shall see Charles II. marking them off as a separate province, under a royal government.  Such were the beginnings of New Hampshire.  Mrs. Hutchinson herself, however, with the rest of her adherents, bought the island of Aquedneck from the Indians, and settlements were made at Portsmouth and Newport.  After a quarter of a century of turbulence, these settlements coalesced with Williams’s colony at Providence, and thus was formed the state of Rhode Island.  After her husband’s death in 1642, Mrs. Hutchinson left Aquedneck and settled upon some land to the west of Stamford and supposed to be within the territory of the New Netherlands.  There in the following year she was cruelly murdered by Indians, together with nearly all her children and servants, sixteen victims in all.  One of her descendants was the illustrious Thomas Hutchinson, the first great American historian, and last royal governor of Massachusetts.