page_title: Anne Hutchinson
section_title: Childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Anne Hutchinson / Life in England / Childhood
caption_attribution_description: Marshalsea prison, Southwark, London, 18th century
context_page_description: Anne Hutchinson was a Puritan spiritual advisor, religious reformer, and an important participant in the Antinomian Controversy which shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Her strong religious convictions were at odds with the established Puritan clergy in the Boston area and her popularity and charisma helped create a theological schism that threatened to destroy the Puritans' religious community in New England. She was eventually tried and convicted, then banished from the colony with many of her supporters.
  Hutchinson was born in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, the daughter of Francis Marbury, an Anglican cleric and school teacher who gave her a far better education than most other girls received. She lived in London as a young adult, and there married a friend from home, William Hutchinson. The couple moved back to Alford where they began following preacher John Cotton in the nearby port of Boston, Lincolnshire. Cotton was compelled to emigrate in 1633, and the Hutchinsons followed a year later with their 11 children and soon became well established in the growing settlement of Boston in New England.
context_section_description: Anne Hutchinson was born Anne Marbury in Alford, Lincolnshire, England, and baptised there on 20 July 1591, the daughter of Francis Marbury and Bridget Dryden. Her father was an Anglican cleric in London with strong Puritan leanings, who felt strongly that a clergy should be well educated and clashed with his superiors on this issue. Marbury's repeated challenges to the Anglican authorities led to his censure and imprisonment several years before Anne was born. In 1578, he was given a public trial, of which he made a transcript from memory during a period of house arrest. He later used this transcript to educate and amuse his children, he being the hero and the Bishop of London being portrayed as a buffoon. 
  For his conviction of heresy, Marbury spent two years in Marshalsea Prison on the south side of the River Thames across from London. In 1580, at the age of 25, he was released and was considered sufficiently reformed to preach and teach. He moved to the remote market town of Alford in Lincolnshire, about 140 miles (230 km) north of London. Hutchinson's father was soon appointed curate (assistant cleric) of Saint Wilfrid's, the local church in Alford, and in 1585 he also became the schoolmaster at the Alford Free Grammar School, one of many such public schools, free to the poor and begun by Queen Elizabeth. About this time, Marbury married his first wife, Elizabeth Moore, who bore three children, then died. Within a year of his first wife's death, Marbury married Bridget Dryden, about 10 years younger than he and from a prominent Northampton family. Her brother Erasmus was the grandfather of John Dryden, the playwright and Poet Laureate.  Anne was the third of 15 children born to this marriage, 12 of whom survived early childhood. The Marburys lived in Alford for the first 15 years of Anne's life, and she received a better education than most girls of her time, with her father's strong commitment to learning, and she also became intimately familiar with scripture and Christian tenets. Education at that time was offered almost exclusively to boys and men. One possible reason why Marbury taught his daughters may have been that six of his first seven children were girls. Another reason may have been that the ruling class in Elizabethan England began realising that girls could be schooled, looking to the example of the queen, who spoke six foreign languages.
  In 1605 when Hutchinson was 15, her family moved from Alford to the heart of London, where her father was given the position of vicar of Saint Martin's in the Vintry. Here his expression of Puritan views was tolerated, though somewhat muffled, because of a shortage of clergy. Marbury took on additional work in 1608, preaching in the parish of Saint Pancras, several miles northwest of the city, travelling there by horseback twice a week. In 1610, he replaced that position with one much closer to home and became rector of Saint Margaret's on New Fish Street, only a short walk from Saint Martin in the Vintry. He was at a high point in his career, but he died suddenly at the age of 55 in February 1611, when Anne was 19 years old.
caption: Marshalsea Prison, London, where Hutchinson's father was detained for two years for "heresy"
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