Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/140

124 haste to other points. Coddington led a colony to Rhode Island, made up chiefly of the fifty-eight who had been disarmed, and in process of time became a Quaker. This was the natural ending for many, the heart of Anne Hutchinson's doctrine being really a belief in the "Inward Light," a doctrine which seems to have outraged every Puritan susceptibility for fully a hundred years, and until the reaction began, which has made individual judgment the only creed common to the people of New England. It was reasonable enough, however, that Massachusetts should dread a colony of such uneasy spirits, planted at her very doors, enfranchised and heretical to an appalling degree and considered quite as dangerous as so many malefactors, and an uneasy and constant watch was kept.

The Hutchinsons had sold their property in Boston and joined Coddington at Pocasset, of which Mr. Hutchinson soon became the chief magistrate. His wife, as before, was the master spirit. She even addressed an admonition to the church in Boston, turning the tables temporarily upon her enemies, though the end of her power was at hand. In 1642, her husband died, and various circumstances had before this made her influence feared and disliked. Freedom in any English settlement had ceased to be possible, and as Massachusetts grew more powerful, she resigned any hope of holding the place won by so many sacrifices and emigrated to the Dutch settlement, forming a small colony of sixteen persons at Pelham in Westchester County, New York, where a little river still bears her name.

One son had remained in Boston, and was the