Men can do best and women know it well,
Preheminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours."

Plain speaking was a Dudley characteristic, but the fate of Anne
Hutchinson silenced all save a few determined spirits, willing to
face the same consequences. In the beginning, however, there could
have been only welcome for a woman, whose spiritual gifts and
unusual powers had made her the friend of John Cotton, and who
fascinated men and woman alike. There was reason, for birth and
training meant every gift a woman of that day was likely to
possess. Her father, Thomas Marbury, was one of the Puritan
ministers of Lincolnshire who afterward removed to London; her
mother, a sister of Sir Erasmus Dryden. She was thus related in
the collateral line to two of the greatest of English intellects.
Free thinking and plain speaking were family characteristics, for
John Dryden the poet, her second cousin, was reproached with
having been an Anabaptist in his youth, and Johnathan Swift, a
more distant connection, feared nothing in heaven or earth. It is
no wonder, then, that even an enemy wrote of her as "the
masterpiece of women's wit," or that her husband followed her
lead with a devotion that never swerved. She had married him at
Alford in Lincolnshire, and both were members of Mr. Cotton's
congregation at Boston.

Mr. Hutchinson's standing among his Puritan contemporaries was of
the highest. He had considerable fortune, and the gentlest and
most amiable of dispositions. The name seems to have meant all
good gifts, for the same devoted and tender relation existed
between this pair as between Colonel Hutchinson and his wife. From