the defendant told the assembled judges in the Cambridge meetinghouse, “I shall give you the ground of what I know to be true.” Having denied teaching any men—and argued convincingly that her questionable statements were privileged because they were made in private—Anne Hutchinson began in public to teach. “When I was in Old England,” she started, leaping back nearly a decade in her journey of faith, “I was much troubled at the falseness of the constitution of the Church there. So far,” she admitted, “as I was ready to have turned Separatist,” like the earlier Plymouth settlers who had split from the English church. In 1607, when she was sixteen, they had come from Scrooby, eighty miles west of Alford, to the coast and tried to flee on ships. Caught by authorities, the Scrooby Separatists were imprisoned in Boston, Lincolnshire, and brought to trial. A year later they were allowed to move to Holland, from where they traveled to the tip of Cape Cod and then on to the more protected harbor at Plymouth.
