Governor Charles K. Williams, of Vermont, writing from Rutland under date February 26, 1853, said of the Reverend Eleazer and his "claims" to the throne of France, "I never had any doubt that Williams was of Indian extraction, and a descendant of Eunice Williams. His father and mother were both of them at my father's house, although I cannot ascertain definitely the year. I consider the whole story a humbug, and believe that it will be exploded in the course of a few months." As a matter of fact, the story has been exploded,--though the features of the Reverend Eleazer Williams, when in the full flush of manhood, certainly bore a remarkable resemblance to those of the French kings from whom his descent was claimed. His mixed blood might account for this, however. Williams's paternal grandfather was an English physician,--not of the Deerfield family at all,--and his grandmother the daughter of Eunice Williams and her redskin mate. His father was Thomas Williams, captain in the British service during the American Revolution, and his mother a Frenchwoman. Thus the Reverend Eleazer was part English, part Yankee, part Indian, and part French, a combination sufficiently complex to account, perhaps, even for an unmistakably Bourbon chin.
Even to-day, in this emancipated twentieth century, women ministers and "female preachers" are not infrequently held up to derision by those who delight to sit in the seat of the scornful. Trials for heresy are likewise still common. It is not at all strange, therefore, that Mistress Ann Hutchinson should, in 1636, have been driven out of Boston as an enemy dangerous to public order, her specific offence being that she maintained in her own house that a mere profession of faith could not evidence salvation, unless the Spirit first revealed itself from within.
Mrs. Hutchinson's maiden name was Ann Marbury, and she was the daughter of a scholar and a theologian--one Francis Marbury--who was first a minister of Lincolnshire and afterward of London. Naturally, much of the girl's as well as the greater part of the woman's life was passed in the society of ministers--men whom she soon learned to esteem more for what they knew than for what they preached. Theology, indeed, was the atmosphere in which she lived and moved and had her being. Intellectually, she was an enthusiast, morally an agitator, a clever leader, whom Winthrop very aptly described as a "woman of ready wit and bold spirit."