A Tale of Two Annes

A new play celebrates a little-known Puritan-era free-speech heroine, Anne Lloyd Yale Eaton. In the audience will likely be another Anne, Anne Tyler Calabresi, a modern-day free-expression champion — and a direct descendant.

The play, The Excommunication of Mrs. Eaton, is a joint production of the Fair Haven-based Bregamos Community Theater Company and the New Haven Theater Company. Full disclosure: I wrote the play. (Its first staged reading is at Center Church on the Green, Saturday, June 20, at 1 p.m.) I learned about Anne Eaton’s story, and it gripped me.

I know what hooked me about Anne Eaton. I love heroes, the more uneven the odds against which they fight, and the more unsung, the better. Why? Because the less known they are, the more they need us writers to give expression to their silenced voices. In the telling of the story, the missions of the hero and the writer are fused. Maybe. If we’re lucky.

Anne Calabresi (pictured above) is not a writer, but a socially committed philanthropist. It turns out that Anne Eaton​‘s story has long touched her, too.

Modern-day New Haven knows Calabresi best for her role founding two local institutions, the youth program LEAP and, with a few friends, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. It turns, I discovered in the course of preparing the play, that Calabresi sees her ancestor as an inspiration.

I knew I had to speak with her about the story. But first a brief but necessary touch of historical background:

In 1645, seven years after New Haven was established, Anne Eaton (depicted at left in an 1885 issue of Harper’s magazine) challenged New Haven Colony’s two founders, none other than her husband Theophilus and the hard-as-nails minister, John Davenport, by opposing the baptism of infants.

She walked out of Davenport’s sermons. He labored to correct her Biblical interpretation. She found his chapter and verse still wanting. So he began to spy on her domestic life.

Center Church is exactly the ground on which the trial took place. Theophilus, whose silence in the matter the play tries to illuminate, said not a word in defense of his wife.

AA: Why in your view isn’t Anne’s story better known and appreciated?
ATC: Because the history was written by men.

AA: I know you’re a descendant of Anne’s youngest daughter Hannah, but that’s not primarily what draws you to Anne Eaton’s story, is it?
ATC: Well, certainly not. All that Daughters of the American Revolution stuff was just awful, and not for us. Anne held onto her conviction about infant baptism at great risk, and she became a real thorn in Davenport’s side. Women of that era had very little power. She was under great stress, but she refused to give up.

AA: Can you elaborate on those stresses?
ATC: These were upper-crust people who came to New Haven. You read the inventory of her house after that first winter: there were 17 chimneys, a Jacobean house, wall hangings, it was lavish. In the beginning, they didn’t know how to live here in the desolate conditions, especially in the early years. Anne was running a farm, too, or trying. She was supervising the making of beer, preserves, doing a lot of work people of her background weren’t accustomed to. Plus living with a mother-in-law who made her life miserable and Eaton’s children by a previous marriage, besides her own children. And she took from her father I think far more tolerant views than Davenport’s. In that era women were supposed to be restrained. But she didn’t give in.

AA: I know what they called ​“antipedobaptism” was a hot-button issue of the time, maybe like abortion for us. But why do you think she focused on opposing infant baptism?
ATC: Anne had a baby die just before she came across. She likely missed that baby deeply, and she arrived in New Haven, and here’s a man (Davenport) who tells her it goes to hell if it has not been baptized. Maybe that started her off. In my congregation you weren’t baptized until you were seven. Also if she lived a cosseted life and then to be subjected to this virulent Puritan christianity … all that personal hardship , and she did not find a supportive community.

AA: Meaning?
ATC: Those Puritans prosecuted every single sin in the community because they thought otherwise God would punish them all. I am not repentant being hard on those Puritans. Believe me, those Puritans have nothing to recommend them. They shouldn’t be held up as models.

AA: Weren’t they seeking religious freedom here?
ATC: Well, yes, but they left England, I think, so they could be just as mean and horrible as they wanted to be. Any sect takes its community and brainwashes it and doesn’t let anyone alone. In that world most people, and particularly women, didn’t have lots of power to make choices.

AA: But she was the wife of the governor.
ATC: Yes, but if he defended her, he couldn’t remain governor. When she was convicted, Theophilus at least kept her from being banished as Anne Hutchinson was in Boston, and Roger Williams. But excommunication meant, I think, that she was under virtual house arrest.

AA: You indicated that some of that early New Haven strictness still is extant today?
ATC: The critical, unfriendly, suspicious nature of those Puritans has not entirely left New Haven. I will tell you that I had relations who reported that as late as the 19th century grandmothers and even mothers in New Haven didn’t physically pick up their children, or give them treats, for fear of spoiling them. Under Theophilus, those laws were passed here. I think it was a horrible community.

AA: If it was such a horrible place, why didn’t she leave?
ATC: Well, half the colony did return to England when Cromwell took power. But not Davenport, because in England he would have had a little church, but here he had a whole domain to rule over. And Theophilus stayed with him, so Anne stayed.

AA: What would in your view be a fitting memorial to Anne Eaton?
ATC: You know she was Elihu Yale’s grandmother? (Ed: the financial founder of Yale University). So, I think a good memorial to her would be a college at Yale named after her.

AA: Have you inquired about this?
ATC: I’ve suggested it, but the idea didn’t make much progress. In part, because in the record she’s made out to look so poorly. But fate put her here, and she weathered it, she didn’t jump off a boat, she and her children survived, and that’s why there is a Yale.

AA: I understand you are about to launch something in Anne’s spirit.
ATC: Yes, a new website. It’s called World Without Walls. We can’t use antiquated methods of being safe. The only way we can be safe is to understand each other. Why I get so exercised about the Puritans is that they typify the notion that we are only safe when we live in a tiny little community and that’s the only way to get to heaven. The site’s going to extol peple who act not out of self interest, who change their lives to make other people’s lives better.

AA: Thank you.
ATC: I mean if you really believe in God, how can you think your way is the only way?