Mary Dyer

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Mary Barrett Dyer (c.1611? - June 1, 1660) was an English Puritan turned Quaker who was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts for repeatedly defying a law banning Quakers from the colony. She is considered to be the only woman in the United States to die for religious freedom.

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Mary Barrett married William Dyer (Dier, Dyre), in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, England, on 27 October 1633. William Dyer was a milliner in the New Exchange, a member of the Fishmongers' Company, and a Puritan (NEHGR Vol. 94, p. 300, July 1940). In late 1634 or early 1635, the Dyers emigrated to Massachusetts. They were admitted to the Boston church on December 13, 1635. Mary Dyer was a friend of Anne Hutchinson, who preached that God "spoke directly to individuals" rather than only through the clergy. Dyer, Hutchinson and others became involved in what was called the "Antinomian heresy," where they worked to organize groups of women and men to study the Bible in contravention of the theocratic law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In 1638, Mary Dyer and her husband William were banished along with Hutchinson and others from the colony. On the advice of Roger Williams the group that included Hutchinson and the Dyers moved to Portsmouth in the colony of Rhode Island. William Dyer signed the Portsmouth Compact along with 18 other men.

Mary had given birth two months prematurely (on October 17, 1637) to a grossly deformed stillborn fetus, which was buried privately following the advice of Rev. John Cotton. After Anne Hutchinson was tried and the Hutchinsons and Dyers banished from Massachusetts in January 1637/8, the authorities learned of the “monstrous birth,” and Governor Winthrop had it exhumed in March 1638, with a large crowd in attendance. He described it thus: “it was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp; two of them were above one inch long, the other two shorter; the eyes standing out, and the mouth also; the nose hooked upward; all over the breast and back full of sharp pricks and scales, like a thornback [i.e., a skate or ray], the navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be, and the back and hips before, where the belly should have been; behind, between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but, instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.” (The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649 [Cambridge, 1996], p. 254.) Winthrop sent descriptions to numerous correspondents, and accounts were published in England in 1642 and 1644. The deformed birth was considered evidence of the heresies and errors of Antinomianism.

Mary Dyer and her husband sailed to England with Roger Williams and John Clarke in 1652. William Dyer returned to Rhode Island within the year but Mary Dyer remained in England and did not return until 1657. Mary Dyer joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) sometime during her five-year stay in England. Mary Dyer and Anne Burden, unaware of the new laws banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Colony, arrived in Boston on a ship from England and were at once arrested. After two and a half months in jail, William Dyer persuaded Governor Endicott to release his wife after pledging that they would return to Rhode Island and that he would not to lodge her in any town of the colony nor to permit any to have speech with her on the journey and that Mary would never return to Massachusetts.

Mary Dyer continued to travel in New England to preach Quakerism, and in 1658 she was arrested and expelled from New Haven, Connecticut. In June 1659, Quakers William Robinson of London and Marmaduke Stephenson of Holderness, now in Rhode Island, entered Massachusetts. They were all promptly jailed. Learning of her Friends' incarceration in Boston, Mary Dyer went there in the summer of 1659 to visit them and was herself again imprisoned.

Robinson and Stephenson were hanged, she was reprieved through the intersession of her son, Major William Dyer, on October 18, 1659, under the conditions that "Whereas Mary Dyer is condemned by the General Court to be executed for her offence; on the petition of William Dyer, her son, it is ordered the said Mary Dyer shall have liberty for forty-eight hours after this day to depart out of this jurisdiction, after which time being found therein she is to be executed." He had secured the last-minute reprieve against her wishes, for she had refused to repent and disavow her Quaker faith and was resigned to hang with her Quaker friends.

"Mary Dyer led to execution on Boston Common, 1 June 1660", by an unknown 19th century artist

Mary Dyer returned to Boston in April, 1660, in obedience to her conscience and in defiance of the law stating in court on May 31, 1660, "I came in obedience to the will of God to the last General Court desiring you to appeal your unrighteous laws of banishment on pain of death, and that same is my work now, and earnest request, although I told you that if you refused to repeal them, the Lord would send others of his servants to witness against them." It took a week for the news to reach William Dyer that Mary had left Shelter Island. Quickly, he wrote again to the magistrates of Boston. (Click here to read William's moving letter.) Governor Endicott received the letter and presented it to the General Court. The General Court summoned Mary before them on May 31, 1660.

Mary Dyer walked to the gallows between drummers to prohibit the crowd from hearing anything that she might say. She was hung in Boston on June 1, 1660.

A statue of her stands in front of the Massachusetts state capitol in Boston; there is another Dyer statue in front of the Friends Center in downtown Philadelphia, and another in front of Stout Meetinghouse at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

[edit] Publications

• Rogers, Mary Dyer, the Quaker Martyr (Providence, 1896)
• Jones, The Quakers in the American Colonies (New York, 1911)

[edit] External links

• WomensNews biography of Mary Dyer
• Mary Dyer: A Quaker Martyr
• Trials without Justice: Mary Dyer