Mary Dyer and the Boston Martyrs: Executed for Quakerism
Mary Dyer and her husband William immigrated from England to the Puritan colony of Boston in 1635. Like many who made the dangerous voyage, the young couple had been looking for a home where they could safely practice their religious beliefs. Along with Mary’s friend Anne Hutchinson, they supported the dangerous endeavors of “intellectual and theological salons for Boston's women” and took the view that individuals could connect with God without depending on the interpretation of clergy, as Women’s eNews narrates. It made them a threat to the patriarchal structure of Governor John Winthrop’s community.
On the grounds of subversion, Hutchinson was excommunicated from the church and banished in 1637, and Mary joined her voluntarily. Their families moved to the “more tolerant Rhode Island community,” states Women’s eNews, but this didn’t shield their reputations for long.
Still in her twenties, Mary had just given birth for the fourth time in less than five years, but when the baby was deformed and stillborn, she knew how it could be used against her. Even after the precaution of a secret burial, Winthrop found and disinterred the body. The New England Memorial called her an “unnatural woman” and her baby a “hideous monster,” which Winthrop castigated as a divine punishment for her heresy and reformist views.
It was no wonder Dyer felt dissatisfied with the authoritarianism of her Puritan background. It took her twenty years to return to Boston, and this time she came newly arrayed as a converted Quaker—or attempted to.come. As LawBuzz narrates, by 1657, Boston was girded with new anti-Quaker laws that had her imprisoned on sight. William managed to plead for her release on terms of her silence and retreat to Rhode Island that time. Yet Mary Dyer was still determined to fight.
More or less a pure theocracy, Boston’s Puritans terrorized Quakers for their religion, branding their tongues and marking skin with the ‘H’ of a heretic, jailing and banishing them. They differed with their principles of tolerance, their regard for individualism, and certainly with their gender equality. Dyer became a preacher and minister, risking protests in Boston repeatedly for the cause of other Quakers who were threatened with death. An arrest in 1659 landed her on the gallows hand-in-hand with two other Quaker activists, the noose around her neck when they suddenly reprieved her. Her friends, Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson, were not as lucky.
In the face of her banishment and certain arrest, Dyer made a final return to Boston in 1660, records The Colonial Gazette. Her zeal for her Society of Friends meant she couldn’t turn away from their oppression. She knew she wasn’t alone on her mission. Again, they delivered her to the gallows, and for fear of her words, Women eNews states that drummers were employed to muffle her. The colony’s authorities urged her to repent from the Devil’s influence, and unafraid, Dyer maintained "Nay, man, I am not now to repent."
They hanged Dyer on June 1st, and buried her in an unmarked grave on the 2nd. A year later, Boston tortured and hanged the Cornish Quaker William Leddra, records the UM Clements Library. He would be the last of the four Boston Martyrs. Later in 1661, Charles II of Great Britain and Ireland “formally forbade executions for Quakerism" as aligned with English Law, and strengthened this law to the forbbidance of their legal torture and persecution in 1665. Mary Dyer never lived to see the establishment of the religious freedom laws she espoused, but the tragedy of her martyrdom had brought much of the uproar that they needed. The Puritans’ total control had been broken.
Dyer and Hutchinson still stand together as statues across from the site of the gallows, overlooking a newer world.
