Mary Dyer of Rhode Island
The Quaker Martyr That Was Hanged On Boston Common, June 1, 1660
by
Horatio Rogers, Associate Justice of The Supreme Court Of Rhode Island
Providence
Preston and Rounds 1896
PREFACE
THE interest awakened by a paper read by me last fall before the Rhode Island Historical Society, of which I was then the President, has induced me to revise the matter then used, and to accept the offer of the publishers of this volume to issue it in its present form.
The material for a sketch of Mary Dyer is meagre, and necessarily has to be gathered, bit by bit, from many sources, the principal of which are George Bishop's New England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord, Part I., 1661, and Part II., 1667,--both parts, somewhat abbreviated, again printed in 1703; John Whiting's Truth and Innocency Defended against Falshood and Envy, And the Martyrs of Jesus, and Sufferers for his sake, Vindicated, 1702; A Call from Death to Life, being an Account of the Sufferings of Marmaduke Stephenson, William Robinson and Mary Dyer, in New England, in the year 1659, printed by Friends in London, 1660, a private reprint of which was made in 1865, including Marmaduke Stephenson's A Call from Death to Life, and other papers, with an Introduction; Joseph Besse's A Collection of the Sufferings of the People called Quakers,1753; Sewel's History of the People called Quakers; Bowden's History of the Society of Friends in America; and the Massachusetts Records. In addition to these, however, many works, too numerous to mention, have been consulted and drawn from; for the labor involved in such a study is out of all proportion to the space occupied by the narrative.
- R.
PROVIDENCE, R.I., February, 1898.
CHAPTER I.
AMONG the most pathetic chapters of New England history are those that recount the sufferings for conscience sake. Every gradation of cruelty known to puritan persecution was practiced upon the Quakers. Many of the victims of this religious intolerance were inhabitants of Rhode Island visiting neighboring colonies, for the hand of persecution could not reach across its border; the government of Rhode Island, in 1657, when urged by the Commissioners of the United Colonies to expel the Quakers from its boundaries, writing in reply as follows: "And as concerning these quakers (so caled) which are now among us, we have no law among us whereby to punish any for only declaring by words, &c, their minds and understandings concerning the things and ways of God, as to salvation and an eternal condition."
Massachusetts Bay was the most active of the New England persecutors, but Plymouth Colony and the colonies along the Connecticut River also shared the persecuting spirit. When the Quakers first arrived in Boston Harbor, in 1656, Massachusetts was without legislation specially aimed at the new sect; but lack of legislation did not stand in the way of intolerance, and then, too, the General Court rapidly provided constantly increasing punishment for what they denominated "the cursed sect of Quakers," whom they denounced in an address to the King, in 1660, as "open and capitall blasphemers, open seducers from the glorious Trinity, . . . and from the Holy Scriptures as the rule of life, open ennemyes of government itself as established in the hands of any but men of theire owne principles, . . . and malignant and assiduous promoters of doctrines directly tending to subvert both our churches and state." The forms of law were but scantily observed. "You are court, jury, judge, accusers, witnesses, and all "--said Coddington. The Puritan ministers were particularly forward in the persecution. The Rev. John Norton, one of the pastors of the Boston First Church, was clamorous for the passage of the law of banishment under penalty of death upon return, and it was his pen that wrote the so-called vindication of the Massachusetts authorities for putting Quakers to death in 1659. The Rev. John Wilson, another of the pastors of the Boston First Church, seemed fairly beside himself as the sad work proceeded. "I would carry fire in one hand," said he, "and fagots in the other, to burn all the Quakers in the world. . . . Hang them," he cried, "or else"-and then he significantly drew his finger across his throat, suggestive of cutting it.
The stocks and the pillory, stripes at the whipping-post or at the tail of an oxcart, fines and mprisonment, branding and mutilation, banishment and death upon the gallows, were meted out with shocking barbarity to unresisting victims, who exhibited a constancy and a heroism in suffering never surpassed in the history of the world. Many were imprisoned, some for years. Some were reduced from comfort to penury by the fines imposed upon them. Some had their ears cut off, and the law provided for boring the tongue through with a hot iron. Two were ordered to be sold into slavery to pay their fines, and large numbers were mercilessly whipped. Neither age nor sex was spared. William Brend, a man of years, was given "in all One Hundred and Seventeen Blows with a pitch'd Rope, so that his Flesh," in the words of the narrator, "was beaten Black, and as into a Gelly ; and under his Arms the bruised Flesh and Blood hung down, clodded as it were in Baggs ; and so into One was it beaten that the sign of one particular Blow could not be seen." He was also starved for five days, and for sixteen hours was put into irons, neck and heels, so that it was thought he would die-all of which so excited the populace that the authorities promised that the jailer should be punished, but no further notice was taken of it.
Christopher Holder of Rhode Island was barbarously whipped, was then kept for three days without food or water, and without bed or straw, and for nine weeks was imprisoned without fire in the cold winter season. Afterwards he was apprehended again, was again cruelly whipped, his right ear was cut off, and other barbarities were at different times practiced upon him.
Defenseless women, maidens and matrons, were stripped naked to the waist, and, thus exposed to the public gaze, were beaten with whips of threefold knotted cord until the blood ran down their bare backs and bosoms. George Bishop, the Quaker historian of the time, whose narrative is couched in the form of an address to the Massachusetts General Court, being an answer to an apologetic declaration issued by the Court after the hanging of two Quakers in 1659, thus relates the treatment dealt out to two Rhode Island women in Boston. "Horred Gardner is the next," says Bishop," who being the Mother of many Children, and an Inhabitant of Newport in Rhode Island, came with her Babe sucking at her Breast, from thence to Weymouth (a Town in your Colony) where having finished what she had to do, and her Testimony from the Lord, unto which the witness of God answered in the People, she was hurried by the baser sort to Boston, before your Governour, John Endicot, who after he had entertained her with much abusive Language, and the Girl that came with her to help bear her Child, he committed them both to Prison, and Ordered them to be whipp'd with Ten Lashes apiece, which was cruelly laid on their Naked Bodies, with a three-fold-knotted-Whip of Cords, and then were continued for the space of Fourteen Days longer in Prison, from their Friends, who could not Visit them. The Woman came a very sore Journey, and (according to Man) hardly accomplishable, through a Wilderness of above Sixty Miles, between Rhode Island and Boston; and being kept up, after your Cruel Usage of their Bodies, might have died; but you had no Consideration of this, or of them, tho' the Mother had of you, who after the Savage, Inhumane and Bloody Execution on her, of your Cruelty aforesaid, kneeled down, and Prayed--The Lord to Forgive you--which so reached upon a Woman that stood by, and wrought upon her, that she gave Glory to God, and said—That surely she could not have done that thing, if it had not been by the Spirit of the Lord."
The other Rhode Island woman was Catharine Scott(1), an ancestress of the author, and a sister of the famous Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. She went to Boston to be near a young friend of hers in his sufferings, Christopher Holder, already alluded to, who afterwards married her daughter. Of her, Bishop thus writes: "And Katharine Scot, of the Town of Providence, in the Jurisdiction of Rhode-Island (a Mother of many Children, one that had lived with her Husband, of an Unblameable Conversation, and a Grave, Sober, Ancient Woman, and of good Breeding, as to the Outward, as Men account) coming to see the Execution of the said Three, as aforesaid, whose Ears you cut off, and saying upon their doing it privately, -- That it was evident they were going to act the Works of Darkness, or else they would have brought them forth Publickly, and have declared their Offence, that others may hear and fear. -- Ye committed her to Prison, and gave her Ten Cruel Stripes with a three-foldcorded- knotted-Whip, with that Cruelty in the Execution, as to others, on the second Day of the eighth Month, 1658. Tho' ye confessed, when ye had her before you, that for ought ye knew, she had been of an Unblameable Conversation; and the' some of you knew her Father, and called him Mr. Marbery, and that she had been well-bred (as among Men) and had so lived, and that she was the Mother of many Children; yet ye whipp'd her for all that, and moreover told her, --That ye were likely to have a Law to Hang her, if she came thither again. To which she answered,--If God call us, Wo be to us, if we come not; And I question not, but he whom we love, will make us not to count our Lives dear unto ourselves for the sake of his Name. To which your Governour, John Endicot, replied--And we shall be as ready to take away your Lives, as ye shall be to lay them down."
To thoroughly comprehend the religious situation in New England at the time of these persecutions, and the spirit actuating both persecutors and victims, it is necessary to bear in mind the environments of those times, and to breathe the atmosphere, so to speak, then pervading society. The sensuous splendor and formalism that characterized the worship of the Romish Church, and the extravagant indulgences allowed its members, resulted in the religious revolt in the sixteenth century known as the Protestant Reformation. The reforming spirit, when once awakened, is difficult to hold in check, and, as decade succeeded decade, new reformers sought to reform former reformations, until in a few score years the Lutheran and Anglican Churches seemed conservative indeed, and a large religious party of heterogeneous elements easy to fall apart, sprang up in England known as Puritans, which, as the name implied, desired to purify the reformed churches. Aught suggestive of Rome or Romish faith or forms, was an object of Puritan abomination. Uniformity of worship among Protestants became impossible, as each shade of belief, while advocating uniformity, insisted that all should conform to their particular tenets, and, until liberty of conscience was established whereby everyone was free to judge and act for himself in matters of religion, cruelty and oppression were exercised by those of the ascendant faith towards those not in accord with their views.
(1) The Scott family were staunch Quakers and very friendly with Mary Dyer. One of the daughters, Patience, when only eleven years old, was imprisoned in Boston with Mary Dyer when the latter was banished from Massachusetts. Another daughter, Mary, who afterwards married Christopher Holder, was imprisoned in Boston with Mary Dyer when the latter returned there and met her death, Mary Scott being allowed to return home after having been admonished by the General Court. Still another daughter, Hannah Scott, married Walter Clarke, a strong Quaker and for a number of years Governor of Rhode Island, and it is from her that the author is descended. Mrs. Catharine Scott's father was the Rev. Francis Marbury of London, and her mother was a sister of Sir Erasmus Dryden, Bart., grandfather of John Dryden the poet.
In order to enjoy greater toleration, a considerable number of Puritans removed from England to Holland, where they formed churches of their own; but, in course of time, not relishing the manners of the Dutch, they emmigrated to America and settled at Plymouth. From time to time numbers who found strict conformity to the Church of England irksome, came to America, and in 1630 Massachusetts Bay was settled, the colonies on the Connecticut River being settled a few years later. Massachusetts Bay, though not the earliest of the New England colonies, became at once from its settlement the leading and representative Puritan colony, and to it reference is almost exclusively made in this volume when Puritan thought and social manners here in America are alluded to.
In Massachusetts Bay, Church and State were firmly united, and only members of the church were admitted as freemen. The Puritan ministers were looked up to by the legislators, and were called upon to frame laws. They were also called to sit in council and give advice in matters of religion and cases of conscience which came before the General Court, and without them the Court never proceeded to any act of an ecclesiastical nature. Religion was the absorbing question of the times. The Rev. Francis Higginson, in his Election Sermon in 1663, said: "It concerneth New England always to remember, that they are originally a plantation religious, not a plantation of trade. The profession of the purity of doctrine, worship and discipline is written upon her forehead. Let merchants, and such as are increasing cent per cent remember this, that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of New England, but religion." President Oakes of Harvard College, in his Election Sermon in 1673, in referring to Massachusetts Bay, said, " I look upon this as a little model of the glorious kingdom of Christ on earth."
The Puritans made the saving of souls a dismal, dreary piece of business; for salvation with them seemed to rest on abject fear of hell fire and eternal damnation, rather than on the atoning love of that meek and gentle Saviour who offered up his life for us on Calvary. Their sermons extended through hours, and their prayers were exhaustingly protracted.
People were fined for not attending church and were compelled to contribute to the support of the ministers. Any infraction of the Sabbath met with speedy punishment. They were solemn in appearance, austere in manner, plain in attire, and grave in speech, which was interlarded with scriptural phrases. The Bible, and especially the books of the Old Testament, they claimed as their guide, and quaint Old Testament names were given to their children, one of Mary Dyer's sons being named Mahershallalhashbaz. They were a God-fearing people and never forgot that there were souls to be saved, or rather that there were souls in danger of being damned; for they seemed never to emerge from the gloom and shadow of fear into the joyous brightness of hope, and hence, by the standards of to-day, their lives were comparatively joyless. As might be expected, their laws were rigorous to the last degree. Not only were immorality and levity, but even many of the innocent enjoyments of life were sternly repressed. Especially were improprieties between the sexes relentlessly punished (2) and innocent intercourse between them and the advances towards marriage were regulated by law.
(2) To such an extreme was this carried, if the date of the birth of a young married couple's first-born indicated any impropriety before marriage, the parents were publicly punished, though they had been married for months. In the colony of New Haven it was ordered in 1650, "That no master of a familye shall give interteinment or habitation to any young man to sojourns in his familye, but by the allowance of the inhabitants of the towne where he dwells, under the penalty of twenty shillings per week. And it is allso ordered, that no young man that is neither married, nor bath a servant, nor is a publique officer shall keepe house by himselfe, without the consent of the towne, for and miner paine or penalty of twenty shillings a week.
Women were forbidden to expose their arms or necks to view, and it was ordered that their sleeves should reach down to their wrists, and their gowns should be closed around their throats. Sumptuary laws and all other kinds of laws regulating private conduct were in force.
The use of tobacco was forbidden, and so was dancing at weddings. In 1659 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay passed the following law, viz.: "For preventing disorders arising in severall places wthin this jurisdico?n, by reason of some still observing such festivalls as were superstitiously kept in other countrys, to the great dishonour of God and offence of others, it is therefore ordered by this Court and the authority thereof, that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labour, feasting, or any other way, uppon any such accounts as aforesajd, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings as a fine to the county."
Of course, in a community thus constituted, any divergence from the orthodox standard of religious belief would not be tolerated; and Roger Williams became the first victim of Puritan orthodoxy in 1635, founding the Colony of Providence Plantations the next year upon a basis utterly at variance with President Oakes's "little model of the glorious kingdom of Christ on earth," and which, in the judgment of the world, was a vast improvement upon it. Within a few years succeeding Roger Williams's banishment, the Rev. John Wheelwright, Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, Samuel Gorton, and many others, were thrust out of Massachusetts Bay in rapid succession under varying circumstances of indignity and cruelty. The Quakers were the next class of religious victims to feel the hand of Puritan persecution; but, peaceful as were their professions, they were made of sterner stuff than the preceding victims of Puritan oppression, and, undaunted by either threats or sufferings, fairly repressed the persecuting spirit by surfeiting it with more victims courting martyrdom than could be disposed of. At a time of such a religious awakening as the middle of the seventeenth century, and, in the words of Hildreth, as "one among many other results of that violent fermentation of opinions among part of the English Puritans, which Cromwell, to the horror of the conservative Presbyterians, allowed to go on almost unchecked," George Fox founded the sect called Quakers or Friends, Fox beginning his preaching about the year 1647.
For the leading traits of the Quaker belief I shall borrow and abridge from the Quaker writer Hallowell, in his Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts. In common with the Puritans, the Quakers believed in the divinity of Jesus, the Christian atonement, a future life either in heaven or hell, and the inspiration of the Bible. In common with the Puritans, they condemned as idolatrous the ceremonial service of the Established Church; but they also denied the efficacy of ordination, baptism, formal prayer, and the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. They sought to restore the spirituality and simplicity of primitive Christianity. Their reliance upon what they called the Inward Light, as a sufficient guide in matters of religion, has always distinguished them from all other religious sects. This Inward Light may be briefly explained as follows: God is an indwelling Spirit, and humanity is his holy temple. His law is written upon the hearts of all men; and obedience to it will lead them into all truth, so far as religious truths are revealed to men. Through the operation of this law the soul of man is accessible to his Creator. It is the rule of life to which every one must subject himself, and out of which duty is evolved. The logic of this cardinal principle of Quakerism led straight to repudiation of the authority of an ordained ministry, to the withdrawal from church membership, and the refusal to pay church tithes.
Intellectual training alone cannot fit men to be religious teachers. The Spirit of God must first illuminate their souls and sanctify their lives. The Puritans rebelled against prelacy, and held in special abhorrence the forms and ceremonies borrowed from Rome by the English Church.
Coming into power, they established their own church, and compelled an unwilling people to conform to and support it. The Quakers probed deeper. They rebelled against prelate and presbyter alike. They claimed not toleration, but liberty of conscience for all as an inalienable right; they demanded the absolute separation of Church and State, denounced the clergy as priests and hirelings, and in spite of fiendish persecution refused to acknowledge their authority or to contribute so much as a farthing to their maintenance. Silent meditation, interrupted only by a short prayer or exhortation by one or more of them, who, perchance, were moved by the Spirit, constituted their only form of worship. They substituted simple affirmation for the oath, defending the innovation with apt and telling quotations from scripture. They held meetings for worship, and were generally careful to abstain from all unnecessary secular employment on the first day of the week, but they did not regard it as especially the "Lord's Day." They claimed that all days are alike holy in the sight of God.
They regarded the Use of the plural number in addressing one person as a species of flattery, and adopted the simple thee and thou of the Bible. They addressed all men by their Christian names only, regarding all other modes of address as "flattering titles." They declared that it is not lawful for Christians to kneel or prostrate themselves to any man, or to bow the body, or to uncover the head to men; that it is not lawful for a Christian to use superfluities in apparel, as are of no use save for ornament and vanity; that it is not lawful to use games, sports, plays, nor, among other things, comedies, among Christians, under the notion of recreations, which do not agree with Christian silence, gravity, and sobriety.
They considered war an evil as opposite and contrary to the spirit and doctrine of Christ as light to darkness, and they would not fight. That injustice may not be done, it should be borne in mind that the persecution of the Quakers in Massachusetts was the work of the ministers and of the higher civil magistrates; that but a portion of the church members, and few, if any, who were not, approved of it; that as only church members were freemen and entitled to vote, those in authority were elected by the church members only; and yet, when the penalty of death was sought to be imposed upon those who returned from the banishment meted out to the Quakers, the utmost difficulty was encountered, and only after a stubborn resistance was the law enacted by the General Court by a bare majority of one. Popular tumults were frequently excited by the treatment of the Quakers, and, in the case of William Brend already alluded to, we have seen that the authorities, in order to allay the popular discontent, had to promise to bring the jailer to justice, he having been the instrumentality used in perpetrating the cruelties. It was urged by those in favor of the law that its mere existence, operating in terrorem, would be all-sufficient, and that its enforcement would never be necessary. Those stern old Puritans were full of grim determination, and it never entered their heads that their Quaker opponents could be as doggedly tenacious in upholding their views as they were themselves. Certain it is that those Massachusetts lawmakers did not reckon upon the existence of a zeal, a courage, a heroism -- call it what you will -- that would break clown and triumph over their own determination, which was well-nigh relentless. They had never seen a self-sacrifice that conquered by its very submissiveness, and overwhelmed persecutors by a surfeit of victims offering themselves for sacrifice. The Quakers were absolutely fearless.
They counted their lives as nothing in upholding their views, and they not only did not avoid martyrdom, but they studiously courted it; and therein lay their power and the secret of their final triumph.
Chapter II.
MARY DYER of Rhode Island, in the words of George Bishop, the old Quaker chronicler, written after her death, was "a Comely Grave Woman, and of a goodly Personage, and one of a good Report, having a Husband of an Estate, fearing the Lord, and a Mother of Children." Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts, a less friendly writer, refers to her, in 1638, as "the wife of one William Dyer, a milliner in the New Exchange, a very proper and fair woman, and both of them notoriously infected with Mrs. Hutchinson's errors, and very censorious and troublesome, (she being of a very proud spirit, and much addicted to revelations)."
Gerard Croese, a Dutch writer, states that she was reputed as a " person of no mean extract and parentage, of an estate pretty plentiful, of a comely stature and countenance, of a piercing knowledge in many things, of a wonderful sweet and pleasant discourse, so lit for great affairs, that she wanted nothing that was manly, except only the name and the sex."
William Dyer and his wife emigrated from London to Boston, in Massachusetts Bay, where they were admitted members of the Rev. Mr. Wilson's church, December 13, 1635. That they were better educated than the majority of people of that day, is apparent from the character of the public positions William Dyer held in Rhode Island, and from the letters of Mrs. Dyer that have come down to us, and the fact that she was a great friend of the gifted
Mrs. Anne Hutchinson. When the latter was arraigned before the elders and was expelled from the church, Mary Dyer rose and walked by her side out of the building. The Dyers followed the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson in the Antinomian movement, and in March, 1637, William Dyer signed a remonstrance affirming the innocence of Mr. Wheelwright and that the Court had condemned the truth of Christ. In consequence of this he and others of like sympathies were disfranchised and disarmed, "because," in the
language of the order, "the opinions and revelations of Mr. Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson have seduced and led into dangerous errors many of the people here in New England;" and early in the next year they were forced to leave Massachusetts, removing first to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and the following year to Newport in the same State.
Palfrey, the historian, says that Mary Dyer was an object of peculiar abhorrence in Boston on account of an absurd story of her having given birth to a monster, a divine judgment for her attachment to Mrs. Hutchinson. The story in all its disgusting detail is given by Governor Winthrop in his History of New England, and by Cotton Mather in his Magnalia Christi Americana.
William Dyer was a person of consequence in Rhode Island. In 1638 he was elected Clerk, and in 1640 Secretary of Portsmouth and Newport, holding the office until May, 1647, and thereafter for a year he was the General Recorder under the Parliamentary Patent. Two years later he was the Attorney-General of the Colony. At different times he held various other offices and positions of public trust, such as a Commissioner, a Deputy, General Solicitor, Secretary of the Council, etc.
William and Mary Dyer had six children, and among their numerous descendents are some of the best known and most respected citizens of Rhode Island. (1)
(1 ) William and Mary Dyer's descendants include the late Benjamin Dyer and Charles Dyer, leading merchants in Providence in the early part of this century; the late Elisha Dyer, senior, also prominent there in business; the late Governor Elisha Dyer, who filled with honor the Executive Chair of the State; the late Daniel IV. Lyman, to whose munificence Brown University is indebted for the Lyman Gymnasimum; General Elisha Dyer, until recently Adjutant General of the State; All. James 1:I. Chace, an extensive cotton manufacturer in Providence; the Hon. Jonathan Chace, formerly a United States Senator from Rhode Island; and many others too numerous to mention.
In 1652 William Dyer accompanied Roger Williams and John Clarke, who were sent from Rhode Island to England to obtain a revocation of the extraordinary powers granted to William Coddington; and Mrs. Dyer accompanied her husband. Though William Dyer returned home early in 1653, his wife remained abroad several years longer, becoming a convert to Quaker doctrines and a minister in that society. In 1657 she landed in Boston en route for her home in Rhode Island. The year before her coming, the arrival of the earliest Quakers in Boston had so wrought up the ministers and authorities of Massachusetts Bay that various repressive measures had been adopted, and hence when Mary Dyer, and a widow named Ann Burden who came to settle up her deceased husband's estate, set foot in Boston, they were arrested and cast into prison; for although Mary Dyer's sole business was to pass that way to Rhode Island, she was kept a close prisoner so that none might have communication with her, until her husband, hearing that she had arrived and was in prison, went after her. Then she was not released and suffered to depart until he had bound himself in a great penalty not to lodge her in any town of Massachusetts Bay, nor to permit any to have speech with her on her journey. In 1658 she was expelled from the Colony of New Haven for preaching Quaker doctrines.
As well might the Puritan persecutors of the United Colonies have attempted to stop the inflowing tide of the mighty ocean by their legal fulminations as to curb Quaker zeal by their cruel enactments, so the victims flocked on their way to the jails, the whipping posts and the pillories, yea, even to the gallows.
In June, 1659, William Robinson, a merchant of London, and Marmaduke Stephenson, a countryman of the east part of Yorkshire, 'were moved by the Lord,' in Quaker phrase, to go from Rhode Island to Massachusetts to bear witness against the persecuting spirit existing there; and with them went Nicholas Davis of Plymouth Colony, and Patience Scott of Providence, Rhode Island, a girl of about eleven years of age, and a daughter of the Catharine Scott already referred to. They were all arrested and committed to prison to await the next meeting of the Court of Assistants in the following September. During their incarceration Mary Dyer was moved of the Lord to go from Rhode Island to visit the prisoners, and she too was arrested and imprisoned. On September 12, 1659, the Court banished the four adults from Massachusetts upon pain of death, if after the 14th of September they should be found within the jurisdiction, but Patience Scott was discharged, as, in the words of the chronicler, "the child, it seems, was not of years, as to law, to deal with her by banishment."(2)
(2) Governor Hutchinson in his History of Massachusetts, Vol. 1. p. 153, says: "Patience Scott, a girl of about eleven years of age, came I suppose from Providence; her friends lived there; and professing herself to be one of those whom the world in scorn calls quakers, was committed to prison, and afterwards brought to court. The record stands thus: 'The court duly considering standing the principles of religion--judge meet so far to slight her as a quaker, as only to admonish and instruct her according to her capacity, and so discharge her, Capt. Hutchinson undertaking to send her home.' Strange such a child should be imprisoned! it would have been horrible if there had been any further severity."
Nicholas Davis and Mary Dyer departed to their homes without the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, but William Robinson and Marmaduke Steplienson, though released from prison, determined to stay within the jurisdiction and try the bloody law unto death. On October 8, within thirty days of her banishment, Mary Dyer with other Rhode Island Quakers went to Boston to visit Christopher Holder, then in prison, where she was again arrested and held for the action of the authorities. Five days later William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, who had been travelling about spreading their doctrines through Massachusetts and Rhode Island since their release from prison, also went to Boston to look the bloody laws in the face, in the words of the Quaker chronicler; and they too were arrested and cast into prison.
The issue was now clearly made between Quaker and Puritan. The Quaker defied the unjust Puritan laws, and dared martyrdom. Dare the Puritan authorities inflict it?
On October 19 the three prisoners were brought before Governor Endicott and the Assistants, and demand having been made of them--Why they came again into that jurisdiction after having been banished from it upon pain of death if they returned?—they severally declared that the cause of their coming was of the Lord and in obedience to him.
The next day they were again brought before the magistrates, when the Governor called to the keeper of the prison to pull off their hats, which having been done, he addressed them substantially as follows: "We have made many laws and endeavored in several ways to keep you from among us, but neither whipping nor imprisonment, nor cutting off ears, nor banishment upon pain of death, will keep you from among us. We desire not your death."
Notwithstanding which, he immediately added: "Hearken now to your sentence of death." Then he stopped: whereupon William Robinson desired to read to the magistrates and the large audience assembled there a paper prepared by him, containing a declaration of his call by the Lord to Boston and the reason of his staying within the jurisdiction after his banishment.
The Governor with much feeling said: "You shall not read it, nor will the court hear it read." Upon its being passed to the Governor, and read by him to himself, he said: "William Robinson, you need not keep such an ado to have it read, for ye spake yesterday more than is here written." To which Robinson replied, "Nay," and desired again that it might be read, that all the people might hear the cause of their coming and of their stay there, and wherefore they were put to death. But the Governor would not allow him to read it, and proceeded to pronounce sentence of death upon him, whereupon he was carried back to prison. Then the Governor addressed Marmaduke Stephenson, and, more partial to him, apparently, than to William Robinson, said, "If you have anything to say, you may speak."
But Stephenson was silent, and spoke not, so sentence of death was pronounced upon him also. When the Governor ceased speaking, however, Stephenson lifted up his voice in this wise: " Give ear, ye magistrates, and all who are guilty, for this the Lord hath said concerning you, who will perform his promise upon you, that the same day that you put his servants to death shall the day of your visitation pass over your heads, and you shall be cursed forevermore, the Lord of Hosts hath spoken it; therefore in love to you all take warning before it be too late, that so the curse might be removed ; for assuredly if you put us to death, you will bring innocent blood upon your own heads, and swift destruction will come upon you:" whereupon he, too, was sent back to jail.
Then Mary Dyer was brought to the bar of the Court, and the Governor pronounced sentence upon her as follows: " Mary Dyer, you shall go from hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged till you be dead." To which she said, "The will of the Lord be done." -- "Take her away, Marshal," quoth the Governor. She replied, "Yea, and joyfully I go." And on her way to prison she used similar words, with praises to the Lord. To the marshal who had her in custody, she said, "Let me alone, for I should go to prison without you." – "I believe you, Mrs. Dyer," he rejoined, "but I must do what I am commanded."
Great influence was brought to bear to prevent the execution of the sentences. Governor Winthrop of Connecticut appeared before the Massachusetts authorities, urging that the condemned be not put to death. He said that lie would beg it of them on his bare knees that they would not do it. Colonel Temple also addressed the authorities, and said that if according to their declarations they desired the prisoners' lives absent rather than their deaths present, he would beg them of the authorities, and would carry them away at his own charge, and give them a house to live in, and corn to feed on, and land for them and their heirs to plant on, that so once within a year they should be able to provide for themselves; and if any of them should come hither again, he would again fetch them at his own charge. Governor Endicott, the Rev. John Wilson, and the whole pack of persecutors, however, seemed to thirst for blood; and it was determined that somebody must die.
The 27th of October, 1659, was fixed for the triple execution, and elaborate preparations, for those days, were made for it. Popular excitement ran high, and the people resorted to the prison windows to hold communication with the condemned, so the male prisoners were put in irons, and a force was detailed, in the words of the order, "to watch with great care the towne, especially the prison." Captain James Oliver was ordered to detail one hundred soldiers "proportionably out of each company in Boston, completely armed with pike, and musketeers with powder and bullet," to escort the prisoners to the place of execution; though subsequently the order was modified so that thirty-six of the soldiers were to remain in and about the town, while the rest went to the place of execution.
The eventful day having arrived, Captain Oliver and his military guard attended to receive the prisoners. The marshal and the jailer brought them forth, the men from the jail, and Mary Dyer from the House of Correction. They parted from their friends at the prison full of joy, thanking the Lord that he accounted them worthy to suffer for his name and had kept them faithful to the end. The condemned came forth hand in hand, Mary Dyer between the other two, and when the marshal asked her, "Whether she was not ashamed to walk hand in hand between two young men," for her companions were much younger than she, she replied, " It is an hour of the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world. No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand, the sweet incomes and refreshings of the spirit of the Lord which now I enjoy." The concourse of people was immense, the guard was strong and strict, and when the prisoners sought to speak the drums were caused to be beaten.
The method of execution was extremely simple in those days. A great elm upon Boston Common constituted the gallows. The halter having been adjusted round the prisoner's neck, he was forced to ascend a ladder affording an approach to the limb to be used for the fatal purpose, to which limb the other end of the halter was attached. Then the ladder was pulled away, and the execution, though rude, was complete.
Having arrived at the place of execution, (3) the Rev. Mr. Wilson tauntingly said to the prisoners, "Shall such Jacks as you, come in before authority with your Hats on?" To which Robinson replied, "blind you, mind you, it is for not putting off the Hat we are put to Death."
(3) Peleg W. Chandler, writing in 1841, in Chandler's Criminal Trials, Vol. I., p. 44, note, says in regard to the execution of the Quakers: "These executions are supposed to have taken place on Boston Common, probably near where the Hollis Street Church now stands."
The prisoners took a tender leave of one another, and William Robinson, who was the first to suffer, said, as he was about to be turned off by the executioner, " I suffer for Christ, in whom I lived, and for whom I die." Marmaduke Stephenson came next, and, being on the ladder, he said to the people, "Be it known unto all this day, that we suffer not as evil-doers, but for conscience sake." Next came Mary Dyer's turn. Expecting immediate death, she had been forced to wait at the foot of the fatal tree, with a rope about her neck, and witness the violent taking off of her friends. With their lifeless bodies hanging before her, she was made ready to be suspended beside them. Her arms and legs were bound, and her skirts secured about her feet; her face was covered with a handkerchief which the Rev. Mr. Wilson, who had been her pastor when she lived in Boston, had loaned the hangman. And there, made ready for death, with the halter round her neck, she stood upon the fatal ladder in calm serenity, expecting to die. Human devices to arouse terror and to break her spirit had failed. She stood there on that grim height, gazing backward, as it were, upon time, and forward into eternity, without a tremor. In another moment her life would be like a tale that is told. Just then an order for a reprieve, upon the petition of her son all unknown to her, arrives. The halter is loosed from her neck and she is unbound and told to come down the ladder. She neither answered nor moved. In the words of the Quaker chronicler, "she was waiting on the Lord to know his pleasure in so sudden a change, having given herself up to dye." The people cried," Pull her down." So earnest were they that she tried to prevail upon them to wait a little whilst she might consider and know of the Lord what to do. The people were pulling her and the ladder down together, when they were stopped, and the marshal took her down in his arms, and she was carried back to prison.
All this dismal spectacle made by the authorities, of Mary Dyer, on the 27th of October, 1659, was but a cold-blooded refinement of cruelty to shake her constancy and overcome her fortitude. It was a mere prearranged scheme, for before she set forth from the prison it had been determined that she was not to be executed, as shown by the reprieve itself, which reads as follows: "Whereas Mary Dyer is condemned by the Generall Court to be executed for hir offences, on the petition of William Dier, hir sonne, it is ordered that the sajd Mary Dyer shall have liberty for forty-eight hovers after this day to depart out of this jurisdiction, after which tjme, being found therein, she is forthwith to be executed, and in the meane time that she be kept a close prisoner till hir sonne or some other be ready to carry hir away wthin the aforesajd tyne; and it is further ordered, that she shall be carrjed to the place of execution, and there to stand upon the gallowes, with a rope about her necke, till the rest be executed, and then to returne to the prison and remajne as aforesaid."
Evidently her Puritan persecutors did not know Mary Dyer. When she returned to prison and understood the ground of the reprieve, she refused it, and the next morning she wrote to the General Court, again refusing to accept her life from her persecutors. She said "My life is not accepted, neither availeth me, in comparison with the lives and liberty of the Truth and Servants of the living God, for which in the Bowels of Love and Meekness I sought you; yet nevertheless with wicked Hands have you put two of them to Death, which makes me to feel that the Mercies of the Wicked is cruelty; I rather chuse to Dye than to live, as from you, as Guilty of their Innocent Blood."
Such constancy and courage as the prisoners had displayed greatly excited the populace against the authorities, who were in a quandary what to do with Mary Dyer; for as the reprieve had been kept secret, neither young William Dyer nor anyone else had appeared to take charge of his mother; so the day after the execution some officials came and took her in their arms and set her on horseback and conveyed her fifteen miles towards Rhode Island and left her with a horse and man to be conveyed further. Popular indignation was both loud and deep. So pronounced was it that the authorities deemed it necessary to put forth a declaration in vindication of their course, or rather, it would seem, an apology; for such reprehensible and indefensible conduct could not be vindicated, and it is in answer to that apology that George Bishop wrote his book, to which I have already referred. Particularly did the Massachusetts authorities claim credit for their reprieve of Mary Dyer, and ingeniously and industriously did they seek to soften the judgment of men upon the martyrdom of Robinson and Stephenson, by vaunting the consideration they claimed to have shown Mary Dyer--an argument which we shall see reacted upon them when we come to note its effect upon the recipient of the boasted clemency.
Mary Dyer went to Rhode Island, where she did not tarry long, as she spent most of the winter on Long Island. Terribly in earnest was she; and her sufferings in no wise abated her purpose to combat, even unto death, the wicked persecution taking place in Massachusetts. She was especially roused at the attempt to vindicate the execution of Robinson and Stephenson; and the clemency extended to her she believed to be a mere device to divert, in a measure, popular indignation. She therefore determined to go again to Boston, and again defy the authorities, forcing them either to practically annul their unjust laws, if they did not proceed against her, or else by her death to awaken popular indignation that would compel the repeal of them. She arrived in Boston May 21, 1660, and ten days later she was brought before the magistrates. "Are you the same Mary Dyer," inquired Governor Endicott, "that was here before?" -- "I am the same Mary Dyer that was here the last General Court," she undauntedly replied."
You will own yourself a Quaker," the Governor inquired, "will you not?"—"I own myself to be reproachfully so called," responded Mary Dyer.1 Then the Governor said, "Sentence was passed upon you the last General Court; and now likewise--You must return to the prison, and there remain till to-morrow at nine o'clock; then thence you must go to the gallows, and there be hanged till you are dead." Mary Dyer replied, "This is no more than what thou saidst before."--"But now," said the Governor, "it is to be executed. Therefore prepare yourself to-morrow at nine o'clock." Then she spoke thus: "I came in obedience to the will of God the last General Court, desiring you to repeal 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."
Whereupon the Governor sneeringly inquired if she was a prophetess? To which she replied, she spoke the words the Lord spoke in her; and now the thing was come to pass. She then proceeded to speak of her call, when the Governor cried, "Away with her! Away with her! "And she was taken back to jail. Her husband, who was not a Quaker, and did not share her views, wrote a letter of earnest intercession for his wife's life to Governor Endicott, but in vain.
On June 1, 1660, at nine o'clock, Mary Dyer again set out from the jail for the gallows on Boston Common, surrounded by a strong military guard. As she stood upon the fatal ladder, she was told if she would return home, she might come down and save her life.
"Nay," she replied, "I cannot; for in obedience to the will of the Lord God I came, and in his will I abide faithful to the death." Captain John Webb, the commander of the military, said to her that she had been there before, and had the sentence of banishment on pain of death, and had broken the law in coming again now, as well as formerly, and therefore she was guilty of her own blood. "Nay," she replied, " I came to keep blood-guiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law of banishment upon pain of death, made against the innocent servants of the Lord, therefore my blood will be required at your hands who wilfully do it; but for those that do it in the simplicity of their hearts, I do desire the Lord to forgive them. I came to do the will of my Father, and in obedience to his will I stand even to the death." Then her old Puritan pastor, the Rev. Mr. Wilson, bade her repent, and be not so deluded and carried away by the deceit of the devil. To which she replied, "Nay, man, I am not now to repent." Being asked whether she would have the Elders pray for her, she replied, "I know never an Elder here." They asked whether she would have any of the people pray for her? She responded, "I desire the prayers of all the people of God."
Some scoffingly said, "It may be she thinks there are none here." Looking about, she said, "I know but few here." Then they spoke to her again, that one of the Elders might pray for her. She replied, "Nay, first a child, then a young man, then a strong man, before an Elder of Christ Jesus." And more she spake of the eternal happiness into which she was about to enter; and then, without tremor or trepidation, she was swung off, and the crown of martyrdom descended upon her head. Thus died brave Mary Dyer2 Her remains were buried on Boston Common, and there they now rest in an unknown grave.
In the Friends' Records of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, is this entry: "Mary Dyer the wife of William Dyer of Newport in Rhode Island: She was put to death at the Town of Boston with ye like cruil hand as the martyrs were in Queen Mary's time, and there buried upon ye 31 day of ye 3d mo. 1660." It will be observed there is an error of a day in the date.
Mary Dyer's Puritan persecutors, strange to say, have found many apologists whose excuses are flimsy indeed. Had her persecutors been Romish priests instead of Puritan ministers and magistrates, such apologists, it is believed, would entertain different views. The persecutions of the Quakers were purely religious and were by no means confined to those who were guilty of improprieties of manner or conduct. Some of the worthiest inhabitants of Massachusetts were cruelly punished for affording the Quakers shelter, or giving them food, or attending their meetings, and even for merely deprecating the inhumanities practiced upon them. There was nothing in Quaker doctrine or practice inherently difficult to get on with. If Rhode Island found no difficulty in enduring the Quakers, why could not the other New England Colonies endure them just as well?
The Puritan persecutors themselves said that Mary Dyer was guilty of her own blood. Human rights were nothing to them when their purposes were crossed, and they wondered at a heroism they could not understand, and which was ready to face death, if need be, in the struggle with oppression. The horrible persecutions themselves produced the martyrs. Men's minds were wrought up to the highest pitch, and some were so roused that they were willing to die to put down such wrongs. The feeling is well illustrated by the woman who, in 1658, at the sight of the cruel and bloody infliction of thirty-three stripes each upon two Quakers, at Barnstable, with a three-corded knotted whip, cried out in the grief and anguish of her spirit: "How long, O Lord, how long shall it be ere thou avenge the blood of thine elect?" And afterwards in her bewailings she cried: "Did I forsake father and mother and all my dear relatives to come to New England for this? Did I ever think that New England would come to this? Who would have thought it?"
Mary Dyer did not die in vain. But one more Quaker was executed, (4) and then the torrent of public indignation made itself effectually felt. Governor Endicott stormed and raved at his brother-magistrates for what he deemed their weakness, but it was all in vain; for they would not further imbrue their hands in human blood for such a cause, and even if they would the King sent over to forbid it, ordering the Quakers to be sent to England for trial and punishment. Though the royal order was subsequently modified, and persecution began again and continued for nearly twenty years, yet it went on only intermittently and with decreasing severity until it ceased altogether.
(4) William Leddra, the last Quaker martyr to suffer death in Massachusetts, was hung on Boston Common March 14, 1661.
Roger Williams, the great apostle of Soul-Liberty, was thrust out of Massachusetts for conscience sake, but Mary Dyer, a humbler sufferer in the same great cause, to enable the Heaven-implanted principle to obtain root on Massachusetts soil itself, persisted in remaining and watering it with her blood, and God gave the increase; so that nowhere on the face of the earth to-day is liberty of conscience more free or more highly revered than on the very spot where, in the words of General Atherton, one of her persecutors, "Mary Dyer did hang as a flag for others to take example by."
Each must judge for himself of the credit due Mary Dyer for her sufferings and death. It is a growing belief that when, in coming ages, the roll shall be made up of those whose lives or deaths contributed to the establishment among men of the immortal principle of liberty of conscience, inscribed in enduring fame upon it will be found the name of Mary Dyer.