Mary Dyer - Colonial America

Colonial America

William Dyer took the Oath of a Freeman at the General Court in Boston on March 3, 1635 or 1636, and they were admitted to the Boston Church on December 13, 1635.

In 1637, she supported Anne Hutchinson, who preached that God "spoke directly to individuals" rather than only through the clergy. Dyer joined with Hutchinson and became involved in 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. After she helped her friend, she followed her to the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

She had given birth on October 11, 1637, to a deformed stillborn baby, who was buried privately. After Hutchinson was tried and the Hutchinsons and Dyers banished from Massachusetts in January 1637–8, the authorities learned of the "monstrous birth", and Governor John Winthrop had it exhumed in March 1638, before a large crowd. 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, 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."

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.

In 1638, Dyer and her husband were banished from the colony along with Hutchinson. 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.

She traveled alone to England in 1650, where she joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) after hearing the preaching of its founder George Fox and feeling that it was in agreement with the ideas that she and Hutchinson held years earlier. She eventually became a Quaker preacher in her own right.

William Dyer joined her but returned alone to Rhode Island in 1652; Mary Dyer remained in England until 1657. Her ship landed in Boston and she was immediately arrested. Her husband secured her release nearly three months later, when she was expelled from the colony.

Dyer continued to travel in New England to preach Quakerism, and was arrested in 1658 in New Haven, Connecticut. After her release, she returned to Massachusetts to visit two English Quakers, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, who had been arrested. She was also arrested and then permanently banished from the colony. She traveled to Massachusetts a third time with a group of Quakers to publicly defy the law, and was again arrested, and sentenced to death. After a short trial, two other Quakers were hanged, but she was spared at the last minute because her son interceded on her behalf against her wishes.