In 1620, a company of radical religious Separatists who thought that English society was far too corrupt to ever reform and could only be escaped sought out an isolated corner of the British empire where they could settle and re-found human civilization according to their understanding of the Bible landed in what came to be known as Massachusetts Bay. These Pilgrims sought not individual religious freedom as we understand that term today, but a place so remote from the center of British power that they could act independently of royal control and have little fear of direct reprisal from the government. Their goal was to establish a theocratic society purged of all worldliness and their laws reflected that goal and they established a theocracy. As Dr. Daniel Baracskay explained:
They were religious people with a strong piety and a desire to establish a holy commonwealth of people who would carry out God’s will on earth. In such a commonwealth, they felt, it was the duty of the civil authorities to enforce the laws of religion, thus holding a view almost the opposite of that expressed in the First Amendment. …The fact that the Puritans had left England to escape religious persecution did not mean that they believed in religious tolerance. Their society was a theocracy that governed every aspect of their lives. Freedom of religion and freedom of speech or of the press were as foreign to the Puritans as to the Church of England. When other colonists arrived with differing beliefs, they were driven out by the Puritans.
Puritans
One of the groups that encountered the worst violence and persecution from the Puritans were the so-called “Quakers.”
The Society of Friends, derided as “Quakers” for the physical quaking that happened during their more ecstatic religious meetings, were the very opposite of the Puritans. The Friends were radically egalitarian, eschewing formal language by addressing everyone in the same informal language no matter what the others social status might have been, refusing to doff (remove) their hat as a sign of another’s superior social class, allowed women to do missionary work, and even welcomed women preaching and teaching in worship services. They rejected all clergy altogether and held radically decentralized worship services where there wasn’t even a minister to conduct. They renounced all war and bore a “peace testimony” to the world, teaching that Christianity demanded that the followers of Jesus never engage in violence or bloodshed. Because they renounced war and proclaimed peace they were often severely persecuted, as they were during the American Revolution. The Friends saw themselves, “as a return to the primitive Christianity of the Apostles, after a long and dark night of “apostasy” from the true Spirit and glory of the new covenant” and believed they were justified in disobeying any laws that would compel them to break the commandments of God.
Needless to say, their denunciation of worldly social order, their rejection of violence, their views on the spiritual and social status of women, their anarchic worship services, their willingness to disobey those in power when wrong, and their beliefs that they were the true church of Christ rebuilt after centuries of darkness and apostasy set the Friends in direct opposition to the Puritans and the theocratic state and society they wished to build. Faced with what they saw as the heretical doctrines of the Friends and their socially disruptive beliefs that challenged the very foundations of Puritan society, the Puritans did what every authoritarian statist (“state-ist“) society does when its rule is challenged – torture and exterminate the challengers.
The story of Mary Dyer and the Boston Martyrs, martyred by the state in the cause of Christian liberty and human freedom, is a heroic story of simple men and women who refused to be silenced by those in power and who had the courage to refuse to obey evil orders and wicked laws even when they would pay with their lives for not doing so. Their story is an example of truly Christ-like resistance to evil and the power of that resistance to transform society.
Prologue: Anne Hutchinson
Mary and her husband William migrated from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, a short fifteen years after the Pilgrims landed and founded Plymouth and two years after Anne Hutchinson and her husband had done the same. Hutchinson proved to be a seminal influence in Mary’s life. As a midwife, Hutchinson quickly made connections with many of the women of the colony and overtime her home became a gathering place for women to come together and discuss the religion, the Holy Bible, and sermons of local ministers. This in of itself wasn’t revolutionary and was a typical practice of them time. What was revolutionary was what was taught in these meetings. Influenced by the teachings of popular minister the Reverend John Cotton, Hutchinson and her group believed that there was no need for a professional and institutionalized clergy and that the only way one could know if he or she were saved was by direct revelation from the Holy Spirit to that person.
As a result, they rejected the role of the Puritan clergy as superfluous, at best, and, at worst, sinful because he made people think that by living a publicly “righteous” life ministers could (and did) mislead people into think that it was human works, and not Christ’s grace alone, that saved people from Death and Hell. And, to top it all off, as her groups became more popular men started attending, meaning Hutchinson was essentially was now a woman preaching to men in a mixed-gender setting – another huge banned activity in Puritan Massachusetts.
To say these teachings were antithetical to Puritan religious beliefs and culture is to put it lightly. The theocratic state that the Puritan had built was based on the importance of the church’s clergy and all of the highest political offices were occupied by ministers. An attack on them was not merely seen as an attack on a rival religious belief, it was seen as an attack on the state itself. Her claims to personal revelation from the Holy Spirit and that others could have the same revelatory guidance meant that the theocratic state that the Puritans had built to enforce religious law on everyone was, at best, pointless, and, at worse, in direct opposition to God. This in turn meant that the very foundation of government was being undermined and an attack on it was seen as a violation of the Fifth Commandment. Hutchinson was not honoring her father and her mother because she was dishonoring the “fathers of the Commonwealth,” the Puritan ministers who ran the political order. Because of this Hutchinson was excommunicated and driven from the colony. She and her entire family were forced to flee to Rhode Island.
And right beside her was one of her closest friends, Mary Dyer.
The Excommunication of Mary Dyer
Mary was one of Anne Hutchinson’s neighbors and they were close friends. Mary regularly attended Hutchinson’s meetings and was convinced that Hutchinson was correct. When Hutchinson was attacked for her beliefs first by Puritan society and then the state itself, Mary stood by her completely, defending her every chance Mary got. It the 1638 meeting that ended with Hutchinson being exiled from the colony and excommunicated from the church, Mary stood up, took her friend by the hand in front of everyone, and walked out of the meeting with her in an obvious sign of sympathy and solidarity. This, of course, drew the ire of the Puritan establishment upon Mary as well, leading to one of the most disgusting moments in early American history.
A year before, on October 17, 1637, Mary Dyer began to have contractions only seven months into her pregnancy. Hutchinson, serving as Mary’s midwife, rushed to her home and helped to deliver the child – a baby girl born with extreme malformities. The baby girl was described as having no forehead, but a face that drooped with her ears touching her shoulders, and on her back she had two open holes that looked like mouths with flesh hanging out. (Schutte, pgs. 88-89) Experts today have diagnosed the child (Schutte, pg. 90) as having anencephalia (meaning the child’s skull never formed properly because she was missing part of her brain) and an extreme form of spina bifida (with the spine and nerve tissues stick out of a hole in the baby’s back.) So severe were her deformities that she only lived a few hours before dying. On the advice of the Reverend John Cotton and out of a well informed (and soon to be entirely justified terror) about what would happen to them if the girls appearance became common knowledge, Mary and her family, heartbroken beyond belief, buried their dead daughter secretly in the church’s graveyard, wrapped in nothing but a simple sheet.
A year later, after Mary has so publicly stood by Hutchinson and upon hearing rumor of Mary’s “monstrous birth,” the Reverend John Withrop, Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, had the baby’s body dug up in front of a large crowd. Upon learning just how malformed the baby was by having the corpse medically examine, Withrop immediately published his discovery to the entire colony and eventually accounts even reached England. People at sea were hearing it before they even landed in North America. (Miles, pg. 25) Taking his lead from Withrop’s denouncement of Mary, English Puritan publisher and minister Thomas Weld (Bremer, pg. 267) took up the charge and argued that the birth of such a “monster” was proof from God that Mary was an apostate, her soul as twisted and corrupt as her baby’s body. (Schutte, pgs. 96-98) The story would be repeated for decades to come with Mary continuing to be used as an example of what happens to those with debauched and sinful beliefs. (Miles, pg. 32) This cruel “proof” combined with her support of Hutchinson as all the evidence the Puritan autocracy needed to drive Mary and her family from the colony as well. They were excommunicated in 1638, soon after Hutchinson was, and they likewise fled to Rhode Island. There they lived a life of quiet obscurity in the village of Portsmouth until 1652 when William Dyer, Mary’s husband, herself, and others travel to England with and at the request of the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams.
The Persecuted Mary Dyer
It is in England that the Dyers are first exposed to the Society of Friends, to “Quakerism.” In London they met the Society’s founder, George Fox and heard him preach doctrines very similar to Hutchinson’s, especially the idea of one’s Inner Light which sounded a great deal like Hutchinson’s concept of personal revelation through the Holy Spirit. Mary was so entranced by Fox’s teachings that she stayed behind in England even after her husband returned to Rhode Island later in 1652. For the five years, Mary studied the teachings of the Society as a disciple of George Fox and became so dedicated to the Society that she even became a missionary or preacher of the Society. There was another way that the Society was like what Mary already believed – women could become preachers in the sect. Finally, in 1657, Mary set sail for home.
Nearly twenty years after being exiled from Massachusetts, Mary once more set foot into the colony when her boat landed in Boston harbor. Mary was immediately arrested (the ship’s crew manifest record all known Friends with a Q for “Quaker” by their names.) The new governor of the colony, John Endicott, was even more intolerant of other Christian sects than Withrop had been. And he saw the beliefs of the Friends, with its liberality, gender equality, and emphasis on personal revelation as a threat not only to the Puritan religious institution but as a threat to the existence of the autocratic state itself. And when the state feels threatened, it immediately resorts to brutality to force compliance.
Endicott therefore spearheaded a successful effort in 1656 to establish a set of draconian laws designed to make “Quakerism” illegal, to drive any Friends in the colony from it, and to terrorize, torture, and kill any who refused to leave. In addition to being banished, Friends could now be legally whipped, fined, imprisoned, and tortured by having their ears cut off or holes bored through their tongues with a hot iron. They could even be imprisoned and worked like slaves in a “House of Correction.” It was even illegal to own any literature produced by the Society or friendly to its beliefs and doing so could result in fines of 40 to 54 pounds. It is hard to determine average wages for this time period and the best records I have found only go back to 1752 (pg. 62, pdf), when the average daily wage for a farmer was about $.33 (thirty-three cents.) If we use this as a base and extrapolate backwards, knowing that wages were not significantly higher, then even if we do not know the exactly what the daily wage was, we can be certain that such high fines would have been crushing, nearly half a year’s total earnings. You could be fined for just having a Friend in your home.
The Puritans were out to destroy the Friends and it was into this maelstrom that Mary stepped.
Mary spent over two months in prison in 1657. All of her books were burned. She wasn’t even allowed communication with anyone outside of her jail. She only managed to escape after she was able to secretly slip a letter through a crack in the prison wall to someone outside, a letter which eventually reached her husband weeks after it was written. Incensed, he stormed into Endicott’s office and demanded Mary be set free. Endicott agreed on the conditions that he would take her home immediately without spending a single night in the colony and that Mary would be absolutely forbidden from speaking until they were in Rhode Island. Both agreed and Mary was freed, finally able to go home to her family.
The Heroic Mary Dyer
It was at this point that Mary was faced with a moment in her life that would determine all that would come after.
Option 1: She could go home to Rhode Island, be with her family and quietly fade into history.
Option 2: She could become a minister and a missionary, preaching the doctrines of the Friends to all that would hear everywhere she went.
Mary chose Option 2.
Like Jeremiah of old, Mary felt the fire of the word of God in her bones and she could not withhold it. She had to set it free. She crisscrossed Rhode Island preaching the message of the Society of Friends – that all people could have a personal relationship with God, that all people could receive and be guided by the Holy Spirit of prophecy and revelation, that all oaths of any kind (including government oaths) were a violation of Christ’s commandments, and that women could teach and preach the word of God as well as any man. In 1658, Mary crossed into Connecticut to the city of New Haven, recently established by Puritans settlers. Her ideas, being too radical for them in Connecticut as they were for the Puritans in Massachusetts, Mary was driven from New Haven as well. But it hardly slowed her down.
At the same time, persecution of the Friends by the Puritans autocracy in Massachusetts only worsened. In 1661, Edward Burrough published his record of how the Friends during this time were persecuted, saying that the Puritans stripped “women stark naked” and searching them “in such an inhumane manner as modesty will not permit to mention,” that men were whipped with three-corded ropes with knots at their end “with as much strength as they could be by the arm of their executioner,” that there were 64 imprisonments, 25 banishments, near starvations as “five [were] kept fifteen days without food”, confinement in irons, brandings on hands, chaining to logs “in the winter time,” ears being cut off, and their homes were seized and people thrown out. The worst came to a head when, on October 19, 1658, the Puritan autocracy in Massachusetts passed a law ordering that any “Quaker” found in the colony would be banish and if he or she returned then he or she would be executed, hanged at the gallows.
In the face of such bloodthirsty and tyrannical oppression, three brave Friends -William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and Patience Scott- felt called of God to challenge such an evil law, so they crossed into Massachusetts and were soon imprisoned. Mary, fearing for the lives of her friends, went to visit them in prison and was herself arrested. Once again, her husband William came to her rescue. When he discovered she was imprisoned again he wrote a withering letter to the Puritan leaders of Boston denouncing them for their un-Christian actions that they imprisoned her without trial:
Had you no commiseration of a tender soul that being wett to the skin, you cause her to thrust into a room whereon was nothing to sitt or lye down upon but dust .. had your dogg been wett you would have offered it the liberty of a chimney corner to dry itself, or had your hoggs been pend in a sty, you would have offered them some dry straw, or else you would have wanted mercy to your beast, but alas Christians now with you are used worse [than] hoggs or doggs … oh merciless cruelties.
[She] only came to visit her friends in prison and when dispatching that her intent of returning to her family as she declared in her [statement] the next day to the Governor, therefore it is you that disturbed her, else why was she not let alone. [What] house entered she to molest or what did she, that like a malefactor she must be hauled to [prison] or what law did she transgress? She was about a business justifiable before God and all good men.
This is the sum and totals of a law title Quakers: that she is guilty of a breach of a tittled Quakers is as strange, that she is lawfully convicted of 2 witnesses is not hear of, that she must be banished by law tittled Quakers being not convicted by law but considered by surmise and condemned to close prison by Mr. Bellingham’s suggestion is so absurd and ridiculous, the meanest pupil in law will hiss at such proceeds in Old Lawyers … is your law tittled Quakers Felony or Treason, that vehement suspicion render them capable of suffering … If you be men I suppose your fundamental lawes is that noe person shall be imprisoned or molested but upon the breach of a law, yett behold my wife without law and against law is imprisoned and punished.
Facing such a legal challenge, the Puritan magistrates of Boston released the imprisoned Friends, including Mary, and banished them under threat of execution if they returned. Mary went back to Rhode Island, but only for a short time as her friends William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and Christopher Holder stayed in Massachusetts Colony. They were determined to challenge the Puritans laws, to push the to the breaking point, and to die, if necessary, to demonstrate to all the world how evil the Puritan’s laws were. They were quickly arrested and re-imprisoned. When Mary heard about it she walked from Providence, Rhode Island to Boston, Massachusetts – a distance of 44 miles that would take over 15 hours – to comfort her friends. Once more she too was imprisoned. There was no mistaking her goal. She, along with Robinson, Stephenson, and Holder were challenging the legal authority of the Puritans to banish “Quakers” and to execute them if they violated banishment. She was challenging the authority and justice of Puritans law. And this time the Puritans were determined to kill her.
While awaiting death Mary and her co-prisoners wrote to the Puritan General Court, the central governing body of Massachusetts Colony, denouncing the laws against “Quakers” as unjust and demanding they be set at liberty once more. In part, Mary wrote:
Whereas I am by many charged with the Guiltiness of my own Blood: if you mean in my Coming to Boston, I am therein clear, and justified by the Lord, in whose Will I came, who will require my Blood of you, be sure, who have made a Law to take away the Lives of the Innocent Servants of God, if they come among you who are called by you, ‘Cursed Quakers,’ altho I say, and am a Living Witness for them and the Lord, that he hath blessed them, and sent them unto you: Therefore, be not found Fighters against God, but let my Counsel and Request be accepted with you, To repeal all such Laws, that the Truth and Servants of the Lord, may have free Passage among you and you be kept from shedding innocent Blood
…[I do everything I can to persuade all men] especially you who name the Name of Christ, to depart from such Iniquity, as SHEDDING BLOOD, EVEN OF THE SAINTS OF THE Most High. Therefore let my Request have as much Acceptance with you, if you be Christians as Esther had with [Persian King] Ahasuerus whose relation is short of that that’s between Christians and my Request is the same that her’s was: and he said not, that he had made a Law, and it would be dishonourable for him to revoke it: but when he understood that these People were so prized by her, and so nearly concerned her (as in Truth these are to me) as you may see what he did for her…if through the Enmity you shall declare yourselves worse than Ahasueras, and confirm your Law, tho’ it were but the taking away the Life of one of us, That the Lord will overthrow both your Law and you, by his righteous Judgments and Plagues poured justly upon you who now whilst you are warned thereof, and tenderly sought unto, may avoid the one, by removing the other; If you neither hear nor obey the Lord nor his Servants, yet will he send more of his Servants among you, so that your End shall be frustrated, that think to restrain them, you call ‘Cursed Quakers’ from coming among you, by any Thing you can do to them[.]
Mary Dyer’s First Letter Written from Prison, 1659, in-text link added by myself
Mary, and the Friends, clearly understood the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Lord’s teachings that His Saints should reject the methods and powers of governments, that they should instead love their enemies and that they should embrace civil disobedience, nonviolence, and self-sacrifice as the means by which to transform the world around them through the preaching and living of the Gospel of Jesus Christ without compromise. Puritan Governor John Endicott responded by condemning all of them to death.
This time she was saved by her eldest son (named William after his father) who had written letters to the former governor John Withrop and convinced him to write to Endicott asking him to free Mary. What exactly Withrop wrote, I have been unable to discover. The most likely theory, given Withrop’s own hatred of the Friends, is that he warned Endicott about the possible political problems that could arise from hanging a woman for merely existing. Whatever it may have been, Endicott acquiesced. On October 27, 1659, Mary was marched to the gallows with Robinson and Stephenson (Holder was banished as a first time offender) and made to watch them be murdered by hanging, their bodies then stripped naked and thrown in a public pit to rot for everyone to see as a warning about what happens to those who challenged the state. At the last moment, after they had tied the noose around her neck, the officials announced that she herself was to be spared and once more sent into exile. If she returned they would not hesitate to murder her as they had her brethren.
They then sent her back to prison to await her final escort from the Colony. While there she wrote these powerful words:
My life is not accepted, neither availeth me, in Comparison of 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.
The Christian Martyr Mary Dyer
For the next five months, Mary tried to throw herself into her religious work. She travelled to Long Island at the request of a group of Native Americans to preach to them the Christian doctrines of the Friends. But, like Jeremiah of old, she couldn’t settle for what she was doing, as noble as it was, because she felt a calling from the Lord to do His will no matter how much suffering it might cause her. She could not let it alone. While such wickedness reigned in Massachusetts she could not be silent, she could not be still, she could not be safe while her brothers and sisters faced death. So, in late April of 1660, Mary Dyer returned to Boston to grind the gears of the machinery of Puritan tyranny to a stand still with her own blood.
Brought once more before the General Court on May 31, 1660, Mary was examine by Endicott himself. After asking her to confirm her identity and that she remained a “Quaker,” Endicott told her should would be executed. This exchange then occurred:
[Mary:] I came in Obedience to the Will of God the last General Court, desiring you to Repeal your unrighteous Lawes of Banishment upon pain of Death; and that same is my work now, and earnest Request, because ye refused before to grant my Request, although I told you, That if ye refused to Repeal them, the Lord will send others of his Servants to Witness against them.
[Endicott then asked, “Are you] a Prophet?”
[Mary responded,] “I spake the words that the Lord spake in [me]; and now the thing is come to pass.”
[Endicott then interrupted] “Away with her! Away with her!”
Edited by myself for clarity. See this article also for Endicott’s response.
Talk about courage! Mary stood face to face with the man who had the power to condemn her or spare her and instead of lying or begging his mercy she threw his own spiritual ignorance back in his teeth and testified to the supremacy of the commandments of God to the laws of men.
The next day, June 1, 1660, Mary Dyer was taken to be hanged. As she was marched to the gallows someone in the crowd begged that she should return to Rhode Island and stay there, show the reluctance of some even among the Puritan faithful to kill her. (At 0:26:53.5) Mary responded, “Nay, I cannot go back to Rhode Island for in obedience to the will of the Lord I came and in His will I abide faithful to the death.” Once she was on the gallows one Captain John ebb pronounced her sentence, declaring that because she had willingly and knowingly broken the law she was guilty of her own blood being shed, an excellent example of the kind of bloodthirsty scapegoating humans use to justify their own sins that David Gornoski discusses when explaining mimetic theory. To this accusation, Mary responded:
Nay, I came to keep Blood-guiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous & 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.
The Execution of Mary Dyer
Then she was asked if she would have any Elder of the church to pray for her or any among the crowd. First, she responded that she knew of no Elders in Boston, meaning the Puritan clergy did not serve God and were not part of His church. Secondly she responded that she knew of but a few Christians in Boston despite the Puritan pretense of piety, holiness, and and Christianity. Someone in the crowd shouted that she should have been in Paradise (with the implication being that she would not be in Hell) and Mary responded, eliciting in response her last words:
“Yea, I have been in Paradise for several days and now I am about to enter eternal happiness.“
With that, the Puritans of Massachusetts murdered the indomitable and fearless Mary Dyer.
Lessons in Pure Christianity
It is said that a person in the crowd, looking upon Mary’s body hanging with her dress fluttering in the wind, remarked, “She hangs there as a flag for others to take example by.”
And indeed she did. That very day, Edward Wanton, a King’s Guard in charge of security at the gallows, went home and told his mother, “Alas, Mother! we have been murdering the Lord’s people,” and “I have met the most beautiful woman in the world. And now I’m going to become a Quaker.” (see also Card 16) He took off is sword, quitting his job right there, and never wore it again. Wanton spent the rest of his life as a “Quaker” preacher, spreading the doctrines of the Friends to all who would hear and facing violent persecution himself more than once.
Following her death, Edward Burrough used her story as one of the most outrageous examples of Puritan brutality in his widely published pamphlets and in his audience with King Charles II. The result was a royal mandate forbidding the colonial government of Massachusetts from killing anymore of the Friends, forcing Endicott to cease the executions and set free those he had imprisoned. Within five years of her death all persecutions of the Friends had ceased in Massachusetts.
And in 1663, three years after her death, Rhode Island, under the leadership of Roger Williams, was granted a royal charter that ordered:
No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion, in matter of religion, who do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said colony; but that all and every person and persons may, from time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully have and enjoy his own and their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernments, throughout the tract of land hereafter mentioned, they behaving themselves peaceably and quietly and not using this liberty to licentiousness and profaneness, nor to the civil injury or outward disturbance of others.
Undoubtedly in issuing such a charter Charles II was reminded of what had happened to Mary Dyer and her brethren in autocratic and theocratic Massachusetts and was inspired, by their suffering and deaths, to try something different. He body, blowing in the wind, heralded an era of change, of hope, and of liberty and helped to make than era a reality.
Such is the power of pure Christianity. Instead of responding to oppression and violence with anger and brutality of our own, Christians actively choose to act out of love and sacrifice. Following the example of our Lord, we would rather suffer so that our pains will change the hearts and minds of our enemies that they may be converted, be saved, and become our friends. We do not destroy others, we redeem them. We know that the kingdoms of the world have no power over us, to force us to conform to their wills. Instead we know that the supreme laws are the commandments of God and that we should always obey God even when it means breaking the laws of men. When we obey the laws of God we will always find joy, here and hereafter. We have no fear of tomorrow, even if it brings our deaths because death is but one more step on the path to Paradise.
Because we know these truths we, like Mary Dyer, are free from the ability of men to tyrannize, terrorize, and oppress us. We follow God, not men. Where the laws of men align with God’s laws then we follow the laws. Where the laws of men violate God’s laws then we follow God’s law and break the laws of men. Our Guiding Light is Christ and none else. We are therefore made free and being free have the power to liberate and save the world around us. Just as Mary did.