Mary Dyer, Quaker martyr for religious freedom

hung in Boston, 1 June 1660

Mary Dyer was a follower of midwife Anne Marbury Hutchinson, who taught that God could be reached directly, without the assistance of a minister. This was thought heresy by Puritans. When Hutchinson was excommunicated by the Boston Puritan Church for her views, Dyer sided with her. She and her husband William were likewise excommunicated and banished. They eventually settled in Newport, Rhode Island, which offered the Dyers greater religious tolerance.

Dyer returned to England in 1652, where she became a follower of George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers), whose teachings were similar to those of Anne Hutchinson. When she returned to Boston in 1657, the Massachusetts Bay Colony imprisoned her for her uncompromising expression of her Quaker beliefs. She was released when her husband promised she would keep silent until she left the colony.

In 1658, religious intolerance in Boston reached a new height with passage of a law banishing Quakers under “pain of death.” When Mary Dyer learned that two Quakers of her acquaintance were jailed in Boston, she went to visit them in 1659—and was herself imprisoned. That September, Mary and the two other Friends were released, and told they would be executed if they returned. Less than a month later, Mary Dyer, in the company of other Friends, returned to Boston resolved to “look the bloody laws in the face.”

Imprisoned again, Dyer saw two Quakers hung before her. Then, while already bound and with the rope around her neck, she received a last-minute reprieve. She was expelled to Rhode Island, but soon returned to Boston, determined to give up her life in order to gain the “repeal of that wicked law.”

On June 1, 1660, holding to her beliefs and refusing to “repent,” she was executed by hanging.