The Decision of Mary Dyer, Who Spent Her Own Life to Repeal an Unjust Law

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This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Mary Dyer needs to be remembered.

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Her hands were bound. Her feet were bound. A handkerchief covered her face. The noose was around her neck.

Then they told her she would live.

That was 27 October 1659, on Boston Common. Two of her companions, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, had already been hanged in front of her. Mary Dyer climbed the ladder expecting to follow them. The reprieve was announced at the last possible instant. It had been arranged in advance. Governor John Endecott wanted her marched the full mile from the jail to the gallows and placed on the ladder with the rope at her throat so she would, in his words, experience the chill of death and get some sense in her head.

Seven months later she sailed back to Boston.

THE PERSON

Mary Barrett Dyer came out of Somersetshire around 1611 and married William Dyer at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London on 27 October 1633. The Dyers reached Boston in 1635. They were Puritans, like everyone else stepping off the boats that decade, and they meant to live the life the colony promised.

They did not get to. Mary fell in with Anne Hutchinson and her Bible lectures, and by the end of 1637 Hutchinson had been excommunicated by the Boston church for challenging the ministers. On 22 March 1638, as Hutchinson walked out of the meetinghouse, Mary Dyer stood and walked out with her, hand in hand. A voice in the crowd asked who the other woman was. Another voice answered: the mother of a monster. That was not an insult. It was a reference to a stillborn, severely deformed infant Mary had delivered five months earlier. Governor John Winthrop had the body exhumed, examined it personally, and published accounts of it in England as proof of antinomian heresy.

The Dyers were banished. They went to Rhode Island. William Dyer signed the Portsmouth Compact and became the General Recorder of Rhode Island Colony. Mary raised their children.

THE CONTEXT

She sailed to England alone in 1650. She stayed seven years. Somewhere in that stretch she became a Quaker — a follower of George Fox, a member of the Society of Friends, a believer in the Inner Light that let any ordinary person speak directly to God without a minister in between.

That last part is what made Quakers unbearable to Massachusetts. The Puritan colony was built on ordained authority. A church that claimed a plowman could hear God as well as a minister was not a competing doctrine. It was the end of the colony as the colony understood itself.

Massachusetts responded with law. A 1656 statute cropped the ears of returning Quakers. A 1657 statute bored holes in their tongues. On 19 October 1658 the General Court passed, by a single vote, a new act: any Quaker not an inhabitant of the colony, convicted of being a Quaker, was to be banished upon pain of death. Connecticut’s Governor John Winthrop the Younger begged Massachusetts not to enforce it. Only Massachusetts kept it on the books.

In June 1659 two Friends traveled from Rhode Island to Boston to, in their own phrase, look the bloody laws in the face. Mary Dyer went to Boston to visit them in jail. She was arrested too. All three were tried. All three were banished on pain of death on 12 September 1659. All three came back.

Endecott pronounced death. Then he pronounced the staged reprieve. Robinson and Stephenson died. Mary Dyer was returned, bound, unhurt, to Rhode Island.

THE DECISION

The decision was not on the ladder. The decision was on Shelter Island the following winter.

The Massachusetts General Court had written a declaration to London describing the reprieve as evidence of Puritan mercy. Mary Dyer read it. She understood what it meant. It meant the law had survived. It meant the men who had hanged Robinson and Stephenson now had political cover. It meant her own return from the gallows had been turned into propaganda for a statute she had been trying to overturn.

She had told the General Court, before they sentenced her the first time, that if they refused to repeal the law the Lord would send others of his servants to witness against it. She decided the Lord would send her.

She sailed back to Boston on 21 May 1660. She was arrested the same day. On 31 May she stood before Endecott and the General Court.

Are ye the same Mary Dyer that was here before?

I am the same Mary Dyer that was here the last General Court.

Endecott passed sentence. Return to prison, tomorrow at nine of the clock, the gallows, hanged till you are dead.

This is no more than what thou saidst before.

It is the calmest sentence in the transcript. It is also the most lethal. She was telling the man about to kill her that his sentence was not news. She had come expecting it. She had come, as she wrote to the Court after her first reprieve, to repeal their unrighteous laws of banishment upon pain of death.

THE AFTERMATH

They hanged her at nine o’clock on the morning of 1 June 1660. She climbed the ladder again. Captain John Webb told her she was guilty of her own blood. She answered that she had come to keep blood-guiltiness from the magistrates. Reverend John Wilson, who had christened her son Samuel twenty-five years earlier, called up to her to repent. She looked down at him and said,

Nay, man, I am not now to repent.

Someone offered her one last exit. If she would agree to return to Rhode Island, she might come down and save her life.

Nay, I cannot, for in obedience to the will of the Lord God I came, and in his will I abide faithful to the death.

They dropped her. A breeze caught her skirt on the rope. General Humphrey Atherton, watching, said she hung there like a flag. The Quakers took the sentence for their own and kept it. Edward Burrough wrote in London the following year that Mary Dyer did hang as a flag for them to take example by. She was buried in an unmarked grave on the Common.

William Leddra was hanged nine months later. He was the fourth and last.

Edward Burrough went to King Charles II and described the Boston killings. On 9 September 1661 the King issued a royal mandate ordering Massachusetts to stop executing Quakers and to ship any further condemned Friends to England for trial. He sent the mandate with Samuel Shattuck, a Salem Quaker who was himself under sentence of death for returning to the colony. Shattuck handed the paper to Endecott in person. Endecott read it and, according to the accounts of the day, removed his hat.

On 27 November 1661 the Massachusetts General Court suspended the capital anti-Quaker law. Twenty-eight Quakers walked out of prison.

THE MEANING

Most martyrs die because they refuse to stop doing what they were already doing. Mary Dyer died because she chose to go back and do it again. That is a different kind of courage, and it is rarer.

She did not resist the law. She argued that the law was wrong and should be repealed, and she spent her own life as the argument. She told the General Court what she was going to do, and then she did it, and then when they spared her she came back and did it again. She forced Massachusetts to choose between enforcing its statute and admitting the statute was indefensible. Massachusetts enforced it. The statute fell fourteen months later.

In 1959 the Massachusetts legislature commissioned a statue of her. It sits on the east lawn of the State House today, a few hundred yards from where she was hanged. The inscription reads: Witness for Religious Freedom. The legislature that put up the statue is the institutional descendant of the General Court that ordered her killed. That is the shape of the thing. The body that hanged her now honors her. The editor of the bloody laws is remembered as the builder of the colony. The woman who made the bloody laws unlivable has a statue most Bostonians walk past without looking at.

She carried religious liberty in colonial America from a claim the Crown would eventually have to decide into a fact the Crown could no longer ignore. She did it with her own body. She did it by walking back into a city that had told her what the rope was for.

Mary Dyer needs to be remembered.

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Sources: Edward Burrough, A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New-England (London, 1661) — the primary contemporary account of Mary Dyer’s examination and execution; Horatio Rogers, Mary Dyer of Rhode Island, The Quaker Martyr Who Was Hanged on Boston Common June 1, 1660 (Providence, 1896); Massachusetts General Court, An Act made at a General Court, held at Boston, the 20th of October, 1658 (Edward Rawson, Secretary); William Dyer’s 1660 Petition to the Governor, preserved in the Massachusetts Archives; Charles II, Royal Mandate Concerning Quakers (Whitehall, 9 September 1661). Additional reference: Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Mary Dyer; Douglas O. Linder, Famous Trials archive, The Trial of Mary Dyer document collection.

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Next in this series: John Fries — When Tax Resistance Became Treason.

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Charles C. Jett is the author of the Courage and Consequence series and the Critical Skills Blog. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Business School, he writes on leadership, civic education, and the decisions that shape history. His work appears at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.