Mary Dyer and the Boston Martyrs

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. The other day I took
a long walk through Boston, and that walk took me
past the statue of Mary Dyer that's in front of
the East wing of the Massachusetts State House. And every
time I've gone by there, I've been really curious about her,
and we've gotten some listener requests for an episode on

(00:35):
her as well. Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson were two
of the women who were banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony
for their religious activities in the seventeenth century, although Anne
Hutchinson is probably the one whose name is a little
better known today. There is a statue of her in
front of the State House as well, but it's a

(00:56):
little bit farther back from the road. It's like not
the side of the state House. Also, I walk past
the most often, so she just hasn't caught my eye
as much. We are going to talk a bit about
Hutchinson in this episode, though, because these two women knew
each other and parts of their lives are interconnected. Both
of these women went through a lot of hardship in

(01:18):
terms of religious persecution and things that happened to their
children and families. This was a time when a lot
of people did not survive their early childhood. And we're
also going to be talking about some pregnancy losses that
have some additionally upsetting layers besides just the part of
losing a pregnancy. Mary Dyer was born Mary or perhaps

(01:41):
Marie Barrett, probably in the early sixteen hundreds. We don't
know the exact date, but most sources put the year
as sometime around sixteen eleven, and most likely in Somersetshire, England.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
We know very little about her early life or her family,
but what we do know about her suggests that they
were fairly well off, perhaps not rich, but affluent enough
that a daughter grew up learning how to read and
was later described as well educated and respectable.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
On October twenty seventh, sixteen thirty three, Mary got married
to a milliner named William Dyer. That last name is
also spelled Dyaar and dre in various seventeenth century documents.
He had been apprenticed to a phishmonger when he was younger,
and was also a member of the Fishmonger's Company. They

(02:33):
had their first child, named William, in sixteen thirty four,
but sadly, he died only three days after being baptized
and was buried on his parents' first wedding anniversary. In
sixteen thirty five, the Dyers moved to Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Mary was probably pregnant as they crossed the Atlantic. Their

(02:54):
first surviving son, Samuel, was baptized in Boston on December twentieth,
sixteen thirty five, and they had joined the church just
the week before, so the Massachusetts Bay Colony was only
a few years old when the Dyers arrived there. The
Massachusetts Bay Company had received a charter from King Charles
the First in sixteen twenty nine, authorizing the company to

(03:17):
colonize a portion of what's now thought of as New England.
About a thousand Puritans arrived from England on a series
of ships over the course of the following year. From
the Crown's point of view, this charter was about colonization
and trade, but the colonists were also motivated by the
idea of establishing a Puritan theocracy in North America, one

(03:40):
in which all of the colonists were continually striving to
form a perfect society that was essentially the Kingdom of
God on earth. So we need to take a minute
to talk about Puritanism. You could really do an entire
study on all the historical and religious nuances of the
Puritan religious movement and all of the many, many ways

(04:01):
it affected Britain's government and society, how Puritan's religious beliefs
and practices affected their approach to colonizing North America. So
this is really just a broad layperson's overview to help
make sense of some things that happened in Mary Dyer's life.
Puritanism grew out of the establishment of the Church of

(04:22):
England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First in
the fifteen fifties. Elizabeth and Parliament had tried to resolve
ongoing disputes between Catholics and Protestants by creating a church
that was largely Protestant in its beliefs, but also incorporated
elements that retained the appearance of Catholicism. This was done

(04:42):
through a series of laws and decisions that came to
be known as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. Puritans believed that
the Church of England needed to get rid of those
lingering elements of Catholicism that it needed to be purified.
The term Puritan started as an insulting nickname referencing that
idea of purification. Since this was a grassroots religious movement

(05:05):
and not a centralized denomination with like an official decision
making body to formalize its beliefs and creeds, there could
be a lot of variation from one Puritan to the next.
This is especially true since this movement advocated for everyone
to be able to read and understand scripture for themselves.
That also meant that most Puritan girls were taught how

(05:27):
to read, although most of the time they still typically
didn't have the same access to education that boys did.
This focus on individual study and understanding of scripture also
meant that people came to a lot of their own interpretations,
which led to a number of disagreements and schisms among
different groups of Puritans. That was in addition to all

(05:49):
the disagreements between Puritans and religious conformists in the Church
of England. There were a whole lot of people writing
pamphlets and preaching about how the Church of England needed
to check, but they were not all saying the same things.
By any stretch. These disputes played a big role in
a lot of English history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

(06:11):
including the English Civil Wars. That's not directly connected to
what we're talking about today, but we just want to
acknowledge that the influence of Puritanism went way beyond things
like disputes over whether clerical vestments were too Catholic looking.
One central part of Puritan theology involved the idea of
covenance between humanity and God. John Winthrop, who was one

(06:34):
of the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote a sermon
on board the Arabella while traveling to North America, and
in this sermon he described the Puritan colonists as having
a covenant with one another and with God. This covenant
meant that they were divinely ordained to build a community
dedicated to God's law, a city on a hill that

(06:57):
would be a shining example to the rest of the world.
In this community, the rich would be expected to show
charity to the poor, and the poor would be expected
to work hard, and everyone would be expected to live
in strict adherents to God's law. Other covenants related to
how humanity would attain salvation The Covenant of Works connected

(07:19):
back to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.
God had told Adam that he would have eternal life
in Paradise as long as he followed God's law, and
when Adam broke that law, he was cast out of
the garden. The Covenant of Works stressed that Christians were
obligated to follow religious and moral law. The Covenants of

(07:40):
Grace and Redemption were connected to the idea that people's
belief in God was necessary to attain salvation and to
the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to free humanity from sin.
So for Puritans, all of these covenants also rested on
the idea that God chose only some people to be saved,
and that a person could not know definitively whether they

(08:03):
had been saved or not whether they were still alive.
So people were also kind of continually examining their own lives,
both inwardly and outwardly, looking for signs of their own salvation.
One of the disputes among Puritans in the seventeenth century
involved whether salvation was granted by God unconditionally or whether

(08:24):
it had to be earned through good works and dedication
to the law. Either way, most Puritans believed that this
was predestined and unchangeable. People who argued that salvation was
a gift from God and not something that had to
be earned were often described as antinomian, coming from Greek
words roughly meaning against the law.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
This term was first coined in the sixteenth century and
initially was mostly used in the context of German theologia
Johannes Agricola and his followers, whose teachings included these ideas.
But in the seventeenth century, as more people, including more Puritans,
began to adopt the same ideas, the term antinomian started

(09:07):
to be used a lot more widely. It was often
a disparaging term, used to lump anyone who wanted less
focus on law and more focus on grace into one
vilified group. To many Puritans, antinomianism was heresy.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
One of the seventeenth century figures who brought these ideas
into more prominence was Puritan minister John Cotton. Cotton had
emigrated to the colonies in sixteen thirty three after facing
legal action for his non conforming religious views back in England.
Another clergyman was John Wheelwright, who emigrated to Massachusetts the

(09:43):
following year. Anne Hutchinson was Wheelwright's sister in law, and
she immigrated to Massachusetts in sixteen thirty four. As well,
she was a midwife with a reputation for being a
good mother and one of the people who could really
be counted on to help take care of an anyone
who was sick or dying. She also held meetings in

(10:03):
her home, hosting other Puritan women to talk about the
weak sermons and other religious teachings. Many women found her
wise and insightful, and there were some men who appreciated
her perspective as well.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
All three of.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
These people became involved in the dispute between the people
who put more emphasis on the covenant of grace and
those who were really focused on the covenant of works.
This dispute became known as the Antinomian controversy or the
Free Grace controversy. For a brief period, Cotton, Hutchinson, and
Wheelwright and other people who thought similarly to them, they

(10:40):
had all had some support from Colonial Governor Henry Vane
the Younger, who was in office from May of sixteen
thirty six to May of sixteen thirty seven and was
a proponent of religious tolerance. But in January of sixteen
thirty seven, Wheelwright delivered a sermon that really criticized a
lot of the ministers and magistates of Massachusetts Bay Colony

(11:01):
for their focus on the Covenant of Works. That led
to his being charged with contempt and sedition. Petitions were
circulated on his behalf, and everybody who signed one of
those petitions was later disarmed and disenfranchised by the colonial government.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
John Cotton was able to smooth over his disagreements with
church leaders and he didn't face a lot of consequences
during all this. But John Wheelwright was ultimately convicted and banished,
and Anne Hutchinson faced trial as well. Hutchinson's trial also
led to Mary Dyer being targeted, and we're going to
get into that after we first take a sponsor break.

(11:49):
Before we get to Anne Hutchinson's trial, we need to
return to Mary Dyer's life for a moment. On October seventeenth,
sixteen thirty seven, Mary went into labor. She was about
seven months pregnant with her third child, and her labor
was prolonged, difficult and complicated. At least three midwives came
to help. We only know who two of them were.

(12:12):
Though those were Anne Hutchinson and Jane Hawkins. Mary's baby
was stillborn and also had visible congenital anomalies. This was
something that people referred to at the time as a
monstrous birth. We talked about this a lot more in
our episode on the so called Monster found in the
Heart of a man named Edward May in sixteen thirty seven.

(12:34):
That episode came out last October. But basically, people interpreted
these kinds of occurrences as some sort of punishment from
God or as evidence of God's displeasure. Hutchinson knew how
the community would interpret this birth, so she went to
John Cotton for advice. Cotton advised her to bury the

(12:55):
baby in secret, which she did. There's some speculation here,
but John Cotton may have believed that this really was
a punishment from God, but that it was a punishment
that was meant only for Mary and her husband to experience,
not something the entire colony needed to know about. In
spite of this secrecy, though, rumors started to spread that

(13:18):
Mary Dyer had given birth to a monster. Then Anne
Hutchinson was put on trial in late sixteen thirty seven
and early sixteen thirty eight. The first was a civil
trial held in November sixteen thirty seven, a few days
after John Wheelwright had been convicted and banished. Hutchinson was
charged with producing the ministers, in other words, lying about

(13:42):
or defaming them. This charge was difficult to prove because
most of what she was being charged with had happened
in her own home, it was not something that happened
in public. But in court, Hutchinson also testified about how
her religious knowledge had come to her through her own
Wath revelations equivalent to those that God had revealed to Abraham.

(14:05):
She also said that the people interrogating her would be
cursed if they continued on in this course of action.
Based on things that she said in her court testimony,
Hutchinson was convicted and she was held in Roxbury until
she could face a religious trial. Over that winter, when
she was being held, she had almost no contact with
her family, which included six children under the age of

(14:28):
ten at that point. That was both because of the
travel involved to get to her in the winter weather.
Hutchinson's religious trial began on March fifteenth of sixteen thirty eight,
and she was convicted of lying in heresy and was excommunicated.
After the verdict was announced, Mary Dyer accompanied Anne Hutchinson

(14:48):
out of the courtroom. People started to ask who this
woman was, and word spread that it was the woman
who had given birth to the monster. That then came
to the attention of John Winthrop, who had followed Henry
Vane as governor. He questioned both Anne Hutchinson and Jane
Hawkins about Dyer's pregnancy and her baby. Although Hutchinson didn't

(15:10):
offer a lot of details, Winthrop told Hawkins that Hutchinson
had made a full confession. That led Hawkins to confess
everything herself. Winthrop then interrogated John Cotton, who confessed his
involvement as well. Winthrop had the baby's grave found and exhumed,
and he wrote a description of what he found there quote,

(15:32):
It was a woman child, stillborn about two months before
the just time, having life hours before. It was of
ordinary bigness. It had a face but no head, and
the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an apes.
It had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns,
hard and sharp. Two of them were above one inch long,

(15:54):
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 thornback,
the navel, and all the belly, with the distinction of
where the back should be and the back and hips
before where the belly should have been behind between the shoulders.

(16:17):
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. I just want to be clear, This passage
says a lot more about like Winthrop's religious beliefs and

(16:38):
what he expected to see there than what he honestly
could have been looking at. Dyer had already been described
as polluted with Hutchinson's ideas, and this really solidified the
community's view that she was also deserving of God's punishment.

(16:59):
People can take I knewed to talk and write about
Mary Dyer's so called monstrous birth and what it meant
for decades continuing even years after her death. Anne Hutchinson's husband,
Will had already started making plans to leave Massachusetts. He
and Anne moved to what became known as Rhode Island,
and the Dyers went as well. In the summer of

(17:21):
sixteen thirty eight, Anne Hutchinson experienced a pregnancy loss of
her own, and people saw this fetus as monstrous as well.
Word traveled back to Massachusetts, where people saw this as
a further indictment of both Hutchinson and Dyer. The Dyers
spent the next several years living in Rhode Island, where

(17:42):
William helped found the city of Portsmouth and became a
prominent part of the community and the government there. He
and Mary had several more children, William in sixteen forty two,
Mahershah Hollisbaz in sixteen forty three, Henry in sixteen forty seven,
Mary probably sometime in sixteen forty eight, and Charles in

(18:03):
sixteen fifty. The Hutchinsons ultimately moved again when it seemed
like the Colony of Massachusetts was going to annex the
land that they had been living on. They moved to
New Netherland, which would later become New York, and while
they were living there, Director of New Netherland, William Keith,
started trying to drive the indigenous nations of the Wappinger

(18:23):
Confederacy out of the area, including by attacking the people
and settlements of the Confederacy's member nations. In retaliation, members
of the Seawinoy Nation attacked colonial settlements, including the one
where the Hutchinsons were living. Anne Hutchinson, six of her children,
and nine other people were all killed in the same

(18:44):
attack in August of sixteen forty three. Hutchinson's husband had
died sometime before this, and the only member of her
family to survive the attack was her nine year old daughter, Susannah.
Susannah was captured and held for roughly three years before
either being ransomed or traded to family back in Massachusetts,

(19:05):
as had happened with Hutchinson's pregnancy loss. The response from
a lot of people in Massachusetts was that she and
her family had deserved this because of her heresies, so
to return to William and Mary Dyer. From sixteen fifty
two to sixteen fifty seven, they returned to England, and
while they were there, Mary became a Quaker. Like Puritan,

(19:28):
The term Quaker had started as an insulting nickname, this
time for the followers of George Fox in the seventeenth century.
Quakerism started as another religious reform movement, and it grew
into the religious Society of Friends, and there were a
lot of commonalities between Quaker teachings in what Anne Hutchinson
had been preaching and advocating. In particular, there was the

(19:51):
idea of the inner Light, something that resided within everyone,
no matter who they were, which could lead them to
divine revelation themselves. Although most Quaker leaders were men, women
had more spiritual autonomy and agency among the Quakers than
in many other religions. In many ways, women were charged
with the spiritual well being of their homes and their communities,

(20:15):
and women held that same divine light and were empowered
to speak on their own beliefs. But religious and civil
officials in England saw this as a threat. As more
people became Quakers, the Church of England lost members and
the church also lost their tithes. Many Quaker views were
also seen as heretical. The focus on a person's own

(20:37):
spiritual revelations undermined social structures that were based on adherence
to church law. The Quakers didn't have a religious hierarchy,
unlike the Church of England, which had an established hierarchy
that was connected to the structure of society. England did
not have a lot of tolerance for religious nonconformity, and

(20:59):
the Quakers were really nonconformist. And the number of Quakers
grew very quickly, from about five thousand in sixteen fifty
four to twenty thousand and sixteen fifty seven. And that
rapid growth was threatening as well. So Quakers were persecuted
in England, leaving some of them to leave for the
colonies in North America, where they were seen probably as

(21:22):
an even bigger threat. As we said earlier, the colony
of Massachusetts had been founded as a Puritan theocracy. It
did not welcome the idea of Quaker newcomers at all.
Puritan officials in Massachusetts described the arrival of Quakers as
an invasion. In Massachusetts, Quakers were punished with beatings, whippings,

(21:44):
and imprisonments. Some were indentured to British colonies in Virginia
and Barbados, and in sixteen fifty six Massachusetts passed a
law ordering Quakers to be banished. A year after that
law was passed, Mary Dyer, now a Quaker, went back
to Massachusetts more after a sponsor break. When William and

(22:14):
Mary Dyer returned to New England in sixteen fifty seven,
they were traveling with another Quaker woman named Anne Burden.
Anne and Mary had made their religious beliefs known. They
were both arrested. Anne was forced to return to England.
Mary said she had not known about the law banning
Quakers from Massachusetts, and she was released into her husband's custody.

(22:39):
Soon Mary became one of the many Quakers who tried
to return to Massachusetts after being expelled from the colony,
and today a lot of discussions on this persistence in
defying the law and returning to Massachusetts is framed in
terms of things like religious freedom, religious tolerance, and hypocrisy.
Many Puritans moved to the colonies because they did not

(23:02):
feel they could exercise their religion freely in England or
had faced persecution or legal action for their religion, and
now those same people were doing the exact same thing
to the Quakers. Some Quaker writing from the seventeenth century
does point out this hypocrisy, but early Quakerism was also
influenced by millennialism, which involves the idea that the return

(23:25):
of Jesus Christ was eminent. Early Quaker rhetoric included a
lot of prophecy about the coming of Christ and the
judgments that God would deliver at the turn of this
religious millennium. So there was also a lot of writing
about how, because of its mistreatment of Quakers, who were
people of God, the colony of Massachusetts was sowing the

(23:48):
seeds of its own damnation. Many of the Quakers who
returned to Massachusetts spoke about being called by God to
do so. Of course, leaders in Massachusetts thought of Quakers
as heretics and really did not see any of these
prophetic statements as valid, and they continued to pass laws
to try to keep Quakers out of the colony. In

(24:11):
October of sixteen fifty seven, a law was passed increasing
the fine for being caught harboring a Quaker. There were
also gruesome physical punishments outlined in the law, which escalated
each time a person returned to the colony. In sixteen
fifty eight, Massachusetts passed a law that made returning to

(24:31):
the colony more than once after being banished punishable by death.
In the summer of sixteen fifty nine, Quakers Marmaduke Stevenson,
William Robinson, and Nicholas Davis all traveled to Massachusetts. Stevenson
was originally a farmer from Yorkshire, and Robinson had arrived
in North America from London. All of them were arrested

(24:53):
and they were all banished, and Robinson was also publicly whipped.
Stevenson and Robinson returned to Austin and were imprisoned. When
Mary Dyer went to visit them in prison, she was
imprisoned as well. On September twelfth, sixteen fifty nine, they
were all banished under penalty of death if they returned,

(25:13):
but almost immediately they did return, along with other Quakers,
and they were once again arrested. On October nineteenth, sixteen
fifty nine, Stevenson, Robinson, and Dyer all faced trial, and
all three of them were questioned by Massachusetts Governor John
Endicott as well as other magistrates. Endicott delivered their sentence,

(25:35):
which was quote, you shall be had back to the
place from whence you came, and from thence to the
place of execution, to be hanged on the gallows till
you are dead. Upon hearing her sentence, Dyer reportedly said,
the will of the Lord be done, and as she
was led away, said yay and joyfully I go. While

(25:56):
awaiting her execution, Dyer wrote a letter to the Massage
to use its general court. It contains references to biblical
figures and events from the Bible, including an account from
the Book of Esther. King Ajazuaris had been persecuting Jews,
and Esther had convinced him not only to end that persecution,
but also to become an advocate for the Jewish people.

(26:20):
In this letter, dire Or compared herself to Esther. She
also wrote of her reasons for coming back to Massachusetts, quote,
whereas it is said by many of you that I
am guilty of mine own death by mind, coming as
you call it, voluntarily to Boston, I therefore declare unto
everyone that hath an ear to hear, that in the fear,

(26:41):
peace and love of God, I came, and in well
doing did, and still doth commit my soul and body
to Him, as unto a faithful creator. And for this
very end hath preserved my life.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
And she made a prophetic statement about what would happen
if the colony took the lives of any of the
Quakers had faced trial, with her quote, the Lord will
overturn you and your law by his righteous judgments and
plagues poured justly on you. She also said, quote, he
will send more of his servants among you, so that
your end shall be frustrated that think to restrain them

(27:17):
you call Quakers from coming among you, by anything you
can do to them. On the way to the execution
on October twenty seventh, sixteen fifty nine, Dier was walking
between Stevenson and Robinson, and an official asked her if
she was not ashamed to be there. She answered, quote,
it is the greatest joy and hour I can enjoy

(27:38):
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. Stevenson and Robinson were hanged, and then,
according to an account by Edward Burrow, who is a Quaker,

(27:58):
quote after they who were executed, she stepped up to
the ladder and had her coats tied about her feet
and the rope put about her neck. And as the
hangman was ready to turn her off, they cried out, stop,
for she was reprieved, and having loosed her feet bad
her come down. But she was not forward to come down,
but stood still, saying she was there willing to suffer

(28:22):
as her brethren did. Unless they would null their wicked law.
But they pulled her down, and a day or two
after carried her by force out of town.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
This was not actually a last minute reprieve, though Connecticut
Governor John Winthrop the Younger had also petitioned the Massachusetts
government on her behalf, as had Colonel Thomas Temple of
Nova Scotia. Temple had also offered the three convicted people
land and support in Nova Scotia if they were freed,

(28:53):
But it appears that officials wanted to make an example
of the men while also blunting the impact of the
executions by offering DIYer a reprieve. So maybe the focus
among Quakers would be that DIYer had been spared, not
that Stevenson and Robinson had been martyred. An order had
already been issued before Dyer was taken from the jail,

(29:15):
specifying that she would be taken to the place of
execution and blindfolded and the rope placed around her neck,
but that she would not be hanged and would be
returned to prison. In some reports, so many people came
to see this execution that a bridge collapsed under their
weight as they were leaving, killing some of the spectators

(29:36):
and injuring others. Dyer was returned to prison. She wrote
a second, shorter letter to the Massachusetts General Court. The
original of this second letter has been lost, but it
was reprinted in several places not long after she died.
We don't really know whether those reprints really reflect exactly
what she wrote, though some of the people who published

(29:58):
her first letter toned down a lot of her rhetoric.
But what we have of the second letter reads, in
part quote, 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,

(30:20):
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 choose to die than to
live as from you, as guilty of their innocent blood.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
Dier was eventually released into her husband's custody again, but
again she returned to Massachusetts, where she was arrested and
brought before the General Court. She confirmed that she was
the same Mary Dyer who had previously been sentenced to death,
reprieved and banished, and she was once again sentenced to death.

Speaker 1 (30:54):
Her response to this was quote, I came in obedience
to the will of God the last General Court, desiring
you to repeal your unrighteous laws of banishment upon pain
of death, and that same is my work now and
earnest request, because you refused before to grant my request,
although I told you that if you refuse to repeal them,

(31:16):
the Lord will send others of his servants to witness
against them. She was also asked if she was a prophet,
to which she replied she quote spake the words that
the Lord spake in her, and now the thing has
come to pass. When Mary Dyer was taken to be hanged,
her husband claimed that she was insane in an attempt

(31:36):
to get her freed. When asked to renounce her beliefs
so that she might be reprieved, though she said, quote 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. Mary Dyer was hanged on June first,
sixteen sixty at the age of about forty nine. One

(31:57):
thing to note about this hanging before we A lot
of sources, including the inscription on the statue of Mary
Dyer at the Massachusetts State House, say that she and
the other Quakers were hanged on Boston Common, but there's
some disagreement about whether that is accurate. Some modern sources
say she was hanged from a tree on Boston Common

(32:19):
known as the Great Elm, but it's not totally clear
whether that tree had been planted yet in sixteen sixty,
or if it had been, whether it would have been
big enough to be used to hang people from. Other
sources argue that this was not on Boston Common at all,
that the place of execution in sixteen sixty was on
a thin strip of land connecting Boston to Roxbury that

(32:43):
was known as Boston Neck. It is tricky to say
for sure, because written accounts from these events at the
time say things like the place of execution without offering
any detail about where that place of execution was. Some
other hangings that.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Were carried out around the same time are described more
specifically as being on Boston Neck, but it's also possible
that executions were carried out in more than one place,
or that the place.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Of execution was moved.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
We'll talk about this more on our Friday behind the Scenes,
because I tried to answer this question definitively and it
turned into enormous rabbit hole. I'm just going to go
ahead and thank Jake from the Hub History podcast for
talking to me about this, even though I don't feel
confident that we got to the actual for sure resolution.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
There's also some disagreement on where Mary Dyer was buried.
When people were executed in colonial Massachusetts, they were usually
buried at the place of execution in an unmarked grave,
but there are some accounts suggesting that the DIYer family
were allowed to take Mary's body away, either because of
her sex or because they had money and influence, or

(34:00):
perhaps both. If she was not buried at the place
of execution, she was probably buried at the Dier farm
in Rhode Island. After Diyer's execution, more people in Massachusetts
started to question whether quaker's returning to the colony should
really be punishable by death. In spite of.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
That discussion, though Quaker William Leder was hanged on March fourteenth,
sixteen sixty one, some sources describe Leder as from Barbados.
He seems to have been born in Cornwall and then
either emigrated to Barbados or was transported there due to
his religious beliefs. He's also described as having intentionally gone
to Massachusetts with the hope of being martyred. In the

(34:41):
year between Diyer's and Ledra's executions, people in England had
started to petition for the newly restored King Charles. The
second to intervene in what was happening in Massachusetts. One
was Edward Burrow, whose account we read from earlier. That
account was called a Declaration of the se and great
Persecution and Martyrdom of the people of God called Quakers

(35:04):
in New England for the worshiping of God, and that
was written as part of his attempts to persuade the
King to take action. Some were also trying to persuade
the King to end the persecution of Catholics in the
colonies as well. Charles issued an order for the persecution
of Quakers to be stopped in Massachusetts in sixteen sixty one,

(35:27):
and for colonial authorities to return Quakers to England to
be tried under existing English law, rather than continuing to
pass new laws targeting Quakers. This didn't mean that Quakers
suddenly had religious freedom in England or in the colonies.
Though Edward Burrough was arrested for holding a Quaker meeting

(35:48):
in London in sixteen sixty two and he died in
prison in sixteen sixty three, and Massachusetts continued to pass
anti Quaker laws, one of them, known as the Cart
and Tail Law, was passed in sixteen sixty one, and
under that any quote vagabonds Quaker, regardless of their gender,
would be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart,

(36:09):
and forced to follow it through the town while being whipped. Eventually, though,
the number of Quakers and the number of people of
other religions and the colonies increased, and social and religious
attitude started to shift.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
The statue of Mary Dyer that's in front of the
Massachusetts State House is by Quaker sculptor Sylvia Shad Judson,
and it was unveiled in nineteen fifty nine. There are
at least two identical castings of it, one at the
Friends Center in Philadelphia and one at a private Quaker
college in Indiana called Earlham College. As a side note,

(36:45):
Judson's most famous sculpture is probably Bird Girl, a figure
of a girl standing holding two shallow bulls, one in
each hand at about shoulder height, and that was used
on the cover art of Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil. Oh that is Mary Dyer. Do you
have any listener mail?

Speaker 2 (37:03):
I do. I have listener mail from Paul and Paul
sent this email after.

Speaker 1 (37:09):
Hey, I think.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
Behind the scenes conversation that Holly and I had about
climbing trees and so Paul said, I was just listening
to your last behind the scenes and in climbing trees
you mentioned an old izzard bit about climbing a tree
and putting on makeup, and I just wanted to let
you know about her name change to Susie and use
off she her pronouns. I know you like to be

(37:32):
respectful of people, so probably hadn't heard, and also figured
you would be happy for her. From what I can tell,
she's pretty flexible if people make mistakes, and I probably
wouldn't have thought about it, except that this was also
paired with the Jenny June episode. Thanks for being you
and for sharing your research into interesting and meaningful history.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Paul.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
So thank you Paul first for this email. I did
know that she was using she her pronouns because that
is an announcement from a cup of years back, but
the addition of the name Susie is something she announced
just like a week before we recorded, and that had
not crossed my radar mine either at all. She is,

(38:13):
though still using the name Edi Eddie Izard in like
a professional capacity, like that's still the name on all
of her social media and all of her show promotions
and stuff like that, which I get the sense is
a connected to the fact that that has been her
performance identity for so long. So what I have mostly

(38:36):
been seeing now is that like reference to interviews with
her or her as a person or things like that,
are mostly at this point with the name Susie Eddie Izard.
And then the things that are more like the publicity
for her current one woman show that she has going
on often just have the name Eddie and not the
Susie as well.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
While I was in London recently, I caught the end
of a clip of her talking about her one woman show, Yeah,
but did not see her introduced, so I well, I'm
sure they probably addressed the name change or mentioned that
she goes professionally by Eddie still, it seems, although her

(39:21):
casual name is Susie now but I didn't know, so
I know, and I think she announced that on a podcast,
and it took maybe a week for sort of news
to travel from the podcast to like more mainstream news outlets,
but it still was something I had not seen at
all until I got this email from Paul. So thank

(39:41):
you again, Paul, And if you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast or a
history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social
media I Missed in History. That's where you'll find her Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts.

(40:07):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Holly Frey

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