In October, 1659, under the law which made it a capital offence for a Quaker to return to the colony, Marmaduke Stevenson of Yorkshire, who related of himself that, while he was at plough at Skipton, a voice called to him saying, “I have ordained thee to be a prophet to the nations;” William Robinson of London, who had already been whipped, and Mary Dyer, the widow of the late recorder of Providence, and a friend of Anne Hutchinson, were all found guilty of “rebellion, sedition, and presumptuously obtruding themselves into the colony after banishment on pain of death.” Mary Dyer was carried to the gallows with the rope round her neck, where she witnessed the execution of her friends, after which she was reprieved; but the reprieve was hardly welcome; “Let me suffer as my brethren,” said she, “unless you will annul your wicked law!” The government of Massachusetts, in excuse for these extreme measures, asserted, that “they sought not the death but the absence of the Quakers;” and when, some months later, Mary Dyer, “impelled,” as she said, “by the Spirit,” returned to testify against “the bloody town of Boston,” they thought it necessary to vindicate their authority by hanging her as they had done the others. Vain were all these barbarities to put down quakerism, or to keep “the accursed sect” out of the puritan borders; for as Wendlock Christopherson, who having returned in defiance of the sentence of death, now standing face to face with his stern and pitiless judges, said: “for the last man that was put to death there are five come in his room; and if you have power to take my life from me, God can raise up the same principle of life in ten of his servants, and send them among you in my room, that you may have torment upon torment.” Whether it was the fear of this Hydra-headed quakerism, or whether God prevented them from taking his life, he too was reprieved after sentence of death, and finally set at liberty. Little mercy, however, prevailed generally; the prisons were full of Quakers, men, women, and even children, as in the case of Patience Scott, a girl of eleven, and the hangman’s whip seemed never to have done its work. At length the compassion of the people generally was so much excited, that night and day such crowds gathered round the prison to condole with and to hear the Quakers, who preached through the bars, that a guard was placed round its walls to keep the people off.