In 1658-59, persecutions continued fearfully, and numbers were arrested, imprisoned, and punished. In the latter year, William Robinson, formerly a London merchant, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Myra (or Mary) Dyar, having returned after banishment, were sentenced to be hung; and the two men were hung, Oct. 20. Myra Dyar was upon the ladder, her arms and legs tied, and the rope about her neck, when, at the urgent solicitation of her son, she was spared and sent out of the colony; but she returned again the next year, impressed with the belief that her death was necessary to the cause she had espoused,--as fanatical as were the Puritans themselves,--and was hung in June. The bodies of the men, it is said, were shamefully stripped and abused, after they were literally cut down, and were thrown into a hole together. In July, 1660, Margaret Brewster, from Barbadoes, and two or three other women, made an incursion into the Old South Church; she appeared "in sackcloth, with ashes on her head, barefoot and her face blackened," with some purpose of warning the people against the black pox, "if they put in practice a cruel law against swearing." It is said also "that Deborah Wilson went through the streets of Salem naked as she came into the world, for which she was well whipped." Thomas Newhouse went into a meeting-house in Boston, and smashed two empty bottles together, with a threat to the people; and, no doubt, other provoking things were done. In March, 1661, persecutions still prevailing, William Leddra, who came from Barbadoes, was arrested, together with one William Brend; and Drake says, "The cruelties perpetrated on these poor, misguided men are altogether of a character too horrid to be related." It is said that Leddra would not accept life on any terms, and was therefore hung on the 14th of March; and Capt. Johnson, who led him forth to the gallows, was afterwards taken "with a distemper which deprived him of his reason and understanding as a man." These proceedings, outrageous as they certainly were, led to a movement in England by the Quakers and their friends, which resulted in an order from the King, Sept. 9, 1661, requiring that a stop should be put to all capital or corporal punishments. The following are the words of this remarkable document:-- "CHARLES R.