Anne Hutchinson was arraigned before a General Court of all the ministers, held in Boston in 1637. She defended herself with great ability, but without avail, in fact it is very possible that such unusual temerity on the part of a woman may have been largely responsible for the severity of the sentence passed upon her, for she was condemned to banishment and declared excommunicate. As the exiled outcast woman passed sadly down the aisle, one Mary Dyer[39] joined her and went forth with her, thus taking the first step on that path of suffering which led, twenty-three years later, to the gallows on Boston Common. Anne Hutchinson, after sentence of exile had been pronounced, joined her friends. She had a very considerable following in the new Colony of Aquiday, or Aquidneck, now called Rhode Island, which later became for the persecuted Quakers a veritable “little Zoar,”[40] for these early settlers learned the lesson of religious toleration which was reflected in their laws.[41] The King’s Commissioners, who visited the Colony about 1664, reported that in Rhode Island “all who desire it are admitted freemen. Liberty of conscience and worship is allowed to all who live civilly. They admitted all religions, even Quakers and Generalists, and is generally hated by other Colonies.”[42] Not only was Rhode Island a city of refuge for the persecuted Quakers, but their message was sympathetically received by many in the Colony. Anne Hutchinson did not live to witness the sufferings of the Quakers, as she and several members of her family were murdered by the Indians in the autumn of 1643; her sister Katharine Scot,[43] however, early joined the new sect; she is described as “a Mother of many Children, one that had lived with her Husband, of an Unblameable Conversation, and a Grave, Sober, Ancient Woman, and of good Breeding, as to the Outward, as Men account.”[44] She came from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston on hearing of the sentence passed on three young men who, for the crime of being Quakers, were condemned each to the loss of an ear; on account of her comments thereon she was cast into prison and received “Ten Cruel Stripes with a three-fold-corded-knotted-Whip,” and warned that “if she came thither again they were likely to have a law to hang her,” to which she replied: “If God call us, Wo be to us, if we come not; And I question not, but he whom we love, will make us not to count our Lives dear unto our selves for the sake of his Name.”[45] Truly she and her sister Anne Hutchinson came of heroic stock.