Worse was to follow—in June, 1659, William Robinson, of London, Merchant, and Marmaduke Stevenson, a country-man from East Yorkshire, under a religious concern, passed from Rhode Island to Boston, where with an aged man named Nicholas Davis[52] they were speedily imprisoned, Mary Dyer, who came from Rhode Island, sharing the same fate; there they remained until the sitting of the Court of Assistants, when they were sentenced to banishment, and should they be found within the Jurisdiction of the Court after the 14th of September following they were condemned to death. They were kept prisoners till the 12th of September. Mary Dyer and Nicholas Davis “found freedom to depart” out of the Province; but William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson “were constrained in the love and power of God not to depart,” so they passed out of prison to Salem and remained there and at Piscataway and the parts thereabouts in the service of the Lord. On the 13th of October they returned to Boston “that metropolis of Blood” as it was styled, and with them Alice Cowland, “who came to bring Linnen to wrap the dead bodies of them who were to suffer.” Several other Friends joined them and the Chronicler tells us: “These all came together in the Moving and Power of the Lord as one, to look your Bloody Laws in the Face,” and to accompany those who should suffer by them. Mary Dyer had returned also and on the 19th of the same month she, with William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, was condemned to death. On the 28th of the same month they were led forth to execution, by the back way, we are told, for the authorities were afraid “of the fore way lest it should affect the people too much.” Drums, too, were beaten, so that no words from the prisoners might be heard; we are told that they came “to the place of Execution Hand in Hand, all three of them as to a Weding-day, with great Chearfulness of Heart.” The two men were hanged, but Mary Dyer was reprieved at the last moment, by petition of her son, only to suffer the death penalty a few months later. Yet another martyr was to seal his testimony with his blood—William Leddra, described as of Barbados but a native of Cornwall, was executed at Boston the 14th of March, 1660/61, under the law of banishment, who, before his final trial, had suffered much persecution and grievous cruelty. His beautiful and saintly nature is revealed in a letter written by him “To the Society of the little Flock of Christ,” dated from Boston prison the day before his execution; therein is no fierce denunciation of his persecutors, but words of consolation and hope to his sorrowing friends.[53]