Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great ReformersHubbard, Elbert
History
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers
Hubbard, Elbert
Reformers
Anne Hutchinson was mourned by Mary Dyer as a sister, and she preached
a funeral sermon at Providence in eulogy of her. Mrs. Dyer also went
back to Boston and made an address in praise of Anne Hutchinson on
Boston Common, to the great scandal of the community. Mrs. Dyer had
now become a Quaker, principally because Quakers had no paid
priesthood and allowed women who heard the Voice to preach.
Mary Dyer heard the Voice and preached. Her attention was called to
the law, which in Boston provided that Quakers and Jews should have
their ears cut off and their tongues bored.
She continued to preach, and was banished.
She came back, and was found standing in front of the jail talking
through the bars to two Quakers, Robinson and Stevenson, who were
confined there awaiting sentence. She had brought them food, and was
exhorting them to be of good-cheer. She was locked up, and asked to
recant. She acknowledged she was a Quaker, and not in sympathy with
magistracy.
She was sentenced by Governor Endicott, on her own confession, with
having a contempt for authority, and ordered to be hanged. The day
came and she was led forth, walking hand in hand with her two guilty
Quaker brothers.
The scaffold was on Boston Common, on the little hill about where the
band-stand is at the present day.
Mrs. Dyer stood and watched them hang her friends, one at a time. As
they were swung off into space she called to them to hold fast to the
truth, "for Christ is with us!" Whenever she spoke or sang, the drums
that were standing in front and back of her were ordered to beat, so
as to drown her voice.
After the bodies of her friends had dangled half an hour they were cut
down.
It was then her turn. She ascended the scaffold, refusing the help of
the Reverend Mr. Wilson. He followed her and bound his handkerchief
over her eyes, a guard in the meantime tying her hands and feet with
rawhide.
"Do you renounce the Quakers?"
"Never, praise God, His son Jesus Christ, and Anne Hutchinson, His
handmaiden--we live by truth!".
"A reprieve! a reprieve!!" some one shouted. And it was so--Governor
Endicott had ordered that this woman be banished, not hanged, unless
she again came back to Boston. It was all an arranged trick to
frighten the woman thoroughly.
Wilson removed the handkerchief from her eyes. They unbound her feet,
and the thongs that held her hands were loosed. She looked down below
at the bodies of Robinson and Stevenson lying dead on the grass. She
asked that the sentence upon her be carried out. But not so: she was
led by guards fifteen miles out into the forest and there liberated.
In a few months she was back in Boston, to see her two grown-up sons,
and also to bear witness to the "Inner Light."
Being brought before Governor Endicott, she was asked, "Are you the
same Mary Dyer that was here before?"
"I am the same Mary Dyer."
"Do you know you are under sentence of death?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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