Mary Dyer: A Colonial Execution

One woman stood by Anne Hutchinson when nearly every one else was against her. One woman took her hand as Anne walked out of the court. One woman, and her family, also left Massachusetts with Hutchinson. That woman was Mary Dyer. It was not the first - nor would it be the last - time that Mary Dyer defied the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts. But her defiance proved much more costly than Hutchinson's.

For a time, though, Hutchinson and Dyer found freedom and safety in the territory now known as Rhode Island. Roger Williams practiced what he preached. In an effort to alert Parliament to the extraordinary ill effects of religious intolerance, Williams wrote The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. In it, Williams states the case for tolerance and diversity upon which his colony of Rhode Island was founded:

God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civill state; which inforced uniformity is the greatest occasion of civill Warre, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.

The Hutchinson and Dyer families were able to practice their religion freely in Rhode Island. But, in 1652, the Dyer family took a trip to England. The results of that trip changed Mary Dyer's religious thinking and ultimately put her in grave danger with the Puritan authorities in Boston.