Quieting Mary Dyer: Edward Burrough and Dyer’s Letter to the Massachusetts General Court, 26 October 1659

Mary Dyer, an outspoken Quaker, was twice banished from Massachusetts on pain of death for confronting Puritan anti-Quaker laws and then hanged at Boston in June 1660. During a prior imprisonment, Dyer wrote twice to the Massachusetts General Court, advocating the Quaker cause and chastising those magistrates who prosecuted Friends. She wrote her first letter on 26 October 1659, the day before her expected execution alongside William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson. She wrote her second letter two days later, after her gallows reprieve. Together, the two letters adhere to the witnessing purpose of early Friends: to tell, to reprove, and to forewarn.¹ But the words ascribed to Dyer are not all hers. She was, rather, more extreme and more dangerous than is commonly conveyed, and Quaker authority determined to quiet her words and reshape her writing to their own purposes.

Early Friends—like many of the religious sects that sprang up in England during the two decades that included the Civil Wars, the execution of King Charles I, the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and then the restoration of monarchy in 1660—believed that they lived in an extraordinary time: a period of political turmoil and religious fervor, in which the old world order roiled in anticipation of a new order, if not the imminent arrival of the millennium.² These years were marked by radical rhetoric, radical action, and radical political and social change. Quakers were at the forefront calling for repentance and reform, but they were not alone. Both old and New England were vividly populated with antinomians, Familists, Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, Seekers, and others holding unorthodox views.³ Thus, in the urgency to be heard above the thrumming din, early Friends crafted a language of witness that was intentionally dramatic and provocative.

Of Mary Dyer’s two letters, the second—written from prison the day after the hanging of Robinson and Stephenson—is briefer, narrower in its focus, and more conventional. It is the kind of letter that early Quakers expected from their martyrs, the kind that would raise their spirits, if not their pride. Dyer reproached the persecutors of Friends, warned the Court to put away their evil doings, expressed her frustration at the intervention of the magistrates who spared her life, and asserted that she came in obedience to the command of God. While this is a powerful letter, it is on the whole straightforward, plain-speaking, and relatively inoffensive. Even when Dyer charged the General Court with wickedness for the taking of “innocent blood,” she softened her harshest words with the preface “in the Bowels of Love and meekness.” This second letter has been frequently reprinted in the various records of the sufferings of early Friends, beginning with George Bishop, the Quaker pamphleteer, in his New England Judged, in 1661.⁴ The original of this letter is apparently no longer extant.

Dyer’s first letter is longer, and far more caustic and complex. It is a powerful example of millennial exhortations, prophetic warnings, and declarations of divine judgments. It both entreats and chastises. It is alternately tender and acerbic. This sort of writing has been classified by Hugh Barbour and Arthur Roberts as a “tract of proclamation”; they note that about a third of all surviving Quaker writings through 1660 were of this type.⁵ It is also consistent with an observation made by Barbour that “[w]hen a Quaker woman spoke, the message was more often moral than doctrinal, expressing a judgment against injustice.”⁶ Dyer’s first letter was initially published about April 1661 by Edward Burrough in a pamphlet detailing the sufferings of New England Friends.⁷ The original survives in the Massachusetts Archives.⁸

Early Quaker leadership quickly grasped the value of public letters and printed tracts for spreading their core messages, and for shoring up the faithful and their meetings. Thus Friends were encouraged to witness in writing to their faith and sufferings. These letters and testimonials were collected, compiled, edited, and widely published, and the work of producing and editing these works fell to...