Colonial New England Curiosities by Robert A. Geake

Author:Robert A. Geake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

Founders Brook, where Hutchinson and friends first found refuge in Rhode Island. Photo by author.

three Quakers…William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, (2 young fellows, little above 20 years of age)…and one Mary Dyer of Rohd Island, who about twenty years since, was of Boston, and brought forth a hideous monster, part like a man, part like a fish, part like a bird, part like a beast, and had no neck: it had scales, claws, and horns. These three persons had the sentence of death pronounced against them by the Genrall Court…and well they deserved it.66

Mary Dyer was reprieved from the sentence by late October, though the young men were executed. Hull’s description of the unfortunate stillbirth that Mary Dyer endured speaks to her notoriety in Boston. Dyer had been a close friend of Ann Hutchinson, and she and her husband, William, had stood by her in court when she was banished from the colony. Hutchinson had been present at the birth of the deformed child and, on the advice of her minister, John Cotton, agreed with Jane Hawkins, the midwife, to keep the incident a secret from authorities. A third woman who had arrived at the Dyer household during the birth and saw the remains of the child informed Governor John Winthrop by March 1637 that Mary Dyer had given birth to “a monster.” Winthrop immediately summoned Miss Hawkins and persuaded her to confess the details of the birth. He summoned Cotton as well and, after remonstrating him for his part in the concealment of the incident, seems to have accepted his apologies. He may have believed, as Roger Williams seems to have believed, that all parties involved had likely been influenced by the exiled Hutchinson. “Mrs Hutchinson (with whome and others of them I have much discourse) makes her Apologie for her concealement of the monster that she did nothing in it without Mr Cottons advice, though I cannot believe that he subscribes to her Applications of the parts of it,” Williams wrote.

Winthrop and Puritan authorities would use the tragedy to stir up fear of those Antinomian followers to illustrate the punishments that God dealt to those who clung to false doctrine and the Familist path of direct communication with the divine.

Mary and William Dyer returned to England with Roger Williams in 1652 to obtain the charter for Rhode Island. William returned with the founder the following year while Mary stayed and fell under the influence of the Quakers.67 Her return to New England in 1657 alarmed authorities, and while she was remanded from death, she was banished to Rhode Island.

In the first session after the expulsion of Mary Fisher, Ann Austin and the other Quaker missionaries, the General Court in 1656 enacted laws specifically aimed to curb the further arrival of sect members. These included:

• a fine of £100 against any shipmaster knowingly transporting Quakers into the colony and imprisonment if he refused to return them to the port from which they had sailed

• a like fine for anyone importing,

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