Mary Dyer and the Boston Martyrs

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

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Speaker 2: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. The other day I took a long walk through Boston, and that walk took me past the statue of Mary Dyer that's in front of the East wing of the Massachusetts State House. And every time I've gone by there, I've been really curious about her, and we've gotten some listener requests for an episode on her as well. Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson were two of the women who were banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious activities in the seventeenth century, although Anne Hutchinson is probably the one whose name is a little better known today. There is a statue of her in front of the State House as well, but it's a little bit farther back from the road. It's like not the side of the state House. Also, I walk past the most often, so she just hasn't caught my eye as much. We are going to talk a bit about Hutchinson in this episode, though, because these two women knew each other and parts of their lives are interconnected. Both of these women went through a lot of hardship in terms of religious persecution and things that happened to their children and families. This was a time when a lot of people did not survive their early childhood. And we're also going to be talking about some pregnancy losses that have some additionally upsetting layers besides just the part of losing a pregnancy. Mary Dyer was born Mary or perhaps Marie Barrett, probably in the early sixteen hundreds. We don't know the exact date, but most sources put the year as sometime around sixteen eleven, and most likely in Somersetshire, England.

00:01:54
Speaker 1: We know very little about her early life or her family, but what we do know about her suggests that they were fairly well off, perhaps not rich, but affluent enough that a daughter grew up learning how to read and was later described as well educated and respectable.

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Speaker 2: On October twenty seventh, sixteen thirty three, Mary got married to a milliner named William Dyer. That last name is also spelled Dyaar and dre in various seventeenth century documents. He had been apprenticed to a phishmonger when he was younger, and was also a member of the Fishmonger's Company. They had their first child, named William, in sixteen thirty four, but sadly, he died only three days after being baptized and was buried on his parents' first wedding anniversary. In sixteen thirty five, the Dyers moved to Massachusetts Bay Colony. Mary was probably pregnant as they crossed the Atlantic. Their first surviving son, Samuel, was baptized in Boston on December twentieth, sixteen thirty five, and they had joined the church just the week before, so the Massachusetts Bay Colony was only a few years old when the Dyers arrived there. The Massachusetts Bay Company had received a charter from King Charles the First in sixteen twenty nine, authorizing the company to colonize a portion of what's now thought of as New England. About a thousand Puritans arrived from England on a series of ships over the course of the following year. From the Crown's point of view, this charter was about colonization and trade, but the colonists were also motivated by the idea of establishing a Puritan theocracy in North America, one in which all of the colonists were continually striving to form a perfect society that was essentially the Kingdom of God on earth. So we need to take a minute to talk about Puritanism. You could really do an entire study on all the historical and religious nuances of the Puritan religious movement and all of the many, many ways it affected Britain's government and society, how Puritan's religious beliefs and practices affected their approach to colonizing North America. So this is really just a broad layperson's overview to help make sense of some things that happened in Mary Dyer's life. Puritanism grew out of the establishment of the Church of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First in the fifteen fifties. Elizabeth and Parliament had tried to resolve ongoing disputes between Catholics and Protestants by creating a church that was largely Protestant in its beliefs, but also incorporated elements that retained the appearance of Catholicism. This was done through a series of laws and decisions that came to be known as the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. Puritans believed that the Church of England needed to get rid of those lingering elements of Catholicism that it needed to be purified. The term Puritan started as an insulting nickname referencing that idea of purification. Since this was a grassroots religious movement and not a centralized denomination with like an official decision making body to formalize its beliefs and creeds, there could be a lot of variation from one Puritan to the next. This is especially true since this movement advocated for everyone to be able to read and understand scripture for themselves. That also meant that most Puritan girls were taught how to read, although most of the time they still typically didn't have the same access to education that boys did. This focus on individual study and understanding of scripture also meant that people came to a lot of their own interpretations, which led to a number of disagreements and schisms among different groups of Puritans. That was in addition to all the disagreements between Puritans and religious conformists in the Church of England. There were a whole lot of people writing pamphlets and preaching about how the Church of England needed to check, but they were not all saying the same things. By any stretch. These disputes played a big role in a lot of English history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the English Civil Wars. That's not directly connected to what we're talking about today, but we just want to acknowledge that the influence of Puritanism went way beyond things like disputes over whether clerical vestments were too Catholic looking. One central part of Puritan theology involved the idea of covenance between humanity and God. John Winthrop, who was one of the founders of Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote a sermon on board the Arabella while traveling to North America, and in this sermon he described the Puritan colonists as having a covenant with one another and with God. This covenant meant that they were divinely ordained to build a community dedicated to God's law, a city on a hill that would be a shining example to the rest of the world. In this community, the rich would be expected to show charity to the poor, and the poor would be expected to work hard, and everyone would be expected to live in strict adherents to God's law. Other covenants related to how humanity would attain salvation The Covenant of Works connected back to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. God had told Adam that he would have eternal life in Paradise as long as he followed God's law, and when Adam broke that law, he was cast out of the garden. The Covenant of Works stressed that Christians were obligated to follow religious and moral law. The Covenants of Grace and Redemption were connected to the idea that people's belief in God was necessary to attain salvation and to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to free humanity from sin. So for Puritans, all of these covenants also rested on the idea that God chose only some people to be saved, and that a person could not know definitively whether they had been saved or not whether they were still alive. So people were also kind of continually examining their own lives, both inwardly and outwardly, looking for signs of their own salvation. One of the disputes among Puritans in the seventeenth century involved whether salvation was granted by God unconditionally or whether it had to be earned through good works and dedication to the law. Either way, most Puritans believed that this was predestined and unchangeable. People who argued that salvation was a gift from God and not something that had to be earned were often described as antinomian, coming from Greek words roughly meaning against the law.

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Speaker 1: This term was first coined in the sixteenth century and initially was mostly used in the context of German theologia Johannes Agricola and his followers, whose teachings included these ideas. But in the seventeenth century, as more people, including more Puritans, began to adopt the same ideas, the term antinomian started to be used a lot more widely. It was often a disparaging term, used to lump anyone who wanted less focus on law and more focus on grace into one vilified group. To many Puritans, antinomianism was heresy.

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Speaker 2: One of the seventeenth century figures who brought these ideas into more prominence was Puritan minister John Cotton. Cotton had emigrated to the colonies in sixteen thirty three after facing legal action for his non conforming religious views back in England. Another clergyman was John Wheelwright, who emigrated to Massachusetts the following year. Anne Hutchinson was Wheelwright's sister in law, and she immigrated to Massachusetts in sixteen thirty four. As well, she was a midwife with a reputation for being a good mother and one of the people who could really be counted on to help take care of an anyone who was sick or dying. She also held meetings in her home, hosting other Puritan women to talk about the weak sermons and other religious teachings. Many women found her wise and insightful, and there were some men who appreciated her perspective as well.

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Speaker 1: All three of.

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Speaker 2: These people became involved in the dispute between the people who put more emphasis on the covenant of grace and those who were really focused on the covenant of works. This dispute became known as the Antinomian controversy or the Free Grace controversy. For a brief period, Cotton, Hutchinson, and Wheelwright and other people who thought similarly to them, they had all had some support from Colonial Governor Henry Vane the Younger, who was in office from May of sixteen thirty six to May of sixteen thirty seven and was a proponent of religious tolerance. But in January of sixteen thirty seven, Wheelwright delivered a sermon that really criticized a lot of the ministers and magistates of Massachusetts Bay Colony for their focus on the Covenant of Works. That led to his being charged with contempt and sedition. Petitions were circulated on his behalf, and everybody who signed one of those petitions was later disarmed and disenfranchised by the colonial government.

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Speaker 1: John Cotton was able to smooth over his disagreements with church leaders and he didn't face a lot of consequences during all this. But John Wheelwright was ultimately convicted and banished, and Anne Hutchinson faced trial as well. Hutchinson's trial also led to Mary Dyer being targeted, and we're going to get into that after we first take a sponsor break. Before we get to Anne Hutchinson's trial, we need to return to Mary Dyer's life for a moment. On October seventeenth, sixteen thirty seven, Mary went into labor. She was about seven months pregnant with her third child, and her labor was prolonged, difficult and complicated. At least three midwives came to help. We only know who two of them were. Though those were Anne Hutchinson and Jane Hawkins. Mary's baby was stillborn and also had visible congenital anomalies. This was something that people referred to at the time as a monstrous birth. We talked about this a lot more in our episode on the so called Monster found in the Heart of a man named Edward May in sixteen thirty seven. That episode came out last October. But basically, people interpreted these kinds of occurrences as some sort of punishment from God or as evidence of God's displeasure. Hutchinson knew how the community would interpret this birth, so she went to John Cotton for advice. Cotton advised her to bury the baby in secret, which she did. There's some speculation here, but John Cotton may have believed that this really was a punishment from God, but that it was a punishment that was meant only for Mary and her husband to experience, not something the entire colony needed to know about. In spite of this secrecy, though, rumors started to spread that Mary Dyer had given birth to a monster. Then Anne Hutchinson was put on trial in late sixteen thirty seven and early sixteen thirty eight. The first was a civil trial held in November sixteen thirty seven, a few days after John Wheelwright had been convicted and banished. Hutchinson was charged with producing the ministers, in other words, lying about or defaming them. This charge was difficult to prove because most of what she was being charged with had happened in her own home, it was not something that happened in public. But in court, Hutchinson also testified about how her religious knowledge had come to her through her own Wath revelations equivalent to those that God had revealed to Abraham. She also said that the people interrogating her would be cursed if they continued on in this course of action. Based on things that she said in her court testimony, Hutchinson was convicted and she was held in Roxbury until she could face a religious trial. Over that winter, when she was being held, she had almost no contact with her family, which included six children under the age of ten at that point. That was both because of the travel involved to get to her in the winter weather. Hutchinson's religious trial began on March fifteenth of sixteen thirty eight, and she was convicted of lying in heresy and was excommunicated. After the verdict was announced, Mary Dyer accompanied Anne Hutchinson out of the courtroom. People started to ask who this woman was, and word spread that it was the woman who had given birth to the monster. That then came to the attention of John Winthrop, who had followed Henry Vane as governor. He questioned both Anne Hutchinson and Jane Hawkins about Dyer's pregnancy and her baby. Although Hutchinson didn't offer a lot of details, Winthrop told Hawkins that Hutchinson had made a full confession. That led Hawkins to confess everything herself. Winthrop then interrogated John Cotton, who confessed his involvement as well. Winthrop had the baby's grave found and exhumed, and he wrote a description of what he found there quote, It was a woman child, stillborn about two months before the just time, having life hours before. It was of ordinary bigness. It had a face but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an apes. It had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp. Two of them were above one inch long, the other two shorter, The eyes standing out, and the mouth also the nose hooked upward all over the breast and back full of sharp pricks and scales like thornback, the navel, and all the belly, with the distinction of where the back should be and the back and hips before where the belly should have been behind between the shoulders. It had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out. It had arms and legs as other children, but instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl with sharp talons. I just want to be clear, This passage says a lot more about like Winthrop's religious beliefs and what he expected to see there than what he honestly could have been looking at. Dyer had already been described as polluted with Hutchinson's ideas, and this really solidified the community's view that she was also deserving of God's punishment. People can take I knewed to talk and write about Mary Dyer's so called monstrous birth and what it meant for decades continuing even years after her death. Anne Hutchinson's husband, Will had already started making plans to leave Massachusetts. He and Anne moved to what became known as Rhode Island, and the Dyers went as well. In the summer of sixteen thirty eight, Anne Hutchinson experienced a pregnancy loss of her own, and people saw this fetus as monstrous as well. Word traveled back to Massachusetts, where people saw this as a further indictment of both Hutchinson and Dyer. The Dyers spent the next several years living in Rhode Island, where William helped found the city of Portsmouth and became a prominent part of the community and the government there. He and Mary had several more children, William in sixteen forty two, Mahershah Hollisbaz in sixteen forty three, Henry in sixteen forty seven, Mary probably sometime in sixteen forty eight, and Charles in sixteen fifty. The Hutchinsons ultimately moved again when it seemed like the Colony of Massachusetts was going to annex the land that they had been living on. They moved to New Netherland, which would later become New York, and while they were living there, Director of New Netherland, William Keith, started trying to drive the indigenous nations of the Wappinger Confederacy out of the area, including by attacking the people and settlements of the Confederacy's member nations. In retaliation, members of the Seawinoy Nation attacked colonial settlements, including the one where the Hutchinsons were living. Anne Hutchinson, six of her children, and nine other people were all killed in the same attack in August of sixteen forty three. Hutchinson's husband had died sometime before this, and the only member of her family to survive the attack was her nine year old daughter, Susannah. Susannah was captured and held for roughly three years before either being ransomed or traded to family back in Massachusetts, as had happened with Hutchinson's pregnancy loss. The response from a lot of people in Massachusetts was that she and her family had deserved this because of her heresies, so to return to William and Mary Dyer. From sixteen fifty two to sixteen fifty seven, they returned to England, and while they were there, Mary became a Quaker. Like Puritan, The term Quaker had started as an insulting nickname, this time for the followers of George Fox in the seventeenth century. Quakerism started as another religious reform movement, and it grew into the religious Society of Friends, and there were a lot of commonalities between Quaker teachings in what Anne Hutchinson had been preaching and advocating. In particular, there was the idea of the inner Light, something that resided within everyone, no matter who they were, which could lead them to divine revelation themselves. Although most Quaker leaders were men, women had more spiritual autonomy and agency among the Quakers than in many other religions. In many ways, women were charged with the spiritual well being of their homes and their communities, and women held that same divine light and were empowered to speak on their own beliefs. But religious and civil officials in England saw this as a threat. As more people became Quakers, the Church of England lost members and the church also lost their tithes. Many Quaker views were also seen as heretical. The focus on a person's own spiritual revelations undermined social structures that were based on adherence to church law. The Quakers didn't have a religious hierarchy, unlike the Church of England, which had an established hierarchy that was connected to the structure of society. England did not have a lot of tolerance for religious nonconformity, and the Quakers were really nonconformist. And the number of Quakers grew very quickly, from about five thousand in sixteen fifty four to twenty thousand and sixteen fifty seven. And that rapid growth was threatening as well. So Quakers were persecuted in England, leaving some of them to leave for the colonies in North America, where they were seen probably as an even bigger threat. As we said earlier, the colony of Massachusetts had been founded as a Puritan theocracy. It did not welcome the idea of Quaker newcomers at all. Puritan officials in Massachusetts described the arrival of Quakers as an invasion. In Massachusetts, Quakers were punished with beatings, whippings, and imprisonments. Some were indentured to British colonies in Virginia and Barbados, and in sixteen fifty six Massachusetts passed a law ordering Quakers to be banished. A year after that law was passed, Mary Dyer, now a Quaker, went back to Massachusetts more after a sponsor break. When William and Mary Dyer returned to New England in sixteen fifty seven, they were traveling with another Quaker woman named Anne Burden. Anne and Mary had made their religious beliefs known. They were both arrested. Anne was forced to return to England. Mary said she had not known about the law banning Quakers from Massachusetts, and she was released into her husband's custody. Soon Mary became one of the many Quakers who tried to return to Massachusetts after being expelled from the colony, and today a lot of discussions on this persistence in defying the law and returning to Massachusetts is framed in terms of things like religious freedom, religious tolerance, and hypocrisy. Many Puritans moved to the colonies because they did not feel they could exercise their religion freely in England or had faced persecution or legal action for their religion, and now those same people were doing the exact same thing to the Quakers. Some Quaker writing from the seventeenth century does point out this hypocrisy, but early Quakerism was also influenced by millennialism, which involves the idea that the return of Jesus Christ was eminent. Early Quaker rhetoric included a lot of prophecy about the coming of Christ and the judgments that God would deliver at the turn of this religious millennium. So there was also a lot of writing about how, because of its mistreatment of Quakers, who were people of God, the colony of Massachusetts was sowing the seeds of its own damnation. Many of the Quakers who returned to Massachusetts spoke about being called by God to do so. Of course, leaders in Massachusetts thought of Quakers as heretics and really did not see any of these prophetic statements as valid, and they continued to pass laws to try to keep Quakers out of the colony. In October of sixteen fifty seven, a law was passed increasing the fine for being caught harboring a Quaker. There were also gruesome physical punishments outlined in the law, which escalated each time a person returned to the colony. In sixteen fifty eight, Massachusetts passed a law that made returning to the colony more than once after being banished punishable by death. In the summer of sixteen fifty nine, Quakers Marmaduke Stevenson, William Robinson, and Nicholas Davis all traveled to Massachusetts. Stevenson was originally a farmer from Yorkshire, and Robinson had arrived in North America from London. All of them were arrested and they were all banished, and Robinson was also publicly whipped. Stevenson and Robinson returned to Austin and were imprisoned. When Mary Dyer went to visit them in prison, she was imprisoned as well. On September twelfth, sixteen fifty nine, they were all banished under penalty of death if they returned, but almost immediately they did return, along with other Quakers, and they were once again arrested. On October nineteenth, sixteen fifty nine, Stevenson, Robinson, and Dyer all faced trial, and all three of them were questioned by Massachusetts Governor John Endicott as well as other magistrates. Endicott delivered their sentence, which was quote, you shall be had back to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, to be hanged on the gallows till you are dead. Upon hearing her sentence, Dyer reportedly said, the will of the Lord be done, and as she was led away, said yay and joyfully I go. While awaiting her execution, Dyer wrote a letter to the Massage to use its general court. It contains references to biblical figures and events from the Bible, including an account from the Book of Esther. King Ajazuaris had been persecuting Jews, and Esther had convinced him not only to end that persecution, but also to become an advocate for the Jewish people. In this letter, dire Or compared herself to Esther. She also wrote of her reasons for coming back to Massachusetts, quote, whereas it is said by many of you that I am guilty of mine own death by mind, coming as you call it, voluntarily to Boston, I therefore declare unto everyone that hath an ear to hear, that in the fear, peace and love of God, I came, and in well doing did, and still doth commit my soul and body to Him, as unto a faithful creator. And for this very end hath preserved my life.

00:26:54
Speaker 2: And she made a prophetic statement about what would happen if the colony took the lives of any of the Quakers had faced trial, with her quote, the Lord will overturn you and your law by his righteous judgments and plagues poured justly on you. She also said, quote, he will send more of his servants among you, so that your end shall be frustrated that think to restrain them you call Quakers from coming among you, by anything you can do to them. On the way to the execution on October twenty seventh, sixteen fifty nine, Dier was walking between Stevenson and Robinson, and an official asked her if she was not ashamed to be there. She answered, quote, it is the greatest joy and hour I can enjoy in this world. No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand the sweet incomes and refreshings of the spirit of the Lord, which now I enjoy. Stevenson and Robinson were hanged, and then, according to an account by Edward Burrow, who is a Quaker, quote after they who were executed, she stepped up to the ladder and had her coats tied about her feet and the rope put about her neck. And as the hangman was ready to turn her off, they cried out, stop, for she was reprieved, and having loosed her feet bad her come down. But she was not forward to come down, but stood still, saying she was there willing to suffer as her brethren did. Unless they would null their wicked law. But they pulled her down, and a day or two after carried her by force out of town.

00:28:32
Speaker 1: This was not actually a last minute reprieve, though Connecticut Governor John Winthrop the Younger had also petitioned the Massachusetts government on her behalf, as had Colonel Thomas Temple of Nova Scotia. Temple had also offered the three convicted people land and support in Nova Scotia if they were freed, But it appears that officials wanted to make an example of the men while also blunting the impact of the executions by offering DIYer a reprieve. So maybe the focus among Quakers would be that DIYer had been spared, not that Stevenson and Robinson had been martyred. An order had already been issued before Dyer was taken from the jail, specifying that she would be taken to the place of execution and blindfolded and the rope placed around her neck, but that she would not be hanged and would be returned to prison. In some reports, so many people came to see this execution that a bridge collapsed under their weight as they were leaving, killing some of the spectators and injuring others. Dyer was returned to prison. She wrote a second, shorter letter to the Massachusetts General Court. The original of this second letter has been lost, but it was reprinted in several places not long after she died. We don't really know whether those reprints really reflect exactly what she wrote, though some of the people who published her first letter toned down a lot of her rhetoric. But what we have of the second letter reads, in part quote, my life is not accepted, neither availeth me in comparison with the lives and liberty of the truth and servants of the Living God, for which in the bowels of love and meekness I sought you. Yet nevertheless, with wicked hands have you put two of them to death, which makes me to feel that the mercies of the wicked is cruelty. I rather choose to die than to live as from you, as guilty of their innocent blood.

00:30:34
Speaker 2: Dier was eventually released into her husband's custody again, but again she returned to Massachusetts, where she was arrested and brought before the General Court. She confirmed that she was the same Mary Dyer who had previously been sentenced to death, reprieved and banished, and she was once again sentenced to death.

00:30:54
Speaker 1: Her response to this was quote, I came in obedience to the will of God the last General Court, desiring you to repeal your unrighteous laws of banishment upon pain of death, and that same is my work now and earnest request, because you refused before to grant my request, although I told you that if you refuse to repeal them, the Lord will send others of his servants to witness against them. She was also asked if she was a prophet, to which she replied she quote spake the words that the Lord spake in her, and now the thing has come to pass. When Mary Dyer was taken to be hanged, her husband claimed that she was insane in an attempt to get her freed. When asked to renounce her beliefs so that she might be reprieved, though she said, quote nay, I cannot, for in obedience to the will of the Lord God, I came, and in his will I abide, faithful to the death. Mary Dyer was hanged on June first, sixteen sixty at the age of about forty nine. One thing to note about this hanging before we A lot of sources, including the inscription on the statue of Mary Dyer at the Massachusetts State House, say that she and the other Quakers were hanged on Boston Common, but there's some disagreement about whether that is accurate. Some modern sources say she was hanged from a tree on Boston Common known as the Great Elm, but it's not totally clear whether that tree had been planted yet in sixteen sixty, or if it had been, whether it would have been big enough to be used to hang people from. Other sources argue that this was not on Boston Common at all, that the place of execution in sixteen sixty was on a thin strip of land connecting Boston to Roxbury that was known as Boston Neck. It is tricky to say for sure, because written accounts from these events at the time say things like the place of execution without offering any detail about where that place of execution was. Some other hangings that.

00:33:02
Speaker 2: Were carried out around the same time are described more specifically as being on Boston Neck, but it's also possible that executions were carried out in more than one place, or that the place.

00:33:15
Speaker 1: Of execution was moved.

00:33:16
Speaker 2: We'll talk about this more on our Friday behind the Scenes, because I tried to answer this question definitively and it turned into enormous rabbit hole. I'm just going to go ahead and thank Jake from the Hub History podcast for talking to me about this, even though I don't feel confident that we got to the actual for sure resolution.

00:33:38
Speaker 1: There's also some disagreement on where Mary Dyer was buried. When people were executed in colonial Massachusetts, they were usually buried at the place of execution in an unmarked grave, but there are some accounts suggesting that the DIYer family were allowed to take Mary's body away, either because of her sex or because they had money and influence, or perhaps both. If she was not buried at the place of execution, she was probably buried at the Dier farm in Rhode Island. After Diyer's execution, more people in Massachusetts started to question whether quaker's returning to the colony should really be punishable by death. In spite of.

00:34:18
Speaker 2: That discussion, though Quaker William Leder was hanged on March fourteenth, sixteen sixty one, some sources describe Leder as from Barbados. He seems to have been born in Cornwall and then either emigrated to Barbados or was transported there due to his religious beliefs. He's also described as having intentionally gone to Massachusetts with the hope of being martyred. In the year between Diyer's and Ledra's executions, people in England had started to petition for the newly restored King Charles. The second to intervene in what was happening in Massachusetts. One was Edward Burrow, whose account we read from earlier. That account was called a Declaration of the se and great Persecution and Martyrdom of the people of God called Quakers in New England for the worshiping of God, and that was written as part of his attempts to persuade the King to take action. Some were also trying to persuade the King to end the persecution of Catholics in the colonies as well. Charles issued an order for the persecution of Quakers to be stopped in Massachusetts in sixteen sixty one, and for colonial authorities to return Quakers to England to be tried under existing English law, rather than continuing to pass new laws targeting Quakers. This didn't mean that Quakers suddenly had religious freedom in England or in the colonies. Though Edward Burrough was arrested for holding a Quaker meeting in London in sixteen sixty two and he died in prison in sixteen sixty three, and Massachusetts continued to pass anti Quaker laws, one of them, known as the Cart and Tail Law, was passed in sixteen sixty one, and under that any quote vagabonds Quaker, regardless of their gender, would be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and forced to follow it through the town while being whipped. Eventually, though, the number of Quakers and the number of people of other religions and the colonies increased, and social and religious attitude started to shift.

00:36:23
Speaker 1: The statue of Mary Dyer that's in front of the Massachusetts State House is by Quaker sculptor Sylvia Shad Judson, and it was unveiled in nineteen fifty nine. There are at least two identical castings of it, one at the Friends Center in Philadelphia and one at a private Quaker college in Indiana called Earlham College. As a side note, Judson's most famous sculpture is probably Bird Girl, a figure of a girl standing holding two shallow bulls, one in each hand at about shoulder height, and that was used on the cover art of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Oh that is Mary Dyer. Do you have any listener mail?

00:37:03
Speaker 2: I do. I have listener mail from Paul and Paul sent this email after.

00:37:09
Speaker 1: Hey, I think.

00:37:10
Speaker 2: Behind the scenes conversation that Holly and I had about climbing trees and so Paul said, I was just listening to your last behind the scenes and in climbing trees you mentioned an old izzard bit about climbing a tree and putting on makeup, and I just wanted to let you know about her name change to Susie and use off she her pronouns. I know you like to be respectful of people, so probably hadn't heard, and also figured you would be happy for her. From what I can tell, she's pretty flexible if people make mistakes, and I probably wouldn't have thought about it, except that this was also paired with the Jenny June episode. Thanks for being you and for sharing your research into interesting and meaningful history.

00:37:51
Speaker 1: Paul.

00:37:51
Speaker 2: So thank you Paul first for this email. I did know that she was using she her pronouns because that is an announcement from a cup of years back, but the addition of the name Susie is something she announced just like a week before we recorded, and that had not crossed my radar mine either at all. She is, though still using the name Edi Eddie Izard in like a professional capacity, like that's still the name on all of her social media and all of her show promotions and stuff like that, which I get the sense is a connected to the fact that that has been her performance identity for so long. So what I have mostly been seeing now is that like reference to interviews with her or her as a person or things like that, are mostly at this point with the name Susie Eddie Izard. And then the things that are more like the publicity for her current one woman show that she has going on often just have the name Eddie and not the Susie as well.

00:38:57
Speaker 1: While I was in London recently, I caught the end of a clip of her talking about her one woman show, Yeah, but did not see her introduced, so I well, I'm sure they probably addressed the name change or mentioned that she goes professionally by Eddie still, it seems, although her casual name is Susie now but I didn't know, so I know, and I think she announced that on a podcast, and it took maybe a week for sort of news to travel from the podcast to like more mainstream news outlets, but it still was something I had not seen at all until I got this email from Paul. So thank you again, Paul, And if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media I Missed in History. That's where you'll find her Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.