Who is
buried in Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb? Is the Pope Catholic? Who wrote Mary Dyer’s
last letter?
In previous books about Mary Dyer,
in internet genealogy sites that copy from one another, and going all the way
back to the 17th-century Quaker chroniclers, we are told that Mary
Dyer (known as the “Quaker Martyr”) wrote two letters in late October 1659: the
night before her death sentence was to be executed, and again, after her
reprieve. Those writers give us the text content of the letters. The inscription on the Mary Dyer
sculpture in Boston
is taken from the text of the second letter.
While researching my novels on the
Dyers, I tracked down original documents to see what the penmanship was like. (I didn't attempt graphological analysis.)
Were there cross-outs, ink blots, even margins, evidence of a bumpy surface on
which the paper was placed, or did the text flow freely from mind to the page?
Many men who were fairly high in colonial government could only make marks instead of signatures. William Dyer was a businessman, clerk, and eventually a colonial official
(first attorney general in all of America)—was he measured in his phrasing, did
he cram his handwriting to save space at the end of a line, did he write in
even planes or slant it up or down, and did he use standard spellings of his
day or write phonetically?
Of course, I had similar questions
about Mary’s writing. Many women could read their Bibles, at least, but not
every man or woman could also write (print or cursive), and if they did, it
looked like chicken scratches.
So I set about looking for these
original holographs. After many hours of research, I found two of William’s
letters regarding Mary (the ones transcribed accurately on several websites),
and one of Mary’s letters, in the Massachusetts Archive and its state library.
 |
Fragmentary image of Mary Dyer's letter to the Boston court,
26 October 1659.
Image courtesy of Massachusetts Archive |
As soon as I read Mary’s letter, I
noticed that it bore little resemblance to the text she’s supposed to have
written the night before she expected to die.
First lines of the letter everyone thinks
Mary wrote:
Whereas
I am by many charged with the Guiltiness of my own Blood: if you mean in my
Coming to Boston, I am therein clear, and justified by the Lord, in whose Will
I came, who will require my Blood of you, be sure, who have made a Law to take
away the Lives of the Innocent Servants of God, if they come among you who are
called by you, 'Cursed Quakers,' altho I say, and am a Living Witness for them
and the Lord, that he hath blessed them, and sent them unto you: Therefore, be
not found Fighters against God, but let my Counsel and Request be accepted with
you, To repeal all such Laws, that the Truth and Servants of the Lord, may have
free Passage among you and you be kept from shedding innocent Blood, which I
know there are many among you would not do, if they knew it so to be: Nor can
the Enemy that stirreth you up thus to destroy this holy Seed, in any Measure
contervail, the great Damage that you will by thus doing procure: Therefeore,
seeing the Lord hath not hid it from me, it lyeth upon me, in Love to your
Souls, thus to persuade you: I have no Self Ends, the Lord knoweth, for if my
Life were freely granted by you, it would not avail me, nor could I expect it
of you,…
First lines of the letter Mary actually
wrote (line breaks follow Mary’s line breaks in the original
holograph):
from marie dire to the generall court now
this present 26th of the 8 moth 59
assembled in the towne
of boston in
new Ingland greetings of grace mercy
and peace to every
soul that doth well : tribulation anguish and wrath to all that doth evell
Whereas it is said by
many of you that I am guilty of mine owne death by my
coming as you cal it
voluntarily to boston:
I therefore declare unto every one
that hath an eare to
hear: that in the fear peace and love of god I came and in weldoing
did and stil doth
commit my soul and body to him as unto a faithful creator
and for this very end
hath preserved my life until now through many trialls and
temptations having
held out his royal scepter unto mee by wch I have accesse
into his presence and
have found such favoure in his sight as to offer up my
life freely for his
truth and peoples sakes :
So what accounts for the huge
difference in the two versions? The short answer is that somehow, Quaker minister
and writer Edward Burrough received a copy of Mary’s original letter, and
created his own letter, putting Mary’s name to it for persuasiveness and
authority. And for 350 years, everyone has thought Burrough’s letter was Mary’s.
But it’s not.
Why would Burrough do that? His purpose was not to preserve Mary’s words,
but to put an end to the Quaker persecutions raging in England and New England by writing a pamphlet to
King Charles II, refuting the defensive pamphlet written by the Boston magistrates after
Mary’s unpopular execution in June 1660. Burroughs’ efforts succeeded, and the
king ordered Governor Endecott to stop executions and refer any capital cases
to England
for trial.
 |
| Cover page of Burrough's 1660 pamphlet |
My training and career have been
focused on writing and editing magazines, books, and websites for nonprofit
organizations, religious entities, and universities. It’s the practical,
workhorse side of public relations and marketing. It was my job to mold (and often rewrite) the words of the CEO or other executives to more precisely fit the mission and message of the organization. If I may project backward by
350 years, I suspect that immediately after Mary’s execution in 1660, someone
in Boston stole and copied Mary’s letter(s) to the
General Court, and sent the copy to Burrough in England. It was his purpose to craft an image for the new Quaker movement, and do
to King Charles what Mary had already done to the people of Massachusetts:
1. create
outrage that the Boston
authorities were out of control,
2. that
they’d gone too far by killing a high-status woman who was innocent of a
capital offense, and
3. that
they must stop the persecution of people who were only obeying God.
But Mary’s letter(s) contained
words meant only for the Boston
magistrates—words of softer persuasion, that they would listen to God’s voice
in their hearts and stop the torture and killings of God’s people, the Quakers.
So Burrough rewrote or ghost-wrote the letter in fiery, angry language to fit
his agenda, presented the pamphlet (containing only the first letter) to the
king in audience in winter 1661, and obtained the desired writ. Only one more
Quaker was hanged after Mary, because of the delay in trans-Atlantic travel. Another
Quaker who had been condemned to die was reprieved and banished because the
writ came in time to save him.
Then in 1662, Burrough, a Quaker
preacher and political advocate, was arrested for holding illegal religious
meetings in his home. He was sent to Newgate Prison, and despite a release
order from the king (which was ignored, probably by anti-royal Puritan rebels
left over from the Cromwell days). Burrough remained in prison and died there
at age 29 in February 1663. Prison conditions were extreme: starvation, filth,
vermin, and disease killed many prisoners, and unheated dungeons in freezing
winters would certainly hasten death.
With Mary Dyer and Edward Burrough
dead and Quaker persecutions surging again, no one remained to think about or
argue who wrote the letters. Somehow, Mary’s letter was returned to the General
Court files kept by the malevolent Edward Rawson, secretary, and that’s the
letter that remains in the archive vaults to this day. A second letter—if it ever existed—is not preserved,
though someone wrote a letter that purports to be Mary’s, for which we have no
holograph. It’s as strongly worded as the other letter’s Burrough version, so
perhaps he wrote the second letter and didn’t use it in his pamphlet.
If Mary’s first letter was changed so
radically, we have to assume that the second letter was also altered
significantly. But we have no original with which to compare.
I used the text of Mary’s original
first letter, making it more modern with paragraph breaks and conventional
spellings, in my second novel, Mary Dyer:
For Such a Time as This. I used phrases from the second letter (whether
written by Mary and edited or rewritten by Burrough) in dialog, but chose not
to reproduce the second letter.
Someday, when my fantasy of all of
this intricate and fascinating Great Migration-era story becomes a TV series on
PBS and BBC, it would be fun to explore or invent who purloined Mary’s letters
and sent copies to England.
Was there a Quaker mole in the
midst of the Boston
wolves?
The letter in Mary Dyer’s hand
Mary came to the end of the large
sheet of paper, and turned it over to write six more lines, the ghost image you
see behind the words in the middle of this fragment. On the right vertical edge
of the paper are water stains which smeared the ink. Perhaps it was raining
when the messenger carried her letter from the jail to the Massachusetts
General Court, presided over by Governor John Endecott. The letter was folded
at some point, and the paper has flaked away at some folds and edges, but for
the most part, it's legible, even after more than 350 years!
 |
Front of the Oct. 26, 1659 letter that
Mary Dyer wrote in prison. |
Paper was a luxury commodity in seventeenth-century
New England because it had to be imported. In Europe, paper was milled from macerated hemp, flax, and linen
or cotton rags. (Wood pulp was not used until 1843.) Important documents like
royal charters were written on vellum (calf skin) or parchment (sheep or goat
skin).
William Dyer, Mary’s husband, would
have had a ready supply of paper for his work as clerk, recorder, secretary,
attorney general, and solicitor to the colonial assembly. His penmanship is
fine, and contains few corrections, which means the documents were copied from
draft notes, or that he was confident of his writing and reporting abilities
and got it right the first time.
As I mentioned before, Mary Dyer
was among the privileged few women who could both read and write. And judging
from the even, consistent appearance of her handwriting, she had plenty of
practice. Perhaps Mary kept a journal that was lost or burned, or wrote letters
to friends that have been lost to the ages. In my novels, I suggested that Mary kept farm and business accounts for the
family, and during her time in England,
kept a journal and wrote letters. Keeping ledgers was common among
merchant-class women, and in England
the aristocratic women kept journals and wrote letters and books.
The letter she wrote to the General
Court while in prison was very legible, but she had more words to write than
she had paper, so she had to turn the paper over and write six more lines on
the back, which most writers did not do because the ink could bleed through.
She probably had to buy the sheet of paper and use of a quill pen and ink from
the jailer, as Quakers were not allowed any books or writing materials in the
prison—upon conviction, the law required that those items be burned to prevent
them from proselytizing, journaling, or fomenting more rebellion.
(Of course, burning Quaker
possessions also destroyed evidence that might have been used against them, but
the Governor and assistants didn’t seem to have thought of that—nor had they ever watched CSI or Law and Order. I
find it amusing that one of the Plymouth Colony Quakers used the lack of
evidence because his books were burned, to successfully to defend himself.)
All of New England’s paper was
imported from England
at this time. There, all the paper for books, broadsheets, pamphlets,
government and private use, was made by one or two companies who held a
monopoly on the process. Mary’s paper’s finish was a horizontal “laid,” which
is a fine texture of parallel lines rolled onto the paper when it’s still wet.
Cheaper paper of the era, made at most paper mills in England, was a
coarse gray, but this paper’s original color may have been a white or cream,
which browned with age. Its content was probably 100 percent linen rag. It
appears it was a quality sheet of paper, perhaps obtained from the office of
Edward Rawson, MassBay Colony secretary, and is the same type of paper that
William Dyer used for Rhode Island business
and the letters he sent to the Boston
court on behalf of his wife.
I wondered if Mary had written the
letter in a prison cell, or if she was in a room with a table and some light.
There’s no evidence of an uneven or rough surface under the writing, so I think
a table was used. In comparison to William’s fine-tipped pen which perhaps had
a metal nib, Mary’s writing is much more thick or bold, so the pen might have
been of low quality or needed trimming. But she had enough light to keep her
lines and letters even. She didn’t write words that she scribbled over. And if
she made a mistake, perhaps she was able to scrape off the ink and rewrite a
word, but I can’t tell from a computer screen.
In the text she wrote, Mary Dyer
cast herself in the role of biblical Queen Esther, a Jewess who threw herself
on the mercy of the Babylonian King Ahasuerus to save her people from
slaughter. No one approached the totalitarian, oft-drunken monarch Ahasuerus
and lived unless the king held out his scepter in acceptance, which he did for
Esther. Esther’s guardian, Mordecai, had told her that it was her destiny to
persuade the king to stop the persecution and genocide, saying that God had
brought Esther to her role “for such a time as this.” And Esther was successful
in saving her people.
Mary saw herself as called by God
to take a stand before the ultra-fundamentalist government of Massachusetts Bay
and Plymouth colonies, at “such a time as this,” the height of
Puritan-on-Quaker persecution, by saying that they were persecuting Christ’s
children, and therefore, Christ himself. She asked them to search themselves
for any spark of the Light of Christ within them, and warned them of eternal
damnation if they persisted in their policies and attitudes.
 |
| Mary Dyer: "but to me to live is Christ and to die is gaine" |
At the page turn, Mary asked that
Quakers be allowed to attend the execution and clothe the bodies of her Friends
Stevenson and Robinson (and herself) with shrouds. The aftermath of the death
penalty was to strip the bodies after death and throw them naked into an open
pit near the road where birds, tidewater, and nature would decompose them and
serve as a warning and crime deterrent to passersby. There was a fence around
the pit to prevent the bodies being taken away.
Boston court records do not show if Mary’s
letter was read in court, or if they denied or accepted her request. Many
letters of the time, in England
and New England, show the date they were read
and recorded. They say “endorsed” or “denied” and are dated. There was no such
notation on her letter, although there’s a scrap of paper taped to the letter
which states that it’s from Mary Dyer, with the date she wrote it. It’s not in
Mary’s hand, though. It seems to be a file note.
Perhaps there was no resolution
noted on the letter because nine days before the October execution, her fate
had already been decided by the court.
Did Mary’s letter have any effect,
then, on stopping Governor Endecott and Reverends John Norton and John Wilson
from their bloody persecution and death penalties? Probably not.
But her death itself, seven months
later, did cause considerable outrage amongst even the non-Quaker populace, and
of course Edward Burrough used Mary’s letter as a model for his successful
pamphlet.
The unintended effect of Mary
Dyer’s letter is that 350 years later, we gain insight into the real story and
intimate details behind the legend.
Christy K Robinson
is the author of three books set in the 17
th century: the
biographical novels
Mary Dyer
Illuminated, and
Mary Dyer: For Such
a Time as This, and (nonfiction)
The
Dyers of London, Boston,
& Newport. For
more information:
http://marybarrettdyer.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html
