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Mary Dyer, born Marie Barrett (c. 1611 – 1 June 1660), was an English and colonial American Puritan turned Quaker who was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony. She is one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs. While the place of her birth is not known, she was married in London in 1633 to the milliner William Dyer. Mary and William were Puritans who were interested in reforming the Anglican Church from within, without separating from it. As the English king increased pressure on the Puritans, they left England by the thousands to go to New England in the early 1630s. Mary and William arrived in Boston by 1635, joining the Boston Church in December of that year. Like most members of Boston's church, they soon became involved in the Antinomian Controversy, a theological crisis lasting from 1636 to 1638. Mary and William were strong advocates of Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright in the controversy, and as a result Mary's husband was disenfranchised and disarmed for supporting these "heretics" and also for harboring his own heretical views. Subsequently, they left Massachusetts with many others to establish a new colony on Aquidneck Island (later Rhode Island) in Narraganset Bay. Before leaving Boston, Mary had given birth to a severely deformed infant that was stillborn. Because of the theological implications of such a birth, the baby was buried secretly. When the Massachusetts authorities learned of this birth, the ordeal became public, and in the minds of the colony's ministers and magistrates, the monstrous birth was clearly a result of Mary's "monstrous" religious opinions. More than a decade later, in late 1651, Mary Dyer boarded a ship for England, and stayed there for over five years, becoming an avid follower of the Quaker religion that had been established by George Fox several years earlier. Because Quakers were considered among the most heinous of heretics by the Puritans, Massachusetts enacted several laws against them. When Dyer returned to Boston from England, she was immediately imprisoned, and then banished. Defying her order of banishment, she was again banished, this time upon pain of death. Deciding that she would die as a martyr if the anti-Quaker laws were not repealed, Dyer once again returned to Boston and was sent to the gallows in 1659, having the rope around her neck when a reprieve was announced. Not accepting the reprieve, she again returned to Boston the following year, and was then hanged to become the third of four Quaker martyrs. ==Early life== Details of the life of Mary Dyer in England are scarce; only her marriage record and a short probate record for her brother have been found. In both of these English records her name is given as Marie Barret. A tradition that Dyer was the daughter of Lady Arbella Stuart and Sir William Seymour, was debunked by genealogist G. Andrews Moriarty in 1950. However, Moriarty correctly predicted that despite his work the legend would persist, and in 1994 the tradition was included as being plausible in a published biography of Dyer. While the parents of Mary Dyer have not been identified, family researcher Johan Winsser made a significant discovery concerning a brother of Dyer, which he published in 2004. On 18 January 1633/4 a probate administration was recorded in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for a William Barret. The instrument granted administration of Barret's estate "jointly to William Dyer of St Martin-in-the-Fields, fishmonger, and his wife Marie Dyer, otherwise Barret." The fact that the estate of a brother of Mary Dyer would be left in the hands of Mary and her husband strongly suggests that William (and therefore Mary) had no living parents and no living brothers at the time, and also suggests that Mary was either William Barrett's only living sister, or his oldest living sister. The other facts that could be drawn from the instrument are that William Barrett was unmarried and that he died somewhere "beyond the seas" from England. That Mary was well educated is apparent from letters that she wrote. The Quaker chronicler, George Bishop described her as a "Comely Grave Woman, and of a goodly Personage, and one of a good Report, having a husband of an Estate, fearing the Lord, and a Mother of Children." Dutch writer, Gerard Croese wrote that she was reputed to be a "person of no mean extract and parentage, of an estate pretty plentiful, of a comely stature and countenance, of a piercing knowledge in many things, of a wonderful sweet and pleasant discourse, so fit for great affairs..." Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop described her as being "a very proper and fair woman...of a very proud spirit, and much addicted to revelations". Mary was married to William Dyer, a fishmonger and milliner, on 27 October 1633 at the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which at the time was in Westminster, Middlesex, but is now a part of London. Mary's husband was baptized in Lincolnshire, England. Settlers from Lincolnshire contributed a disproportionately large percentage of members of the Boston Church in New England, and a disproportionately large part of the leadership during the founding of Rhode Island. Mary and William Dyer were Puritans, as evidenced by their acceptance into the membership of the Boston church in New England. The Puritans wanted to complete the separation of the Anglican church from Catholicism that had begun under the rule of the English monarch Henry VIII. The conformists in England accepted the English monarch as the head of the church, and the form of worship that greatly resembled that in the Catholic church. The Puritans, as non-conformists, wanted to do away with the vestments, bowing and making the sign of the cross that were prevalent in Anglican worship, and observe a much simpler and Biblical form of worship. Some of the non-conformists, such as the Pilgrims, wanted to separate completely from the Anglican church, while the Puritans wished to reform the church from within. As the ranks of Puritans began swelling in England, so too did the severity of government intervention, including exile or death for ministers not adhering to the state religious practices. In the 1620s England's King Charles I, with little understanding of religion, was adamant that English subjects conform to the same uniform religion, which included the vestments and procedures found in the Catholic church. As exploration of the North American continent was then leading to settlement, the Puritans found a way to practice their form of religion by emigrating from England. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mary Dyer」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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