Ninth Generation

416. William DYER was born before 19 September 1609 in Kirkby, Laythorpe, Lincolnshire, England. He died on 18 April 1677 at the age of 67 in Newport, Newport Co., RI. He was in Boston in 1637. There he and others were warned to deliver up pistols, etc., because of having gone over to the teachings of Mrs. Ann Marbury Hutchinson. After being turned out of Boston by the Massachusetts government, he settled in Portsmouth, RI, having landed there with 17 other families March 7, 1638. He was living in Newport on March 10, 1640, when he received 87 acres of land. In 1653, he returned to England with John Clarke and Roger Williams in an attempt to obtain revocation of Governor Coddington's power.

His wife, Mary Dyer, spent five years in England, where she became a Quaker and a minister of that faith. She returned to Boston May 21, 1660, and ten days later was brought to trial before Governor Endicott, on charges of being a Quaker. She was sentenced to death and hung the following day on the Boston Common.

Note: Came over on the Griffin in 1634
one of the original 18 proprieters of Rhode Island Sec of Providence Plantation 1639
Col of R I 1640-42 General Recorder
1647-48 Commissioner to the assembly from providence 1655 fromwarwick 1661 Newport 1662
William great Nephew of Sir James ZDier j c b
from parish of strand London Eng to Boston Mass
Genea Dict of R I by Austin
Comp American Genea. Vol vi p 772
Cutters N E Vol iv p 2062
R I Heraldary by Chapin page 40
N E H G vol xcviii p 25
pioneers of Mass by pope
First families of America vol 7
England hist & gen reg vol civ

married at st. martins london,london eng 27 oct 1633

One of 13 bought island of Rhode Island from Indians - Sec. of state to Gov. Roger Williams of Rhode Island.

Feb.20,1686/1687, his son, William(2) mentions his deceased father in his will.

NEHGR, Vol 151, pages 408-416 "Walter Blackborne, London Milliner" by Johan Winsser; says (i n part): "About Midsummer'sDay (June 24) 1624 Blackborne contracted fouteen year old William Dyer as an apprentice. Dyer, the son of an affluent Lincolnshire yeoman, was the future husband of Mary (Barrett)Dyer, the Quaker martyr. How the Dyer family came to select Blackborne is not certain, but it may have been through the Hutchinsons of Alford, Lincolnshire, or through the Carres ofSleaford, Lincolnshire, both families with known long standing associations with the Dyers and with close relatives in London. It may also be that the Dyers of Lincolnshire knew of Blackborne through one or more of the many Dyer families living in London, to whom they may have been related. In any case, William Dyer must have labored on a trial basis for the first year, because it was not until 20 August 1625 that his nine year indenture was enrolled with the Fishmongers, and it was made retroactive to the previous summer. In assuming responsibility for an apprentice, Blackborne obligated himself to serve as a surrogate father, teaching young Dyer his trade, providing him with bed, food, clothing, and behavioral supervision, andmaintaining him in the religious life of the parish. In return, Dyer agreed to serve his master faithfully for the set term of years, to forgo marriage during his apprenticeship, to keep his master's secrets, and to adhere to strict behavorial standards both in his master's house and abroad in the town.

On 10 February 1632, William Dyer signed a lease to rent "The Globe" in the New Exchange, formerly occupied by Blackborne,for a term of two and a quarter years.

About a year later 1632/33 William Dyer also assumed the lease for Blackborne's tenement on Mr. Greene's Lane.
By the autumn of 1635 William Dyer had set sail for Boston and soon was prospering in his new home. He was one of fourteen owners of a wharf in Boston."

The 20th Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans,Vol. 3, p.366:
"Captain William and Mary Dyre, who came from England to Boston,Mass., and joined the First Church there in December, 1635. Captain Dyre was disfranchised for "seditious writing" Nov. 15 ,1637, removed to Rhode Island, and was one of the signers of the compact of government for that province, March 7, 1638. He was secretary the same year, general recorder, 1648; attorney-general, 1650-53; member of the general court, 1661-62,1664-66; general solicitor, 1665- 66, and 1668, and secretary to the council, 1669. He was commissioned commander-in-chief upon the sea in 1653, and headed an expedition fitted out in Rhode Island against the Dutch. His wife, Mary Dyre, was the only woman to suffer capital punishment in all the oppression of the Friends the world over. She accompanied her husband on his mission to England with Roger Williams and Dr. John Clarke to obtain the revocation of Governor Coddington's power in Rhod Island and while there became a convert to Quakerism and a preacher in the society. On arriving in Boston in 1657 she was imprisoned and on the petition of her husband was permitted to go with him to Rhode Island, but never to return to Massachusetts. She returned, however, and with William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson was tried and convicted for "their rebellion , sedition and presumptuous obtruding upon us notwithstanding their being sentenced to banishment on payne of death, as underminers of the government." Robinson and Stevenson were executed, but through the petition of her son, Mayor William Dyre, she was reprieved on the same conditions as before, but in May, 1660, again appeared on the public streets of Boston, and was brought before the court, May 31, and condemned to death. She was executed June 1, 1660."

Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island, by J.O. Austin 1907;
Representative Men and Old Families of Rhode Island by Beers,1910 p. 413,445,1300

Change Date: 3 FEB 2005
Mary BARRETT and William DYER were married on 27 October 1633 in St. Martin-in-the-fields, London, England.

417. Mary BARRETT was born in 1612 in London, England. She died on 1 June 1660 at the age of 48 in Boston, Suffolk Co., MA. I discount the allegation that Mary Dyer was the daughter of Arabella Stuart and William Seymour.

Arabella (Mary's mother) had no desire to be Queen, but aggressive political suitors from England and France hoped that, by marrying her, they would capture the throne and restore Catholicism to England. King James, made rather anxious by this prospect, prohibited his cousin from marrying anyone. But Arabella fell in love with Sir William Seymour, also a descendant of Henry VII and they were secretly wed in 1610. Within a year, they had a daughter [unsubstantiated], which disturbed King James further, as this marriage doubled Arabella's qualifications to the throne. He order Arabella sent to Highgate and William Seymour imprisoned in the Tower of London.
Arabella tried to flee Highgate, dressed as a man, but although she escaped from prison she was recaptured on board a ship headed to Calais and sent to the Tower of London where she spent the remaining four years of her life. William Seymour escaped to France and when he eventually returned to England after the death of King James, he became tutor to the eleven-year-old Prince of Wales, the future King Charles II.
The infant daughter was left in the care of Arabella's lady-in-waiting, Mistress Mary Dyer, who gave her own name to her adopted child and brought her up quietly and reclusively in the country. King James sent out scouts searching for the child, but was denied information by anyone who was questioned. When Mary was twenty-two years old, she married her foster mother's first cousin, William Dyer
was an English Puritan turned Quaker who was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts for repeatedly defying a law banning Quakers from the colony. She is considered to be the only woman in the United States to die for religious freedom, and is one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs.
In 1637 Mary Dyer met Anne Hutchinson, who preached that God "spoke directly to individuals" rather than only through the clergy. Dyer joined with Hutchinson and became involved in what was called the "Antinomian heresy," where they worked to organize groups of women and men to study the Bible in contravention of the theocratic law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In 1638, Mary Dyer and her husband William were banished along with Hutchinson from the colony. On the advice of Roger Williams the group that included Hutchinson and the Dyers moved to Portsmouth in the colony of Rhode Island. William Dyer signed the Portsmouth Compact along with 18 other men.
Mary had given birth (on October 17, 1637) to a grossly deformed stillborn fetus, which was buried privately. After Anne Hutchinson was tried and the Hutchinsons and Dyers banished from Massachusetts in January 1637/8, the authorities learned of the “monstrous birth,” and Governor Winthrop had it exhumed in March 1638, with a large crowd in attendance. He described it thus:
“it was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; 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 a thornback [i.e., a skate or ray], the navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were 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.” [1]
Winthrop sent descriptions to numerous correspondents, and accounts were published in England in 1642 and 1644. The deformed birth was considered evidence of the heresies and errors of Antinomianism.
Mary Dyer and her husband returned to England with Roger Williams and John Clarke in 1652, where Mary Dyer joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) after hearing the preaching of its founder George Fox and feeling that it was in agreement with the ideas that she and Hutchinson held years earlier. She eventually became a Quaker preacher in her own right.
The Dyers returned to Rhode Island in 1657. The next year she traveled to Boston to protest the new law banning Quakers, and she was arrested and expelled from the colony. (Her husband, who had not become a Quaker, was not arrested.)
Mary Dyer continued to travel in New England to preach Quakerism, and was arrested in 1658 in New Haven, Connecticut. After her release, she returned to Massachusetts to visit two English Quakers, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, who had been arrested. She was also arrested and then permanently banished from the colony. She traveled to Massachusetts a third time with a group of Quakers to publicly defy the law, and was again arrested, and sentenced to death. After a short trial, two other Quakers were hanged, but because her husband was a friend of Governor John Winthrop he secured a last-minute reprieve -- against her wishes, for she had refused to repent and disavow her Quaker faith.
She was forced to return to Rhode Island, traveled to Long Island, New York to preach, but her conscience led her to return to Massachusetts in 1660 to defy the anti-Quaker law. Despite the pleas of her husband and family, she again refused to repent, and she was again convicted and sentenced to death on May 31. The next day Mary Dyer was hanged on Boston Common for the crime of being a Quaker in Massachusetts. Her execution is described by Edward Burrough in A Declaration of the Sad and Great Persecution and Martyrdom of the People of God, called Quakers, in New-England, for the Worshipping of God (1661).

“Nay, I came to keep blood guiltiness from you, desireing you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law made against the innocent servants of the Lord. Nay, man, I am not now to repent.”
—Mary Dyer's last words
After her death a member of the General Court uttered one of those bitter scoffs which prove the truest of all epitaphs, "She did hang as a flag for others to take example by."[2]
A statue of her stands in front of the Massachusetts state capitol in Boston; there is another Dyer statue in front of the Friends Center in downtown Philadelphia, and another in front of Stout Meetinghouse at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

Children were: