page_title: Mary Dyer
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Dyer / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: en:Charing Cross and en:St Martin-in-the-Fields, circa 1562 Extracted from Braun and Hogenberg, en:Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1562
context_page_description: Mary Dyer 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 yet identified, 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.
context_section_description: 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, 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.  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." The 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, in Westminster, Middlesex, now a part of Greater 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 purify the Church of England from what they considered to be vestiges of Roman Catholicism that were retained after the English Reformation.  The conformists in England accepted the Elizabethan via media and English monarch as the titular supreme governor of the state church. The Puritans, as non-conformists, wanted to observe a much simpler form of worship. Some of the non-conformists, such as the Pilgrims, wanted to separate completely from the Church of England. Most Puritans wished to reform the church from within.  As exploration of the North American continent was then leading to settlement, many Puritans opted to avoid state sanctions by emigrating to New England to practice their form of religion.
caption: Map showing St Martin-in-the-Fields, circa 1562, where Mary and William Dyer were married in 1633
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