Sad thoughts possess my sperits, and I cannot repulce them; wch makes me unfit for anythinge, wondringe what the Lord meanes by all these troubles among us. Shure I am that all shall worke to the best to them that love God, or rather are loved of hime, I know he will bring light out of obcurity and make his rituusnesse shine forth as clere as the nounday; yet I find in myself an aferce spiret, and a tremblinge hart, not so willing to submit to the will of God as I desyre. There is a time to plant, and a time to pull up that which is planted, which I could desyre might not be yet.
And so it would seem to us to-day that it was indeed a doubtful beginning to tear up with such violence even flaunting weeds, lest the tender and scattered grain, whose roots scarce held in the unfamiliar soil, might also be uprooted and wither and die. But the colony endured these trials, and flourished, as it did other trials, and still prospered.
Though written expression of their feelings is lacking, we know that the Boston neighbors gave to Anne Hutchinson that sincerest flattery—imitation. Perhaps her fellow-prophets should not be called imitators, but simply kindred religious spirits. The elements of society in colonial Boston were such as plentifully to produce and stimulate “disordered and heady persons.”
Among them was Mary Dyer, thus described by Winthrop:—
The wife of William Dyer, a milliner in the New Exchange, a very proper and fair woman, notoriously infected with Mrs Hutchinsons errors, and very censorious and troublesome. She being of a very proud spirit and much addicted to revelations.
Another author called her “a comely grave woman, of a goodly personage, and of good report.”
Some of these Boston neighbors lived to see two sad sights. Fair comely Mary Dyer, after a decade of unmolested and peaceful revelations in Rhode Island, returned to her early home, and persistently preached to her old friends, and then walked through Boston streets hand in hand with two young Quaker friends, condemned felons, to the sound of the drums of the train band, glorying in her companionship; and then she was set on a gallows with a halter round her neck, while her two friends were hanged before her eyes; this was witnessed by such a multitude that the drawbridge broke under the weight of the returning North-enders. And six months later this very proper and fair woman herself was hanged in Boston, to rid the commonwealth of an intolerable plague.
A letter still exists, written by William Dyer to the Boston magistrates to “beg affectionately the life of my deare wife.” It is most touching, most heart-rending; it ends thus, “Yourselves have been husbands of wife or wives, and so am I, yea to one most dearlye beloved. Oh do not you deprive me of her, but I pray you give me her out againe. Pitye me—I beg it with teares.”
The tears still stain this poor sorrowful, appealing letter,—a missive so gentle, so timid, so full of affection, of grief, that I cannot now read it unmoved and I do indeed “pitye” thee. William Dyer’s tears have not been the only ones to fall on his beautiful, tender words.
Another interesting neighbor living where Washington Street crossed Brattle Street was the bride, young Madam Bellingham, whose marriage had caused such a scandal in good society in Boston. Winthrop’s account of this affair is the best that could be given:—