She continued to preach, and was banished.
She came back, and was found standing in front of the jail talking through the bars to two Quakers, Robinson and Stevenson, who were confined there awaiting sentence. She had brought them food, and was exhorting them to be of good-cheer. She was locked up, and asked to recant. She acknowledged she was a Quaker, and not in sympathy with magistracy.
She was sentenced by Governor Endicott, on her own confession, with having a contempt for authority, and ordered to be hanged. The day came and she was led forth, walking hand in hand with her two guilty Quaker brothers.
The scaffold was on Boston Common, on the little hill about where the band-stand is at the present day.
Mrs. Dyer stood and watched them hang her friends, one at a time. As they were swung off into space she called to them to hold fast to the truth, "for Christ is with us!" Whenever she spoke or sang, the drums that were standing in front and back of her were ordered to beat, so as to drown her voice.
After the bodies of her friends had dangled half an hour they were cut down.
It was then her turn. She ascended the scaffold, refusing the help of the Reverend Mr. Wilson. He followed her and bound his handkerchief over her eyes, a guard in the meantime tying her hands and feet with rawhide.
"Do you renounce the Quakers?" "Never, praise God, His son Jesus Christ, and Anne Hutchinson, His handmaiden—we live by truth!".
"A reprieve! a reprieve!!" some one shouted. And it was so—Governor Endicott had ordered that this woman be banished, not hanged, unless she again came back to Boston. It was all an arranged trick to frighten the woman thoroughly.
Wilson removed the handkerchief from her eyes. They unbound her feet, and the thongs that held her hands were loosed. She looked down below at the bodies of Robinson and Stevenson lying dead on the grass. She asked that the sentence upon her be carried out. But not so: she was led by guards fifteen miles out into the forest and there liberated.