Mary Barrett Dyer (1611 – 1660) was an English Puritan turned Quaker who was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts for repeatedly defying a law banning Quakers from the colony. She is one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs.
Mary (Marie) Barrett's marriage to William Dyer (Dier, Dyre), was recorded in church records at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 27 October 1633. William Dyer took the Freeman's oath at the General Court in Boston on March 3, 1635 or 1636. In 1637 Mary Dyer supported 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.
Mary had given birth on October 17, 1637 to a deformed stillborn baby, 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, before a large crowd. He described it thus:
