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William Dyer (also Dyre) (1609–by 1677) was an early settler of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, a founding settler of both Portsmouth and Newport, and Rhode Island's first Attorney General. He is best known for being the husband of the Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer, who was executed for her Quaker activism. Sailing from England as a young man with his wife, Dyer first settled in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but like many members of the Boston church became a supporter of the dissident ministers John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson during the Antinomian Controversy, and signed a petition in support of Wheelwright. For doing this, he was disenfranchised and disarmed, and with many other supporters of Hutchinson, he signed the Portsmouth Compact, and settled on Aquidneck Island in the Narragansett Bay. Within a year of arriving there, he and others followed William Coddington to the south end of the island where they established the town of Newport. Once in Newport, Dyer was very active in civil affairs, holding a number of offices, particularly those using his clerical skills such as clerk and secretary. The political alignment of the island towns of Portsmouth and Newport was in flux for the first decade of government there, and Coddington had gone to England to obtain a commission to keep the island independent with him as governor. By 1651 Dyer and others had greatly tired of Coddington's rule, and he was one of three men who went to England to have Coddington's commission revoked. Being successful, Dyer returned with the news in 1653, but his wife, Mary, who had been there at the same time, remained in England. Mary returned from England in 1657 after being there for five years, and had become a zealous Quaker convert. Banned from Massachusetts, she nevertheless defied the authorities and returned in 1659, being sentenced to hang, but getting a stay of execution while on the gallows. Her last trip to Boston in 1660 resulted in her execution and martyrdom. Following Mary's death, Dyer remarried, and continued his public service, while having some legal entanglements with William Coddington. He was dead by late 1677, though no record for his death has been found. == Early life == William Dyer was baptized at Kirkby Laythorpe, Lincolnshire, England, on 19 September 1609, the son of William Dyer. In 1625, while a teenager, he was apprenticed to Walter Blackborne, a fishmonger, and 16 years later, while he was in New England, he was taxed back in England as a member of the "Fishmonger's Company," though his profession before leaving there was that of a milliner. Dyer was married at Saint Martin-in-the-Fields in Westminster on 27 October 1633 to Mary Barrett (their oldest son Samuel named a son Barrett). In 1635, Dyer and his wife sailed from England to New England. Mary was likely pregnant, or gave birth during the voyage, because on 20 December 1635 their son Samuel was baptized at the Boston church, the same month that the Dyers joined the church. Dyer became a freeman of Boston on 3 March the following year. Once in Boston the Dyers became attracted to the preachings of the dissident ministers John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson during what is called the Antinomian Controversy, and in March 1637 Dyer signed a petition in support of Reverend Wheelwright, in it saying that "the court had condemned the truth of Christ." Half a year later, on 15 November, he was disenfranchised for signing this petition, and then on 20 November he and others were ordered to deliver up all guns, pistols, swords, powder and shot because the "opinions and revelations of Mr. Wheelwright and Mrs. Hutchinson have seduced and led into dangerous errors many of the people here in New England." In October 1637 Mary Dyer gave birth to a premature, stillborn and deformed child, which following the Dyer's departure from Massachusetts, Boston magistrate John Winthrop had exhumed. In March 1638 Winthrop wrote the following about the Dyers and the infant: "The wife of one William Dyer, a milliner in the New Exchange, a very proper and fair woman, and both of them notoriously infected with Mrs. Hutchinson's errors, and very censorious and troublesome (she being of a very proud spirit, and much addicted to revelations) had been delivered of a child some few months before...it had a face but no head..." Winthrop went on to describe the deformities, and add his own embellishments, and declared that this was divine reaction to the sinful errors of Hutchinson, Wheelwright, and their followers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「William Dyer (settler)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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