That none might hear her speak

What happened

Mary Dyer had been banished from Massachusetts on pain of death for being a Quaker. In October 1659 she had stood on the gallows ladder with the rope on her neck while two friends were hanged beside her, been reprieved at the last moment and sent away. She came back anyway, to bear witness against the law. On 31 May 1660 the General Court sentenced her to hang the next morning at nine. On 1 June the marshal took her from the prison, and a band of soldiers with pikes and muskets marched her about a mile out to the gallows on Boston Neck, with drums beating before her and behind her "that none might hear her speak." At the ladder she was offered her life if she would go home to Rhode Island. She refused, told the captain she had come to keep blood-guiltiness from the colony, and was hanged. Massachusetts hanged one more Quaker, William Leddra, in March 1661. Then a letter from the restored king stopped the executions, and the persecution failed. Rothbard calls the Quaker hangings "the tragic climax: murder" (CiL, p. 233) by an oligarchy of magistrates and ministers, and he sides with George Bishop, who wrote to those magistrates that their "bloody laws were snapped asunder by a woman" (p. 234).