William Dyer

Who is William Dyer?

William Dyer 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 beliefs in Boston. Sailing from England as a young man with his wife, Dyer first settled in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but soon became a follower 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 followers 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. In 1651 he was one of three men sent to England to have Coddington's commission to govern the island of Aquidneck 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.