Charles I. Beheaded
The first of the sect who appeared conspicuous in New England were Mary Fisher and Anna Austin, who arrived at Boston in the summer of 1656, when John Endicott was governor. There was then no special law against them, but under a general act against heretics, they were arrested; their persons were examined to find marks of witchcraft, with which they were suspected; their trunks were searched, and their books were burned publicly by the common hangman. These innocent and well-behaved women were so treated because of the stories of the disorderly acts of some of the sect in England who had come over the sea. After keeping them in prison several weeks, the authorities of Massachusetts sent them back to England. Mary Fisher afterward visited the Sultan of Turkey, passing everywhere unharmed because his people reverenced a crazy person, for such they took her to be.
This harsh treatment of the first comers fired the zeal of the more enthusiastic of the sect in England. They sought martyrdom as an honor. They flocked to New England and fearfully vexed the souls of the Puritan magistrates and ministers. One woman came all the way from London to warn the authorities against persecutions. Others came for the purpose of reviling and denouncing-vehemently scolding--the powers in church and state. They would rail at magistrates and ministers from windows, as these functionaries passed by. They mocked the institutions of the country; and some fanatical young women appeared without clothing in the churches and in the streets, as emblems "of the unclothed souls of the people," while others, with loud voices, proclaimed that the wrath of the Almighty was about to fall like destructive lightning upon Boston and Salem. Horrified by their blasphemies and indecencies, the authorities of Massachusetts passed some very cruel laws. At first they forbade all persons "harboring Quakers," imposing severe penalties for each offence. Then they imposed mild punishments upon the Friends themselves. These statutes were ineffectual; and finally, driven by resentment and mistaken judgment, they passed laws which authorized the cropping of the ears, boring of the tongues with hot irons, and hanging on a gibbet, of offending Quakers. Yet these terrible laws did not keep them away. They were fined, imprisoned, whipped and hanged during the administration of the rigid Endicott, who was implacable. On a bright October day in 1659, two young men named William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, with Mary Dyer, wife of the secretary of state of Rhode Island, were led from the Boston jail, with ropes around their necks, and guarded by soldiers, to be hanged on Boston Common. Mary walked between her companions hand in hand to the gallows, where, in the presence of Governor Endicott, the two young men were executed. Mary was unmoved by the spectacle. She was given into the care of her son who came from Rhode Island to plead for her life, and went away with him. But she returned the next spring, defied the laws, and was executed on Boston Common.
The severity of these laws caused a revulsion in public sentiment. The Friends stoutly maintained their course with decency, and were regarded by the more thoughtful as real martyrs for conscience sake. The people, at length, demanded a repeal of the bloody enactments, and by that repeal, in 1661, the Friends achieved a triumph. The fanaticism of both parties subsided. A more Christian spirit prevailed; and the attention of the more sober-minded Friends was turned to the task of converting the Indians. They nobly assisted the Apostle Eliot and others in propagating the gospel among the pagans of the forests for whom that Apostle had labored for years. He had established a Christian church among them at Natic, and at the time of the repeal of the cruel laws, there were no less than ten villages of converted Indians in Massachusetts.
The reign of republicanism in England, under Oliver Cromwell and his son, was short. King Charles the First, after contending with the people for the royal prerogative and the throne for several years, was beheaded on a cold winter's morning in January, 1649, in front of his own palace of White-hall. Royalty was then abolished. Late in May, 1660, the son of King Charles, who had been proclaimed monarch of England under the title of Charles the Second, rode into London on horseback between his brothers the Dukes of York and Gloucester, and took up his abode in the palace of Whitehall, while flags waved, bells rang, cannon roared, trumpets brayed, shouts rent the air and fountains poured out costly libations of wine as tokens of the public joy. After a struggle for about twenty years between royalists and republicans, the monarchy was restored, and the English people again became subjects of the head of the Scottish house of Stuart.