Mary Dyer’s “monster”

***Please close page if you're sensitive to images of fetuses, 

and accept my apology. 

I think the images are necessary to illustrate the article.***

Mary Dyer Illuminated (paperback and Kindle)
tells the story of Mary Dyer's
and Anne Hutchinson's monster births,
in context, in an uncomplicated,
"addictive" narrative style.
Paperback book, 390 pages: http://amzn.to/16UZ5AZ

Kindle book:  http://amzn.to/1bHFWtW   

Kindle's free reading app: http://amzn.to/MtttcO 

© 2011 Christy K Robinson 

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 On October 17, 1637, Mary Dyer gave birth to a stillborn, deformed baby girl, two months prematurely. This was Mary’s third time in childbirth: her first son William had died immediately after being christened, and was buried in England. Her second son, Samuel, was born in autumn 1635, and christened by Rev. John Wilson, ironically the man who would taunt Mary at her execution. This baby girl was never christened and had no name.

Anne Hutchinson and Jane Hawkins were the attending midwives. In October, Anne had been told to stand trial for heresy in early November, and it appears that William Dyer was away from Boston for at least a month at this time: either on a venison or corn-trading mission with the Indians, or scouting land in Rhode Island on which to plant a town.

The seven-months-gestation child was born dead: it had anencephaly and spina bifida malformations, according to a neurologist (see below). It was buried in an unknown location (not a consecrated cemetery), probably on the nearby Boston Common grazing ground, by Reverend John Cotton, teacher of the First Church of Boston, where the Hutchinsons and Dyers were members.The secret burial was based on old English law that stillborn babies should be buried deeply enough not to be disturbed by animals.

The existence of the baby was unknown to most people (and I suspect its malformation was kept from Mary Dyer as a mercy), until Anne Hutchinson’s second trial for heresy and sedition in March 1638. Most of the men in the Hutchinson faction had gone on a scouting and surveying trip to Aquidneck Island to arrange for their exodus in April 1638. So the governors and ministers arrayed themselves as prosecutors, jury, and judge against Anne, who was not allowed defense counsel.

At Anne’s inevitable conviction, excommunication, and expulsion from the meeting house, Mary Dyer stood up and walked out with Anne, holding her friend’s hand for support. As they left the building, someone in the crowd mentioned that Mary was the mother of a “monster.”

Governor Winthrop, in his zeal to further prosecute Anne and her supporters for their heresy, ordered the exhumation and examination of this monster, Mary Dyer’s baby, which had lain in the frozen ground for six months. It would have decomposed somewhat between October and December, and then frozen with the severe winter that brought repeated blizzards and a frozen harbor; then when it was exhumed, it would have decomposed even further.

Illustration from De Monstrorum

 “Monster” was a term commonly used for more than a hundred years in England, to include conjoined twins, congenital birth defects, stillborn malformed babies, and even deformed living children. A 1634 book, De Monstrorum, illustrated human-beast hybrids that could come of bestiality, and in the later 1630s, Governor Winthrop described a pig-human hybrid with its human father’s face. At Plymouth Colony, a young man was convicted and hanged for having carnal knowledge of farm animals. In such cases, following the Old Testament, both man and beast were destroyed--if his "seed" mixed with the animal, then it would have been cannibalism to use that animal for food or its hide.

Usually, a monster birth was connected with the curse of witchcraft, or was proof of the mother’s heresy to established Christian beliefs and behavior. In the 1650s, a rumor went around that monsters were born to women who preached, or who had listened to a woman preacher—a direct reference to Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, and the many sects, including Quakers, that were springing up with women in teaching and preaching roles.

Anencephalic fetus

 In 1642 and 1644, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop’s account of Mary Dyer’s 1637 stillborn baby’s deformation was published in England with a forward by Rev. Thomas Welde, one of Winthrop’s colleagues who became first a London child-labor trafficker and later a minister in the north of England. In A Short Story of the Rise, Reign and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists and Libertines That Infected the Churches of New England, Winthrop’s text described Mary’s daughter:

“It was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape’s; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp; two of them were above one inch long, the other two shorter; the eyes standing out, and the mouth also; the nose hooked upward; all over the breast and back full of sharp pricks and scales, like a thornback* [i.e., a skate or ray], the navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be, and the back and hips before, where the belly should have been; behind, between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but, instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.”

Anencephalic with spina bifida

*Thornbacks were disdained as filth: William Wood wrote in New England’s Prospect, p. 37, that “Thornebacke and Scates is given to the dogges, being not counted worth the dressing in many places.”

Winthrop didn't directly accuse Mary Dyer (and later, Anne Hutchinson) of witchcraft, or that their pregnancies were devil-spawn, but he certainly implied it by using words like claws and horns. William Hutchinson and William Dyer were socially connected and economically powerful and could protect their wives and families from a direct accusation. 

Norman McNulty, MD, a neurologist, says of Winthrop’s evaluation: “Anencephaly is certainly part of the picture and it was probably some non-inheritable congenital malformation that led to this malformation. Sometimes, in utero strokes very early in development lead to lack of development of brain tissue (anencephaly) which is probably what happened here.”

Anencephalic babies usually don’t live to birth; if they do, they die within hours. They have only a brain stem and usually have other severe defects, so it’s impossible to sustain life. For more information on anencephaly, click HERE. In addition to the anencephaly, the baby almost certainly had spina bifida. These compounded neural defects might have come from a diet poor in Vitamin B,  from lead poisoning (lead/pewter eating and drinking vessels), or from using popular remedies that included mercury.

Mary Dyer’s poor daughter was used as a sermon illustration for decades, and she was known in America and England for being the mother of a monster. Imagine that reputation hanging over you everywhere you go, for decades.

Edward Johnson, in Wonder-Working Providence, 1628-1651, wrote regarding the 1638 earthquake in New England, "yet was not this the first loud speaking hand of God against them; but before this the Lord had poynted directly to their sinne by a very fearfull Monster, that another of these women [Mary Dyer] brought forth, they striving to bury it in oblivion, but the Lord brought it to light, setting forth the view of their monstrous Errors in this prodigious birth."  

There was even gossip that Sir Henry Vane the Younger, a 24-year-old one-term governor of Massachusetts and eventually a high official in English royal court and Parliament, had an illicit affair with both Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson, which, because of the supposed utter abandon of morality, and Sir Henry’s liberal religion and politics, had resulted in both abnormal births. (Anne had a hydatidiform molar pregnancy terminate in about June of 1638, only months after Mary’s stillbirth.)

Sir Henry Vane had a set of Disciples, who first sprang under him in New-England, when he was Governour there, But their Notions were then raw and undigested, and their-Party quickly confounded by God's Providence, as appears from Mr. Tho. Weld's Account. One Mrs. Dyer, a 'Chief Person of the Sect, did first bring forth a Monster, which had the Parts of almost all Sorts of Living Creatures; some Parts like Man, but most ugly and misplac’d ; and some like Beasts, Birds, and Fishes, having Horns, Fins and Claws: And at the Birth of it the Bed shook., and the Women were forced to leave the room. Mrs. Hutchinson, the chief Woman among them; and their Teacher, (to whose Exercises a Congregation of them us'd to assemble) brought forth about 30 Mishapen Births at once; and being banish’d into another Plantation, was kill'd there by the Indians.

An Abridgement Of Mr. Baxter's History Of Young Sir Henry Vane, His Life And Times, by Richard Baxter, Edmund Calamy (editor) —1713: “The Presbyterian view is given by Baxter: ‘Sir H. Vane had a set of disciples who first sprang under him in New England. But their notions were then raw and undigested, and their party quickly confounded by God's providence.’ Baxter's proofs of the divine disfavor visited upon the New England Antinomians are certain monstrous births which poor Mrs. Hutchinson and one of her female followers [Mary Dyer] brought forth, — a sad and disgusting recital.” Calamy's Abridgment of Baxter's Life of Young Sir Henry Vane, pp. 98, 99. 

There’s no record of what Mary Dyer or Anne Hutchinson thought of their tragic pregnancies, because at that time, their emotions and sorrow didn’t matter to the men who recorded history. They were adjudged heretics and deserving of their misfortune. But my hunch is that after Anne’s death in 1643, Winthrop's publications in 1642 and 1644, the English Civil War had stabilized, and she was finished having children and weaning them, and finally Edward Johnson's 1651 history book, Mary Dyer sailed for England in early 1652. I believe her one of her several goals was to set the record straight about Anne Hutchinson, her mentor, friend, and mother figure. In England, Mary encountered a new sect that in some ways reflected the principles that Anne had taught 15 years before: they were the Quakers.

What Plymouth Colony's governor asked about Mary's baby: image and transcription of the Bradford letter: http://bit.ly/13HxQd6  

The DYERS book is available on Amazon
by clicking HERE.

 Like this article? Read the non-fiction book on 17th-century life and times, The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport, by Christy K Robinson. (Click the highlighted text to go to the book.)
Nonfiction, illustrated. The research and recent discoveries behind the novels. The Dyers is a lively nonfiction account of background color, culture, short stories, lives of their friends and enemies (Anne Hutchinson, Henry Vane, John Winthrop, John Endecott, and many others), food, medicine, interests, recreation, cosmic events, and all the "stuff" that made up the world of William and Mary Dyer in the 1600s. More than 70 chapters, and all-new, exclusive content found nowhere else! 

Christy K Robinson is author of the books:

·          We Shall Be Changed (2010)
·          Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013)
·          Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014)
·          The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport (2014)
·          Effigy Hunter (2015)
·          Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)