© 2012 Christy K Robinson
Historical fiction has been my favorite literary genre since
I was a young girl. I’ve learned that several of my author friends read my
favorite book series on the Childhoods
of Famous Americans when we were kids, and it shaped our discovery of
history and historical fiction by humanizing icons of history and making them
accessible to children. It tickled our imaginations to learn about culture and
what life might have been like for Virginia Dare, Martha Washington, or Abigail
Adams, as children. (There were boys in the series, too, of course.)
The author's pedigree chart, begun in 1974 and printed in 1994. |
My mother was chronically ill, and she drafted me to help her
at genealogy and history archives with the fetch-and-carry jobs, or searching
the reference files (you know, the little card drawers at the book place, that
preceded the search engine). We traced many of our lines back through
renaissance and medieval eras to European royalty. One of our most important
discoveries in the early 1970s was the confirmation that we were 11 and 12
generations descended from Mary Barrett Dyer, the 17th-century Quaker martyr.
In the 1970s and 80s, we believed that Mary was hanged by those mean Boston
Puritans for her religious beliefs, “simply for being a Quaker.” Unfortunately,
that belief persists in countless web pages today.
Mary Dyer had several opportunities to avoid prison and
execution. She could have lived her life in peace and safety, doing anything
she wanted to, in Rhode Island,
the colony she co-founded. But she intentionally returned to Boston several times to defy her
banishment-on-pain-of-death sentence, until she forced their hand and they
executed her. It’s not that she wanted to die, but that she was willing to die to shock the citizens into stopping their
leaders from the vicious persecution of Quakers and Baptists. Whippings such as
Herodias Gardner’s. Mary and other Quakers believed they were called by God to
“try the bloody law,” the law that required torture, bankrupting fines, exile,
and death for dissenters.
Mary’s sacrifice and civil disobedience worked. After her death
in June 1660, a petition to King Charles II resulted in a cease-and-desist
order to the Puritan theocracy in New England; and the king’s Rhode Island charter of 1663 (which replaced
previous religiously-liberal charters) specifically granted liberty of
conscience and separation of church and civil powers in Rhode Island Colony.
One hundred thirty years later, the religious-freedom concept modeled by Rhode Island became part of America’s Bill of Rights to the
Constitution.
1663 Rhode Island charter, written by Rhode Islanders such as John Clarke, Roger Williams, and William Dyer, and granted by King Charles II. |
Religious liberties (to practice religion or not without
interference of the government) and those who would legislate their morality
upon others still clash today, 350 years later. That’s one of the things that
compels me to write of a strong-willed woman. Mary Dyer sacrificed her will and
her life of ease and wealth, with husband, children, grandchildren, respect and
influence for the good of hundreds of people in her own time, and untold
hundreds of millions who came after her.
The genealogy hobby is inspiring, educational, and fun. I’m
32 generations down the tree from Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor’s son John was
forced to agree to the Magna Carta, a charter of liberties which has been the
model of constitutions around the world. On another line, I’m 12 generations
down from Mary Barrett Dyer, whose sacrifice laid the groundwork for the human
rights in the US Constitution. There are numerous other figures who may not be
famous today, but who shaped our society nonetheless. It’s fun to speculate
what molecules of DNA have come down to me, or from the thousands of other
strong, resourceful, and intelligent women in the family pedigree. They’re the
people whose actions and principles formed our society and culture today. They
were not wimps. And neither are we.
***************
Author/blogger/friend (not necessarily in that order) Jo Ann Butler releases book two of her trilogy on Herodias Long Hicks Gardner Porter in autumn 2012. "Herod" or "Harwood," as Jo Ann's heroine is known, was a neighbor of the Dyers in Newport, Rhode Island, beginning in the early 1640s.
For more information on Herodias Long, and to order the book, visit the Rebel Puritan website.
Images courtesy of Jo Ann Butler.
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