Skater-Babe (The Portsmouth Place Stories Book 2)

In , one of England's most noted Puritan clergymen, John Cotton , arrived in Boston, and quickly became the second minister called "teacher" in Boston's church. In time, the Boston parishioners could sense a theological difference between Wilson and Cotton. Differing religious opinions within the colony eventually became public debates and erupted into what has traditionally been called the Antinomian Controversy. Hutchinson told her followers that Wilson lacked "the seal of the Spirit.

Both William and Mary Dyer sided strongly with Hutchinson and the free-grace advocates, and it is highly likely that Mary attended the periodic theological gatherings at the Hutchinson's home. Vane was a strong supporter of Hutchinson, but also had his own unorthodox ideas about theology that were considered radical. By late , the theological schism had become great enough that the General Court called for a day of fasting to help ease the colony's difficulties.

The appointed fasting day, in January, included church services, and Cotton preached during the morning, but with Wilson away in England, John Wheelwright was invited to preach during the afternoon. Instead of bringing peace, the sermon fanned the flames of controversy, and in Winthrop's words, Wheelwright "inveighed against all that walked in a covenant of works, During church services and lectures, they publicly questioned the ministers about their doctrines which disagreed with their own beliefs.

When the General Court next met on 9 March, Wheelwright was called upon to answer for his sermon. Most members of the Boston church, favoring Wheelwright in the conflict, drafted a petition justifying Wheelwright's sermon, and 60 people signed this remonstrance protesting the conviction. Dyer's signature in support of Wheelwright soon proved to be fateful to the Dyer family.

Anne Hutchinson faced trial in early November for "traducing" slandering the ministers, and was sentenced to banishment on her second day in court. Within a week of her sentencing, many supporters of hers, including William Dyer, were called into court and were disenfranchised. Those who refused to recant suffered hardships and many decided to leave the colony. While William Dyer appeared in the Boston records on several occasions, Mary Dyer had not caught the attention of the Massachusetts authorities until March as the Antinomian Controversy came to an end.

Following Hutchinson's civil trial, she was kept as a prisoner in the home of a brother of one of the colony's ministers. Though she had been banished from the colony, this did not mean she was removed as a member of the Boston church. In March she was forced to face a church trial to get at the root of her heresies, and determine if her relationship with the Puritan church would continue.

While William Dyer was likely with other men finding a new home away from Massachusetts, Mary Dyer was still in Boston and in attendance at this church trial. At the conclusion of the trial, Hutchinson was excommunicated, and as she was leaving the Boston Church, Mary stood and walked hand in hand with her out of the building. A reply was made that it was the woman who had had the monstrous birth. Governor Winthrop soon became aware of this verbal exchange and began conducting an investigation.

Dyer had given birth five months earlier, on 11 October , to a deformed stillborn baby. Winthrop wrote that while many women had gathered for the occasion, that "none were left at the time of the birth but the midwife and two others, whereof one fell asleep. Hutchinson fully understood the serious theological implications of such a birth, and immediately sought the counsel of the Reverend John Cotton. Thinking about how he would react if this were his child, Cotton instructed Hutchinson to conceal the circumstances of the birth. The infant was then buried secretly. Once Winthrop had learned of the monstrous birth, he confronted Jane Hawkins, and armed with new information then confronted Cotton.

As the news spread among the colony's leaders, it was determined that the infant would be exhumed and examined. While some of the description may have been accurate, many puritanical embellishments were added to better fit the moral story being portrayed by the authorities. The modern medical condition that best fits the description of the infant is anencephaly , meaning partial or complete absence of a brain. The religion of the Puritans demanded a close look at all aspects of one's life for signs of God's approval or disapproval.

Even becoming a member of the Puritan church in New England required a public confession of faith, and any behavior that was viewed by the clergy as being unorthodox required a theological examination by the church, followed by a public confession and repentance by the offender. This led to a highly subjective form of justice, an example of which was the hanging of Ann Hibbins whose offense was simply being resented by her neighbor. In Winthrop's eyes, Dyer's case was unequivocal, and he was convinced that her monstrous birth was a clear signal of God's displeasure with the antinomian heretics.

Winthrop felt that it was quite providential that the discovery of the monstrous birth occurred exactly when Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from the local body of believers, and exactly one week before Dyer's husband was questioned in the Boston church for his heretic opinions. To further fuel Winthrop's beliefs, Anne Hutchinson suffered from a miscarriage later in the same year when she aborted a strange mass of tissue that appeared like a handful of transparent grapes a rare condition, mostly in woman over 45, called a hydatidiform mole.

Though the author of this work was not named, it may have been the New England minister Thomas Weld who was in England at the time to support New England's ecclesiastical independence. Even the English writer, Samuel Danforth, included the birth in his Almanack as a "memorable occurrence" from In his response to Winthrop's Short Story , entitled Mercurius Americanus , he wrote that Dyer's and Hutchinson's monsters described by Winthrop were nothing but "a monstrous conception of his [Winthrop's] brain, a spurious issue of his intellect.

Twenty years after the tragic birth, when Mary Dyer returned to the public spotlight for her Quaker evangelism, she continued to be remembered for the birth of her deformed child, this time in the diary of John Hull. Also, in , an exchange of letters took place between England and New England when the two eminent English clergymen, Richard Baxter and Thomas Brooks, sought information about the monstrous birth from A New Englander, whose identity was not included, sent back information about the event to the English divines. The New Englander, who used Winthrop's original description of the "monster" almost verbatim, has subsequently been identified as yet another well-known clergyman, John Eliot who preached at the church in Roxbury, not far from Boston.

The most outrageous accounting of Dyer's infant occurred in when a memorandum of the Englishman Sir Joseph Williamson quoted a Major Scott about the event. Scott was a country lawyer with a notorious reputation, and his detractors included the famous diarist Samuel Pepys. Several of those affected by the events of the Antinomian Controversy went north with John Wheelwright in November to found the town of Exeter in what would become New Hampshire.

A larger group, uncertain where to go, contacted Roger Williams , who suggested they purchase land from the natives along the Narraganset Bay , near his settlement in Providence. On 7 March , just as Anne Hutchinson's church trial was getting underway, a group of men gathered at the home of William Coddington and drafted a compact for a new government. This group included several of the strongest supporters of Hutchinson who had either been disenfranchised, disarmed, excommunicated, or banished, including William Dyer.

Following through with Roger Williams' proposed land purchase, these exiles established their colony on Aquidneck Island later named Rhode Island , naming the settlement Pocasset. Within a year of the founding of this settlement, however, there was dissension among the leaders, and the Dyers joined Coddington, with several other inhabitants , in moving to the south end of the island, establishing the town of Newport. The Hutchinsons remained in Pocasset, whose inhabitants renamed the town Portsmouth , and William Hutchinson became its chief magistrate.

William Dyer immediately became the recording secretary of Newport, [41] and he and three others were tasked in June to proportion the new lands. Coddington was opposed to the Williams patent and managed to resist union with Providence and Warwick until when representatives of the four towns ultimately met and united under the patent. Coddington continued to be unhappy with the consolidated government, and wanted colonial independence for the two island towns.

He sailed to England to present his case, and in April , the Council of State of England gave him the commission he sought, making him governor-for-life of the island. Three men were then directed to go to England to get Coddington's commission revoked: Roger Williams, representing the mainland towns, and John Clarke and William Dyer representing the two island towns. In November the three men left for England, where Dyer would meet his wife. Dyer "sent his wife over in the first ship with Mr. Travice, and is now gone himself for England.

Biographer Ruth Plimpton hinted that Mary had some royal connection, and suggested that the news of the execution of King Charles compelled her to go. However, no record has been found to satisfactorily explain this mystery. Because of recent hostilities between the English and the Dutch, the three men, once in England, did not meet with the Council of State on New England until April After the men explained their case, Coddington's commission for the island government was revoked in October Mary, however, would remain in England for the next four years.

Mary Dyer's time in England lasted for over five years, and during her stay she had become deeply taken by the Quaker religion established by George Fox around Formally known as the Society of Friends , the Quakers did not believe in baptism, formal prayer and the Lord's Supper, nor did they believe in an ordained ministry.

Each member was a minister in his or her own right, women were essentially treated as men in matters of spirituality, and they relied on an "Inner Light of Christ" as their source of spiritual inspiration. Their worship consisted of silent meditation, though those moved by the Spirit would at times make public exhortations. They minimized the customs of bowing or men removing their hats, they would not take an oath, and they would not fight in wars.

The Puritans in Massachusetts viewed Quakers as being among the most reprehensible of heretics, and they enacted several laws against them.

Customers Also Bought Items By

While in England, one place that Dyer visited, and likely spent a lot of time, was Swarthmoor Hall , located near Ulverston in Cumbria in northwestern England. Biographer Ruth Plimpton surmises that Dyer had spent time with her old friend Henry Vane at his estate in Lincolnshire , called Belleau, and that Vane had introduced Mary to the judge Thomas Fell who traveled extensively across the kingdom, and who owned the Swarthmoor manor. In George Fox had visited Swarthmoor while the judge was traveling, but was invited in as a house guest by the judge's wife, Margaret Fell.

Within a few days, Fox had swayed Margaret to his religious beliefs. When the judge returned to Swarthmoor, he too listened to Fox, and though he was not taken by Fox's religious views, he was nevertheless tolerant and sympathetic with Fox, and allowed him to use Swarthmoor as a Quaker meeting place. Plimpton relates that Dyer made the journey of several days from Lincolnshire to Cumbria, and stayed at Swarthmoor as a guest of the Fells. It is here that Dyer almost certainly met George Fox, and learned about his beliefs and the role of women as preachers in his faith.

We have not heard anything yet from Anne Burden and Mary Dyer, who went thither Judge Thomas Fell died in , but Swarthmoor continued to be a center of Quaker activity where George Fox would visit on many occasions. Margaret Fell was imprisoned for her Quaker activism from to , and following her release she married George Fox. Of all the New England colonies, Massachusetts was the most active in persecuting the Quakers, but the Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven colonies also shared in their persecution. When the first Quakers arrived in Boston in there were no laws yet enacted against them, but this quickly changed, and punishments were meted out with or without the law.

It was primarily the ministers and the magistrates who opposed the Quakers and their evangelistic efforts. He is the one who later wrote the vindication to England, justifying the execution of the first two Quakers in The punishments doled out to the Quakers intensified as their perceived threat to the Puritan religious order increased. These included the stocks and pillory, lashes with a three-corded, knotted whip, fines, imprisonment, mutilation having ears cut off , banishment and death.

When whipped, women were stripped to the waist, thus being publicly exposed, and whipped until bleeding. Such was the fate of Dyer's Newport neighbor, Herodias Gardiner who had made a perilous journey through a mile wilderness to get to Weymouth in the Massachusetts colony. She had made the arduous trek with another woman and with her "Babe sucking at her Breast" to give her Quaker testimony to friends in Weymouth. Similarly, Katherine Marbury Scott , the wife of Richard Scott , and a younger sister of Anne Hutchinson , had received ten lashes for petitioning for the release of future son-in-law, Christopher Holder , who was imprisoned.

This was the setting into which Mary Dyer stepped, upon her return from England. In early Dyer returned to New England with the widow Ann Burden, who came to Boston to settle the estate of her late husband. Dyer's husband had to come to Boston to get her out of jail, and he was bound and sworn not to allow her to lodge in any Massachusetts town, or to speak to any person while traversing the colony to return home.

Dyer nevertheless continued to travel in New England to preach her Quaker message, and in early was arrested in the New Haven Colony , and then expelled for preaching her "inner light" belief, and the notion that women and men stood on equal ground in church worship and organization. Anti-Quaker laws had been enacted there, and after Dyer was arrested, she was "set on a horse", and forced to leave. They had already been evicted from other parts of the colony, and were exasperating the magistrates.

Being joined by John Rous from Barbadoes, the three men were sentenced to having their right ears cut off, and the sentence was carried out in July. Richard and Katherine Scott were considered to be the first Quakers in Providence. The Scotts had two daughters, Mary, the older, who was engaged to Christopher Holder, and Patience, the younger, aged Scott and her two daughters, along with Mary Dyer and her friend Hope Clifton, were all compelled to go to Boston to visit with Holder and the other men in jail.

The four women and child were all imprisoned. Three other people who had also come to visit Holder and were then imprisoned were Nicholas Davis from Plymouth, the London merchant William Robinson and a Yorkshire farmer named Marmaduke Stephenson , the latter two on a Quaker mission from England. The Quaker situation was becoming highly problematical for the magistrates.

• The Almighty in the Ordinary: Spiritual Insights from Everyday Life.
• NHPBS Kids Writers Contest - Winning Stories.
• 20 cracking ideas for Christmas days out in the UK;
• NHPBS Kids Writers Contest - Winning Stories.

Their response to the increasing presence of these people was to enact tougher laws, and on 19 October , a new law was passed in the Massachusetts colony that introduced capital punishment. Quakers would be banished from the colony upon pain of death, meaning they would be hanged if they defied the law. Dyer, Davis, Robinson, and Stephenson were then brought to court, and then sentenced to "banishment upon pain of death" under the new law.

In June Robinson and Stephenson were once again apprehended and brought back to the Boston jail. Her husband had already come to Boston two years earlier to retrieve her from the authorities, signing an oath that she wouldn't return.

• Through It All, Im Going to Make It.
• Guy Déhalles: Rencontre avec la vie (MON PETIT EDITE) (French Edition)?
• Luomo che amava le isole - Luomo che era morto (Le storie) (Italian Edition)?

He wouldn't come back to Boston again, but on 30 August he did sit down to write a long and impassioned letter to the magistrates, questioning the legality of the actions taken by the Massachusetts authorities. He then addressed the group, "We have made many laws and endeavored in several ways to keep you from among us, but neither whipping nor imprisonment, nor cutting off ears, nor banishment upon pain of death will keep you from among us.

We desire not your death. Marmaduke Stephenson, being less vociferous than Robinson, was allowed to speak, and though initially declining, he ultimately spoke his mind, and then was also sent back to jail. When Dyer was brought forth, the governor pronounced her sentence, "Mary Dyer, you shall go from hence to the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there be hanged till you be dead. Captain James Oliver of the Boston military company was directed to provide a force of armed soldiers to escort the prisoners to the place of execution.

Dyer walked hand-in-hand with the two men, and between them. When she was publicly asked about this inappropriate closeness, she responded instead to her sense of the event: No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand the sweet incomes and refreshings of the spirit of the Lord which now I enjoy. The place of execution was not the Boston Common , as expressed by many writers over the years, but instead about a mile south of there on Boston Neck, near the current intersection of West Dedham Street and Washington Street.

Boston Neck was at one time a narrow spit of land providing the only land access to the Shawmut Peninsula where Boston is located. Over time, the water on both sides of the isthmus was filled in, so that the narrow neck no longer exists. A possible reason for the confusion may be because the land immediately south of Boston Neck was not privately owned and considered "common lands", leading some writers to misinterpret this as being the Boston Common.

The gallows consisted of nothing more than a large elm tree. Here the prisoners would step up a ladder with one end of a rope about their neck and the other end secured to the tree, and the ladder would then be pulled away. William Robinson was the first of the three to mount the ladder, and when he was positioned he made a statement to the crowd, then died when the ladder was removed. Marmaduke Stephenson was the next to hang, and then it was Dyer's turn after she witnessed the execution of her two friends.

Dyer's arms and legs were bound and her face was covered with a handkerchief provided by Reverend John Wilson who had been one of her pastors in the Boston church many years earlier. A petition from her son, William, had given the authorities an excuse to avoid her execution. It had been a pre-arranged scheme, in an attempt to unnerve and dissuade Dyer from her mission. This was made clear from the wording of the reprieve, though Dyer's only expectation was to die as a martyr. The day after Dyer was pulled from the gallows she wrote a letter to the General Court, refusing to accept the provision of the reprieve.

What sort of house do you live in? Do you have any pets? When is your birthday? What sort of music do you like? I like most kinds, and I've always been a big fan of Freddie Mercury and Queen. I love a long-ago black and white film called 'Mandy' about a little deaf girl. I often wear black, with lots of silver jewellery. What was your favourite subject at school? I loved English, especially writing stories. I also liked Art. What was your worst subject at school? Which school did you go to? Did you have any jobs apart from writing? Did you always want to be a writer? Ever since I was six years old.

How many books have you published? Which is your favourite out of all your books? It's hard to choose, but I think I like 'Hetty Feather' most of all. Where do you get your ideas from? I don't really know. They just pop into my head. Who is your favourite character in your books? Do you base your characters on real people? No, I much prefer to make them all up.

Are your books always illustrated by Nick Sharratt? Which was your favourite book when you were a child? Have you ever written any books for adults?

Home | www.newyorkethnicfood.com - News, Opinion, Things to Do in the East Bay

I wrote a few crime novels for adults long ago, but I much prefer writing for children. Why do you always write about girls? Where do you write? How long does it take you to write a book? What did it feel like to see your first book on sale in the shops? I was so excited!

Do you travel much? Do you get lots of fan mail? I fell over at a dance long ago. What was your proudest moment? Have you got any special ambitions? I hope to be able to write lots more books! Letter for December 13 December Happy Christmas, everyone! Have a wonderful time over the festive holidays. January - Happy New Year! December - Happy Holidays! November - Cats, dogs and dancing! October - Big Diamond events! August - Diamond is out soon! August - Summer reading!

July - Emerald Star events! June - All about pets! May - Diamond is finished! April - Happy Easter holidays! March - New plans for Hetty! February - A new kitten called Lily! December - Time to do some Christmas shopping! November - Queenie is finally finished! October - Do you love the new website? September - Dear everyone, August - Will Jacob be getting a new playmate? July - A break in beautiful Norfolk! June - Wishing you a very sunny Jubilee! May - Eating ice-cream in Italy! March - Camel-riding in Dubai!

February - Meet Jacqueline this February! December - Merry Christmas! November - No time to rest! October - Here, there and everywhere! September - A very busy time! July - Holiday Time! June - A little rest and relaxation!

15 words and phrases you’ll only use if you come from Portsmouth

April - Spring has sprung! March - What's Hetty Feather 2 called? February - Busy, busy, busy! January - Welcome to a brand new year! December - Christmas time is here! October - Out and about! Good luck with your writing, sweetheart. Fan mail archive August - Fan Mail!!! August - Are there JW books aimed at boys?

August - My favourite book, boys reading your books and a book challenge! July - Biggest fan in Sydney! June - Books for boys or girls only? May - Greetings from Holland May - Books! July - An aspiring translater June - A letter from twins! June - Buried alive at the seaside! May - Questions and poems from Cardiff!

February - A worried cat owner! February - A missing cat February - A letter from a true tomboy! December - A fan in Hong Kong!

2018 Winning Stories

November - Book club questions! October - Triplet fans from New Zealand! October - A fan with a pet rabbit! September - Letter from talented sisters! September - A fan from Kenya! August - A letter from a cat fan!

• Modifying Sprites and Midgets 2nd Edition.
• Miki Takker.
• Similar authors to follow.
• Remedios caseros y naturales. Las mejores recetas de medicina natural (Spanish Edition).
• About Jacqueline!
• All About Jacqueline;

July - A fan from Russia! July - A Hetty Feather fan from Poland! July - A fan of reading and of music! June - A book club founder! June - A professional singer! May - Love for Queenie! April - A Tracy Beaker fan! April - A story from long ago! March - Favourite ice cream! February - Answers to Lily's questions!

January - Christmas wishes from Ireland! December - A letter from Emma and her fish! November - A real life Hetty Feather! October - A very talented illustrator! October - Will Hetty make it to the big screen? September - Not one but TWO lovely letters! August - A writer in the making! July - A chance encounter at the National Gallery! July - A fellow Hetty fan from Poland! July - A message from a movie star!