This week in 1659

“Be it known to all this day, that we suffer not as evil doers, but for conscience[’] sake; this day we shall be at rest with the Lord.”

— Marmaduke Stevenson, convicted of disobeying banishment, hanging, Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Executed October 27, 1659

Stevenson (sometimes spelled Stephenson) was a plowman in England until he took to a religious calling. He left his family and traveled to Barbados. Eventually, in Rhode Island he met William Robinson, with whom he traveled to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to protest a law banishing a new religious order called Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Stevenson was banished himself and, when he later returned to the colony, sentenced to die. He was hanged in the Boston Common, the first of three known as the “Boston martyrs.”