William Dyer

William Dyer was an early settler of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, a founding settler of both Portsmouth and Newport, and Rhode Island's first Attorney General. He is best known for being the husband of the Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer, who was executed for her Quaker activism. Sailing from England as a young man with his wife, Dyer first settled in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but like many members of the Boston church became a supporter of the dissident ministers John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson during the Antinomian Controversy, and signed a petition in support of Wheelwright. For doing this, he was disenfranchised and disarmed, and with many other supporters of Hutchinson, he signed the Portsmouth Compact, and settled on Aquidneck Island in the Narragansett Bay. Within a year of arriving there, he and others followed William Coddington to the south end of the island where they established the town of Newport.