# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Williams, Roger (1604?-1683)

​WILLIAMS, ROGER (1604?–1683), colonist and pioneer of religious liberty, was born most probably either in 1604 or in the first quarter of 1605. He was formerly claimed as a native of Llansawel, Carmarthenshire, but the balance of opinion is now decidedly in favour of his being a native of London, and the son of James Williams (d. 1621), ‘a merchant taylor,’ and his wife Alice, who in her will, dated 1 Aug. 1634, speaks of her son Roger as ‘now beyond the seas’ with his wife and daughter. Roger Williams in 1629 mentions his aged mother as still living.
Mrs. Anne Sadleir tells how when Roger was a youth ‘he would in a shorthand take sermons and speeches in the Star-chamber and present them to my dear father’ (Sir Edward Coke). He showed such quickness of parts in this employment that Coke resolved to forward his education, and Roger was on 25 June 1621 elected a ‘pensioner’ or exhibitioner at Sutton's Hospital (Charterhouse), being ‘the second scholar placed there by Sir E. Coke.’ The rule that no scholar could be admitted under ten or over fourteen may well have been disregarded in this particular instance, for Coke was not only a governor of the school, but was also the legal adviser of the foundation. On 29 June 1623 Williams was admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, and he graduated B.A. from that society in 1626. He seems to have taken orders, and in 1629 was serving as chaplain to Sir William Masham of Oates in Essex, an ancestor of the first Baron Masham [see under Masham, Abigail; cf. Locke, John, 1632–1704; Lady Masham was a cousin of Oliver Cromwell]. While there he had offers of preferment, which he refused, mainly, it would appear, owing to his dislike of the Anglican liturgy (cf. Hist. MSS. Comm. 7th Rep. App. p. 654). Subsequently, in a letter to Mrs. Sadleir, he spoke metaphorically of Bishop Laud as having ‘pursued him out of the land.’
He embarked from Bristol in the ship Lyon, William Pierce, master, on 1 Dec. 1630, and after a voyage of sixty-five days reached Nantasket on 5 Feb. 1631. Winthrop noted his arrival as that of ‘a good minister,’ and he was invited accordingly to fill the pulpit of John Wilson of Boston, who was returning to England on a visit. But the church he had come to pleased Williams little better than the church he had left. He objected to the fact that it was unseparated (had not, that is to say, formally withdrawn from communion with the church of England), and he strongly disapproved of the amount of control over the individual conscience which the Boston church arrogated to itself. On 12 April 1631 he accepted an appointment as assistant ‘teacher’ or minister at Salem, but the Boston authorities viewed his pastorate there with so much jealousy that after a few months' sojourn he thought it wise to remove to Plymouth, where he became assistant to Ralph Smith. He had married shortly before leaving England Mary [Warnard], and his eldest daughter Mary was born at Plymouth in 1633. In August of this year he returned to Salem, and twelve months later, upon the death of Samuel Skelton, he consented to become chief teacher there, though he was not formally appointed to be Skelton's successor until the spring of 1635. The magistrates at Boston protested against the appointment and sought to annul it, but the church of Salem, taught by Williams to cherish the rights of self-governance, paid no heed to their mandate. The objection of the general council of Massachusetts Bay, and indeed of the solid puritan majority, to what they regarded as an excess of schismatic zeal, was not without reasonable justification. Williams's prime contention was that the civil powers should have no authority whatever over the consciences of men. Whether this was a ‘detestable’ opinion or no, the corollary that the church of England was ‘anti-christian’ was unquestionably inopportune and inconvenient as a tenet, while Williams's denial of validity to Charles I's charter of 1629, on the ground that Massachusetts belonged to the Indians and not to the king, who therefore had no right to give it away, might well seem fraught with real political danger to the infant community. In July 1635 Williams was summoned to the general court at Boston to answer the charge of maintaining dangerous opinions, of which the chief specified were: ‘first, that the magistrate ought not to punish the ​breach of the first table [of the decalogue] otherwise than in such cases as did disturb the civil peace; secondly, that he ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerated man.’ The Salem congregation at first stood by their ‘teacher,’ but fear of ostracism and disfranchisement coerced them into submission, and on 9 Oct. 1635 Roger Williams, still persisting in his ‘contumacy,’ was, according to the euphemism of John Cotton, the apologist of the authorities at Boston, ordered to be enlarged out of Massachusetts (see North American Review, April 1868; cf. Edwards, Antapologia, 1644, p. 165; Baillie, Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time, 1645, p. 126; Burrage, Baptists in New England, ap. American Bapt. Publ. Soc. Trans. 1894, 18 sq.) He was ordered to depart out of Massachusetts' jurisdiction within six weeks, but was afterwards granted leave to remain in Salem until the next spring, provided he should not ‘go about to draw others to his opinions.’ The Boston council even went further and offered to revoke the sentence of banishment upon the sole condition that he should not disseminate ‘any of his different opinions in matters of religion;’ but as many still resorted to his house to hear him he was held to have violated this condition. In January he was cited to Boston, but declined to go, and Captain John Underhill (d. 1672) [q. v.] was despatched to Salem with a sloop under orders to arrest him and put him aboard ship for England.
In the meantime Williams had received a hint from Winthrop ‘to arise and flee into the Narrohiganset's country, free from English Pattents.’ With four or five companions Williams ‘steered his course’ for the land of the Narragansett Indians, being ‘sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season, not knowing what bread or bed did mean.’ Of the Indian chief Ousamequin he purchased a tract of land at Manton's Neck, on the east bank of the Seekonk river, and in April 1636 commenced to plant. But his old friend the governor of Plymouth ‘lovingly advised’ him that ‘he had fallen into the edge of their bounds.’ At the end of May, therefore, he crossed over the water with his companions and began a settlement at a spot on the banks of the ‘Mooshausic,’ to which he gave the name Providence. There, later on in 1636, he was joined by his wife and two children. The settlers agreed to submit themselves to the will of the majority ‘only in civil things.’ By a deed dated 24 March 1638, two sachems of Narragansett Bay, with whom he had struck up a friendship while living at Plymouth, made over to him the lands contiguous to the settlement (Arnold, Hist. of Rhode Island, i. 40; Gammell, p. 64; Greene, Short Hist. of Rhode Island, 1877; Proceedings of Massachusetts Hist. Soc. 1873, p. 356).
Williams's tendency to the views of the anabaptists had already been pronounced, and in 1639, having been publicly immersed, he planted the first baptist church in Providence, ‘the mother of eighteen thousand churches of a like faith and order on the continent of America’ (Benedict, Hist. of Baptists, i. 473; Crosby, i. 91). A few months later he characteristically disputed the validity of immersion, severed his connection with the baptists forthwith, and became ‘a seeker’ (that is, one dissatisfied with all existing sects). It is certainly not a little remarkable that Williams, while carrying to their logical issues the principles of such harbingers of individualism in religion as Robert Browne [q. v.], Henry Jacob [q. v.], and John Smith (d. 1612) [q. v.], the se-baptist, should also, in his remote settlement, have attained conclusions so closely allied to those expressed a few years later by Chillingworth, by Jeremy Taylor in his ‘Liberty of Prophesying,’ but more particularly by Milton.
In the meantime additions were being made, chiefly by refugees from Massachusetts, to Williams's little settlement at Providence. In other parts of Narragansett Bay, moreover, settlers appeared, and with the development of the ‘synoikismos’ Williams's peculiar views of ‘soul liberty’ and wide religious toleration acquired strength and precision. In 1639 a number of ‘antinomians’ from Massachusetts, inspired in large measure by the counsels of Sir Henry Vane the younger [q. v.], settled in the township of Newport. Vane, during his sojourn in New England, was in close correspondence with Williams. The little settlements were united by fear of encroachments on the part of Massachusetts Bay, and their uneasiness was enhanced by the consciousness that they had no other title to their land than that obtained from natives. This sense of common danger determined them to send Williams to England as the champion of their separate rights. He set sail accordingly from New York in June 1643. His leisure on the voyage he employed in compiling his very remarkable ‘Key into the Language of America; or an Help to the Language of the Natives in that part of America called New England’ … London, printed by Gregory Dexter, 1643, dedicated ‘to my Deare and Welbeloved Friends and Countreymen in old and new England’ (reprinted in Rhode Island Hist. Soc. Coll. vol. i. 1827). The vocabularist states that God was pleased to give him a ‘painful, patient spirit’ to lodge with the ​Indians ‘in their filthy, smoky holes, to gain their tongue,’ and the value of his book is enhanced by the fact that it was compiled before the language of the Narragansetts had been essentially modified by intercourse with the English.
Williams's friend Vane received him hospitably, and presented him to the commissioners of plantations, who listened to his views with attention and granted him the charter that he sought (dated 14 March 1644), giving to ‘the Providence Plantations in the Narragansetts Bay full power to rule themselves.’ An interval of a few months before setting sail on his return voyage was occupied by Williams in seeing two tracts through the press. The first, ‘Mr. Cotton's Letter lately printed, examined, and answered’ (1644, small 4to), was a reply point by point to the ‘Letter’ justifying the expulsion of Roger Williams which Cotton had printed in 1643—the gist of the writer's complaint being that by the ‘New English elders’ church fellowship was put before godliness. The second of the pamphlets, also in small quarto, was the notable ‘The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for cause of Conscience, discussed in a Conference betweene Truth and Peace, who in all tender Affection present to the High Court of Parliament (as the result of their Discourse) these (amongst other Passages), of highest consideration’ (London, 1644, 4to, two editions). The title-pages slightly differ, but neither bears the author's name (British Museum, Bodl., Advocates' Library). The doctrine of the liberty of conscience in matters of religion was a necessary outcome of protestant conditions, and it had already been preached for many years by independent or baptist divines (see Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, ed. Richardson, Hanserd Knollys Society, 1846); but it is doubtful if it had yet been so forcibly expounded as it was in ‘The Bloudy Tenent.’ At the outset of his treatise Williams takes the highest ground in his advocacy of absolute freedom; ‘it is,’ he says, ‘the will and command of God that (since the coming of his Son, Lord Jesus) a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-christian consciences and worships be granted to all men, in all Nations and Countries, and they are only to be fought against with that sword which is only (in soul matters) able to conquer, to wit, the word of God's Spirit, the word of God’ (preface). In concluding, he goes so far as to enounce the principle, ‘The civil magistrate owes two things to false worshippers, (1) Permission, (2) Protection’ (chap. cxxv). Williams sailed about the time of the appearance of his book, probably in July 1644, and it was perhaps as well that he did, for in August the commons ordered ‘The Bloudy Tenent’ to be burned by the common hangman (Commons' Journal, 9 Aug.). Prynne similarly, in his ‘Twelve Considerable Serious Questions’ (1644), denounced Roger Williams's licentious work and dangerous conclusion of free liberty of conscience, which was again condemned by the Sion College manifesto of December 1647. A small piece of manuscript that Williams had left behind him was published anonymously in London in 1645, in octavo, under the title ‘Christnings make not Christians; or a briefe Discourse concerning that name Heathen commonly given to the Indians; as also concerning that great point of their conversion.’
In the meantime Williams had arrived back in Boston (17 Dec. 1644) with letters to the governor which ensured him against molestation, and the new charter which he had obtained for the settlers of Narragansett Bay was formally recognised in 1647. The result of the appeal to England had been so far satisfactory, but in 1651 matters were again disturbed, and the charter seemed in danger of being undermined by a commission obtained in England by William Coddington [q. v.] as governor of Aquidneck Island, in independence of the remainder of the colony of which it forms an integral part (see Rhode Island Hist. Tracts, No. 4). In November 1651 Williams embarked once more for England with a commission to procure the abrogation of Coddington's authority, and at the same time to secure titles and protection for the Rhode Island boundaries against encroachments on the part of either Massachusetts or Connecticut. On his arrival in England he seems to have paid a visit to Sir Henry Vane in Lincolnshire. Vane was now at the height of his influence, and Williams wrote to his friends in Providence to the effect that ‘the great anchor of our ship is Sir Henry.’ One of his first acts in England, however, was to send to press a vindication of his treatise of 1644, the challenge of which had been responded to by Cotton in his ‘Bloudy Tenent washed and made white in the Bloude of the Lambe.’ Williams's answer to Cotton was entitled ‘The Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy by Cotton's Endevour to wash it white in the Bloud of the Lambe,’ printed by Giles Calvert, 1652, small 4to (British Museum, Bodleian). And this he followed up with ‘The Hireling Ministry none of Christs, or a Discourse touching the Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ’ (London, 1652, 4to; Brit. Museum); and another tract in the form of a letter to his ​wife Mary, upon her recovery from illness, entitled ‘Experiments of Spiritual Life and Health’ (London, 1652, 4to; reprinted Providence, 1863, 4to; cf. Allibone, Dict.)
Williams's lodgings in London were in St. Martin's near the Shambles. He often visited Hugh Peters [q. v.] at Lambeth, and seems to have been on intimate terms with him, for it was to him that Peters confided the melancholy and trouble that oppressed him amid seeming prosperity. It is very probable that he had some intercourse with John Owen and Richard Baxter, to whom he subsequently addressed a letter prefixed to his treatise against the quakers. Among others with whom he is known to have associated while in London between 1652 and 1654 were Thomas Harrison (1606–1660) [q. v.], the regicide, whom he described as ‘a heavenly man, but most high flown for the kingdom of the saints;’ Henry Lawrence [q. v.], another member of Cromwell's council of state; and the eccentric genius, Sir Thomas Urquhart [q. v.], for the mitigation of whose imprisonment he seems to have employed such influence as he possessed, thereby earning a flaming tribute from the knight of Cromartie. By his generosity and by his ‘many worthy books with some whereof he was pleased to present me,’ says Urquhart, ‘he did approve himself a man of such discretion and inimitably sanctified parts that an archangel from heaven could not have shown more goodness with less ostentation’ (Epilogue to Logopandecteision; Willcock, Urquhart, 1899, p. 91).
Williams seems, moreover, to have come frequently in contact with Milton, whose acquaintance it is quite possible that he may have made in 1643. He spoke afterwards with appreciation of Milton's skill in languages, and he mentions in a letter that he was able to give the blind poet some instruction in Dutch, of which Milton possessed but little. Less successful was his endeavour to open relations with the family of his old benefactor, Sir Edward Coke, through the medium of Coke's daughter Mrs. Anne Sadleir. This lady was an unbending royalist, and she took very ill a recommendation from Williams to amend her opinions by reading Milton's ‘Eikonoclastes.’ ‘It seems,’ she wrote to him, ‘that you have a face of brass and cannot blush. … As for Melton it is he, if I be not mistaken, that wrote a book of the “Lawfulness of Divorce,” and, if report says true, had at that time two or three wives living. This perhaps were good doctrine in New England, but it is most abominable in Old England. As for his book against the king, God has began his punishment upon him here, who struck him with blindness;’ and she concluded: ‘Trouble me no more with your letters, for they are very troublesome to her who wishes you in the place from which you came.’ Here this correspondence ceased.
In the summer of 1654, after two and a half years' sojourn in England, Williams returned to Providence, bearing letters from Vane to some of the leading Rhode Island settlers. He had succeeded in the immediate objects of his mission; but he found the colony in a very disorganised and divided state, and he addressed himself at once to an endeavour to restore some degree of unity to the scattered townships. It was not altogether unnatural that his doctrine of liberty should have been interpreted here and there to mean license. The necessary distinction and the need for subordination in secular affairs were drawn out in a memorable letter of Williams, dated January 1655, in which the Commonwealth is likened to a ship. In the meantime, on 12 Sept. 1654, he had been elected president or governor of Rhode Island, an office which he retained until May 1657. During this period Williams rendered important service to the neighbouring colonies, as he had done on former occasions, by his influence with the Indians, and by giving warning of impending hostilities (Winthrop, Hist. of New England, pp. 237 sq.) But he earned some unpopularity in 1656 by issuing a warrant for the arrest on a charge of high treason of one of his old followers, William Harris, who had given an absurd application to Williams's views by promulgating anarchical doctrines, such as the unlawfulness of ‘all earthly powers’ and the ‘bloodguiltyness’ of all penal discipline.
In 1656 the quakers made their appearance in New England, and were cruelly persecuted in most of the colonies. They found a refuge, however, in Rhode Island, where, despite the remonstrances from Massachusetts and elsewhere, Williams (though he held the views of the quakers in the greatest abhorrence) steadily refused to lend his influence either to expel or to persecute them. George Fox visited the colony subsequently, in 1672, and was in Providence at the same time as Williams. The two champions did not meet; but no sooner had Fox returned to Newport than Williams sent him a challenge to a public discussion. Williams subsequently rowed himself down the bay (a distance of some thirty miles) to Newport, in order to hold a dispute with three of Fox's ‘journeymen and chaplains,’ after which, as is usually the case in such combats, both sides claimed the victory and ​published diverse accounts of the arguments employed. The ‘New England Firebrand Quenched’ by George Fox and John Burnyeat remains to illustrate the talent for obloquy possessed by the quakers (see Smith, Friends' Books and Bibliotheca Anti-Quakeriana, 1873, p. 452). But Williams, who may be said to have sat at the feet of Milton, was not easily to be eclipsed as regards controversial vocabulary, and his quarto treatise of 335 pages, called ‘George Fox digg'd out of his Burrowes’ (Boston, 1676; dedicated to Charles II), is a remarkable testimony to the unfailing vigour of his expletives if not of his mind.
When a new charter was obtained for Rhode Island on 8 July 1663, Williams became one of the assistants under the new governor, Benedict Arnold, and he was re-elected in 1667 and 1670. In 1677 he was again elected, but declined to serve. During the alarming rising of the Indians, known as Philip's war, in 1675, he accepted a commission as captain in the militia and drilled companies in Providence. When the Indians were subdued he served on the committee which allotted the captives as slaves among the heads of families residing in Providence. The trade which he had maintained with the Indians probably suffered by the war, and during the last years of his life Williams was badly off, and was maintained apparently by his son. Williams's last letter, to Governor Bradstreet at Boston, was dated Providence 6 May 1682, and he died at Providence in all probability in the early part of April 1683 (cf. Savage, iv. 479; Straus, p. 230 n.; Hodges, Notes concerning Roger Williams, Boston, 1899). He was buried in a spot which he himself had selected on his own land, a short distance from the place where forty-seven years before he had first landed. He left issue: Mary, born in 1633; Freeborn, born at Salem in October 1635, who was twice married but left no issue; Providence, born in September 1638, who died unmarried in 1686; Mercy, born on 15 July 1640, who married three times and had numerous children; Daniel, born in February 1642; and Joseph, born in December 1643. Charts giving the first five generations of the descendants of Roger Williams were published by Austin in his ‘Ancestry of Thirty-three Rhode Islanders’ (Albany, 1889; cf. Savage, Genealog. Dict. iv. 479).
Milton spoke of Williams as an extraordinary man and a noble confessor of religious liberty, who sought and found a safe refuge for the sacred ark of conscience. His associates in the new world described him in terms less exalted. Bradford calls him a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgment (Hist. of Plymouth Plant. p. 310). Cotton Mather spoke of his having a windmill in his head (Magnalia, vii. 7); Sir William Martin and Hubbard both praised his zeal, but thought it overheated (Hutchinson Papers, p. 106). Southey held his memory in ‘veneration,’ which seems hardly the word to apply to a man so profoundly contentious as Williams was. Lowell is substantially just to him when he writes, ‘He does not show himself a strong or a very wise man,’ though ‘charity and tolerance flow so noticeably from his pen that it is plain they were in his heart’ (Among my Books, p. 246). Williams's place as a religious leader has perhaps been exaggerated by his eulogists. His views were not in advance of those of many of his contemporaries, his cardinal doctrine that ‘there is no other prudent Christian way of preserving peace in the world but by permission of different consciences’ being scarcely more than a reaffirmation of John Smith's dictum of 1611 to the effect that Christ being the lawgiver of the conscience, the magistrates were not entitled to meddle with religious opinions. His mind had none of the roominess of Fuller's, or of the elevation of Milton's; but he certainly had a firm grip of the necessity of a principle of toleration, and he was one of the very first to make a serious effort to put that principle into practice.
Such memorials to Roger Williams as exist are for the most part of quite recent date. In 1871 a descendant left a hundred acres of land at Providence to be formed into a ‘Roger Williams park,’ which was inaugurated on 16 Oct. 1877, when a statue to the pioneer of the city was also unveiled and a medal struck (see Diman, Address on Roger Williams, 1877). In 1871, too, a statue by Franklin Simmons was erected in the capitol at Washington at the expense of the state of Rhode Island, and in the year following a monument nearly 200 feet in height was commenced on Prospect Hill, Providence. A few relics are preserved at Providence, and Williams's house at Salem is still pointed out (see Essex Bulletin, April 1870; Mudge, Footprints of Roger Williams, p. 272). In 1874 a petition was forwarded to the Massachusetts legislature asking that body to revoke the order of banishment uttered in 1635. The inference that the general court of Massachusetts had acted with injustice in banishing Williams is combated with great zeal and erudition by Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter in his ‘As to Roger ​Williams and his “Banishment” from the Massachusetts Plantation’ (Boston, 1876, 4to). In 1865 was founded the Narragansett Club, which adopted as its motto ‘What cheare, Netop’ (the traditional hail given by the friendly Indians to Williams from the banks of the Mooshausic, ‘Netop’ signifying friends), and the first six of its massive quarto volumes (1866–74), admirably printed and edited, are devoted to reprints of Williams's writings. The sixth volume contains a series of upwards of 130 of Williams's letters. His sixty-five letters to Winthrop and other detached pieces had previously appeared in the Massachusetts Historical Society's collections (1st ser. vols. i. ix., 2nd ser. vols. vii. viii., 3rd ser. vols. i. ix. x., and 4th ser. vols. iv. v. vi.), and the ‘Bloudy Tenent’ was carefully edited for the Hanserd Knollys Society by Edward Bean Underhill in 1848. ‘What Cheer; or Roger Williams in Banishment,’ a poem by Job Durfee, appeared in 1832 (cf. Foster, Life and Corresp. 1856, i. 156).
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