THE PURITAN MIGRATION TO New England that began in the late 1620s brought a modest number of additional settlers to New Plymouth. Thirty-five Leideners came in 1629, followed by a second group of congregants the next year. Compared to the puritan flood washing ashore at Massachusetts Bay, the additions to the Plymouth church amounted to a trickle. For the Pilgrims, though, the newcomers represented a much-needed infusion of congregational vitality and momentum. “We became through the goodness of God pretty numerous and were in the best estate respecting the church that we had as yet been in New England,” wrote Nathaniel Morton, who later became the colony’s longtime secretary.1
The Pilgrims had a larger congregation, but would anyone other than Elder Brewster lead it? After nearly a decade, Plymouth finally secured a minister chosen by one of its own. In 1628, Isaac Allerton brought a Mr. Rogers to the colony. Church leaders were wary after their experience with John Lyford. After a trial period they concluded that Rogers was “crazed in his brain” and paid to send him back. Allerton apparently had no better judgment when it came to ministers than secretaries.2
The next ministerial candidate came at less expense. Ralph Smith paid his way to Massachusetts Bay in 1629. When New England Company leaders learned of his separatist principles, they regretted having transported him. From England, they instructed John Endecott that unless Smith proved more tractable, they should “suffer him not to remain within the limits” of the company’s charter. Smith moved to an outpost in present-day Hull, Massachusetts, then came to Plymouth. The Pilgrim congregation chose him as its pastor. The resumption of the sacraments was surely welcome news to some men and women who had endured their absence for nearly a decade. Church members could finally partake of the Lord’s Supper and have their children baptized. After a few years, however, Plymouth’s congregants and Smith grew disenchanted with each other, and Pilgrim leaders explored hiring another minister. By 1636, feeling unappreciated and underpaid, Smith had resigned.3
In the early 1630s, Plymouth briefly added a more talented man to its stable of preachers. When he was in his early teens, Roger Williams’s intelligence and diligence caught the attention of renowned barrister, judge, and politician Sir Edward Coke. He employed the young Williams as a clerk and then paid for his education. In 1627, Williams graduated from Cambridge at a time when bishops made it more difficult for puritans to obtain parish positions. He continued his studies at Cambridge for a time, then was employed as a chaplain by Sir William Masham, a political ally of Coke and a man who advanced the prospects of many puritan ministers. In addition to providing spiritual counsel to Masham’s family and friends, Williams carried messages among the king’s parliamentary enemies.4
In July 1629, Williams traveled to the Earl of Lincoln’s estate in Sempringham in the company of puritan luminaries John Cotton and Thomas Hooker. Williams informed his companions that he disagreed with their willingness to use the Book of Common Prayer. Cotton countered that he “selected the good and best prayers in his use of that book” and that prayer books were not a “fundamental error.” Williams would not let his fellow puritans off the hook. The prayer book was an idol. Christians who used it engaged in “false worship.” If kings and bishops forced Christians to choose between “peace” and “truth,” God commanded them to risk everything for truth. At Sempringham the trio met with John Winthrop and other members of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Williams, Cotton, and Hooker all decided to remain in England for the time being, but they would cross paths again on the other side of the Atlantic.5
Williams was as headstrong in romance as he was in theology. That same year, he had the temerity to woo Jane Whalley, the niece of a prominent puritan noblewoman. Lady Jane Barrington informed the young minister that his station was beneath that of his beloved. “I have learned,” Williams apologized to Lady Barrington, “to still my soul as a weaned child and give offence to none.” Williams was wrong; he could never still his soul, his mouth, or his pen. “We hope to live together in the heavens,” he wrote Lady Barrington the next month, “though the Lord has denied that union on earth.” The rebuffed Williams soon rebounded by wedding Mary Bernard. Her father was Richard Bernard, the Worksop vicar who after flirting with separatism had written tracts against John Robinson. Given Williams’s connections to the king’s political enemies, it was not safe for the couple to remain in England. They reached Boston in early 1631.6
Once Williams crossed the Atlantic, he became even blunter. He told New England’s magistrates and ministers that they fell short of God’s mark. Whereas other puritans took great pains to distance themselves from separatism, Williams could find almost nobody he deemed sufficiently separated. He became an arch-separatist, convinced that New England’s churches were in the clutches of Antichrist. Cotton Mather later compared Williams to a windmill whipped by such high winds that its millstones started a great conflagration. The firebrand minister sowed controversy wherever he went.7
Many New Englanders, though, liked blunt and uncompromising ministers, and Williams had no trouble finding congregations that wanted him. First was the church at Boston. In the fall of 1630, John Winthrop had led a large group of settlers across the river from Charlestown, and they named their new settlement Boston. Williams later recalled that Boston’s church unanimously offered him a position but that he had refused to “officiate to an unseparated people.” Winthrop explained that Williams would not join with the church because its congregants “would not make a public declaration of their repentance for having communion with the Churches of England while they lived there.” For Williams, true separation meant not just a withdrawal from England’s church, but a heartfelt apology for having participated in its corrupt ceremonies. During his time in Boston, Williams also raised eyebrows with some of his opinions. According to Winthrop, he asserted that magistrates possessed no authority to enforce the “first table” (the first four) of the Ten Commandments. For example, the court could not punish individuals who did not observe the Sabbath. Williams’s stance foreshadowed his subsequent arguments for the strict separation of church and state. By the time Williams left Boston, its leading citizens were glad he had refused their church’s offer.8
More stridently separatist Salem was Williams’s next stop. Francis Higginson, the congregation’s teacher, had died the previous summer. The Salem church now called Williams as Higginson’s replacement, but the colony’s General Court moved to quash Williams’s appointment because of the ideas he had expressed in Boston. Although one faction of Salem’s church wanted Williams, he did not get the position.
Williams moved again, this time to Plymouth, where he covenanted with the church and acted as an unpaid assistant alongside Ralph Smith. According to Williams’s later account, he “spoke on the Lord’s days and weekdays” and also “wrought hard at the hoe for my bread.” Williams impressed William Bradford as a “godly and zealous” man. Plymouth’s governor later expressed his thanks “even for his [Williams’s] sharpest admonitions and reproofs.” Bradford tolerated the newcomer’s zeal more easily than had his Massachusetts Bay counterpart.9
The next year, John Winthrop, John Wilson (Boston’s minister), and several others from Massachusetts Bay visited Plymouth and lodged at the home of Governor Bradford, whom Winthrop described as a “very discreet and grave man.” On Sunday, the visitors worshipped in the morning and the afternoon. The morning services included the Lord’s Supper, and the Pilgrims invited the Boston visitors to partake. Winthrop wrote more about the afternoon meeting, which consisted of what puritans termed “prophesying,” still a regular practice among the Pilgrims. Williams “propounded a question,” and Ralph Smith then “spoke briefly” to it. Williams, Bradford, Brewster, and several others added their judgments. Winthrop and Wilson were invited to give their views as well. At the close of the service, Samuel Fuller encouraged members to make their contributions. The congregants “went down to the deacon’s seat, and put it into the box.”10
According to Cotton Mather’s turn-of-the-eighteenth-century history, the topic discussed at the afternoon meeting was the custom of calling “any unregenerate man by the name of Goodman.” Could congregants greet those outside the church with the customary appellation of “Goodman” or “Goodwife”? Mather writes that Williams and Ralph Smith, “leavened so far with the humors of the rigid separation,” deemed it unlawful. Why call wicked men good? Mather informs that for his part, Winthrop “distinguished between a theological and a moral goodness” and argued that it “was a pity now to make a stir about a civil custom, so innocently introduced.” According to Mather, Winthrop’s discourse “put a lasting stop to the little, idle, whimsical conceits, then beginning to grow obstreperous.” Winthrop’s journal does not identify the topic discussed or suggest that he settled the question, but even if Mather’s tale is apocryphal, the story captures Williams’s contentiousness. Williams was as keen to separate the sheep and the goats as he was to separate church and state.11
Williams’s time in Plymouth soon came to an end. In a letter to Winthrop, Williams lamented that “to seek the Lord further” was “a duty not so frequent with Plymouth as formerly.” What Williams meant is that the Pilgrims had stopped short of complete separation from impure churches and worship. He later wrote that although Plymouth would not admit “the most godly to communion without a covenant [that is, without membership in a covenanted church],” the Pilgrims were “yet communicating with the parishes in Old [England], by their members repairing on frequent occasions thither.” Plymouth’s leaders had continued John Robinson’s policy of allowing congregants to hear sermons in parish churches when they visited England. Like many other separatists, Williams equated attendance at a Church of England service with apostasy.12
Elder Brewster had heard enough. According to Boston minister John Cotton’s later report, Brewster “warned the whole church of the danger of his [Williams’s] spirit.” Plymouth’s leaders encouraged Williams to depart. Church covenants were solemn, binding agreements among individuals. In order to join another congregation, Williams needed a formal dismissal from Plymouth’s church. Apparently, some church members wanted to retain Williams in Plymouth, but Brewster persuaded the church to grant Williams’s request. Shortly after Mary Williams gave birth to a daughter in August 1633, she and her husband returned to Salem. Plymouth’s congregation also dismissed “such as did adhere to [Williams],” who followed him out of the colony.13
Before he left Plymouth, Williams had expressed what William Bradford deemed “some strange opinions.” He wrote a treatise in which he asserted that English patents were invalid because they were an “unjust usurpation upon others’ possessions.” Like Plymouth’s leaders, Massachusetts ministers and magistrates claimed that they had the right to settle on land that God had made empty for them. Williams considered such claims specious. New England belonged to its Native peoples. Against English arguments that Indians left most of the land unused and unimproved, Williams pointed out that Natives used vast swaths of land for hunting. If Englishmen wanted title to the land on which they had settled, they should buy it from those who already possessed it.14
Bradford asked for a copy of Williams’s manuscript, and so did John Winthrop. The Massachusetts governor consulted several ministers, who agreed that Williams should be censured at the colony’s next General Court. It was not just Williams’s contention but the way he had advanced it. According to Winthrop’s summary of the treatise, Williams accused the late King James of having committed “blasphemy” for having called Europe “Christendom.” As far as Williams was concerned, most Europeans were not Christians. Even worse, Williams applied several choice verses in the Book of Revelation to King Charles, implying that the king of England had “taken up arms with Antichrist against the Lord Jesus” and had “committed fornication with the whore [of Babylon].”15
The magistrates in Boston did not take kindly to Williams’s stunning lack of discretion. At a time when anti-puritans in England were maneuvering to invalidate the patents held by the New England colonies, the magistrates did not want to invite allegations of sedition by having one of their ministers call the king a blasphemer and a fornicator. Winthrop accused Williams of having “provoked our king against us, and put a sword into his hand to destroy us.” In early 1634, Williams apologized and swore an oath of loyalty to the king.16
Williams, though, still could not still his mouth. In April 1635, he publicly objected to the colony’s requirement that all residents swear an oath of obedience to its government, magistrates, and laws. Oaths were sacred acts of worship. Individuals swore with God as their witness. “So help me God,” they said in conclusion. Williams regarded such oath taking as a profane farce in that it forced the “unregenerate” (men who had not experienced God’s work of grace) to “take the name of God in vain.” It also forced the godly to have “communion with a wicked man in the worship of God.” The simplest solution was for governments to dispense with oaths entirely, or at least not to require them.17
Precisely as Williams aired these opinions, Salem’s congregants again called him as their teacher. When the colony’s magistrates and ministers began urging Salem to cast off their newly chosen minister, Williams and his supporters interpreted the pressure as proof positive that the Bay Colony’s leaders no longer respected the liberty of Christians to freely choose their own officers. The colony’s ministers were acting like England’s bishops, repeating the sin of a national church oppressing covenanted Christians. Williams gave his congregants an ultimatum. Either they sundered all communion with other Massachusetts churches because of their “Antichristian pollution,” or he could no longer remain in communion with them. The majority of Salem’s church members chose obedience to the magistrates over fidelity to their new teacher.18
The Bay Colony’s leaders would not tolerate the accusation that they had succumbed to Antichrist. In October 1635, the Massachusetts General Court ordered Williams to leave the colony within six weeks. Because he was ill at the time, the court postponed his banishment until the next spring. Williams was not too sick to preach, which he did to men and women who gathered in his house. It was rumored that he intended to take twenty or so followers and form his own colony on Narragansett Bay. The alarmed magistrates decided to send Williams to England on the next ship and ordered Captain John Underhill to arrest him and “carry him aboard.” Possibly tipped off by none other than John Winthrop, Williams slipped away and headed south on foot in the dead of winter. Winthrop may have wanted to spare Williams the humiliation and hardships of forced deportation, or he may have welcomed a new English foothold in southern New England.19
Williams bought land on the eastern shore of the Seekonk River from the sachem of the Pokanokets. The Pilgrims had called the sachem by his title, Massasoit, but by the early 1630s he had adopted the name Ousamequin, meaning Yellow Feather. New Plymouth claimed that the purchased land fell within its patent, and Edward Winslow—elected governor in one of the rare years that the settlers excused Bradford from the office—told Williams to move to the other side of the river. The Pilgrims “were loath to displease the Bay [Colony leaders]” by allowing the banished minister to settle within their jurisdiction, but Winslow assured Williams that once he moved beyond their bounds, he would be “as free [as] themselves.” Like Winthrop, Winslow had a soft spot for the zealous minister. He visited him and “put a piece of gold into the hands” of Mary Williams. Winslow promised Williams that he and the Pilgrims would be “loving neighbors.” Williams at times was a valuable ally of both New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, but he also remained a thorn in their sides for the next half century.20
After crossing the Seekonk, Williams purchased land from the Narragansetts. A number of families from Salem joined him at what he named Providence, for God’s provision of a refuge from persecution and hardship. Other Bay Colony dissenters, some of them banished by the same magistrates, soon settled on Aquidneck (Rhode) Island to Providence’s south. In 1644, Williams obtained a parliamentary patent for what was then called “Providence Plantations in Narragansett Bay,” though the colony became known as Rhode Island.
Williams soon departed from the church order of Massachusetts and Plymouth in another way. As John Smyth and Thomas Helwys had done in Amsterdam, Williams rejected infant baptism. He helped form a Baptist church in Providence, though he soon left it as well. Roger and Mary Williams from that point on were fervent Christians without a church. They prayed with each other. It was the logical endpoint of Williams’s separatism.
As Providence developed, its government practiced what Williams had preached in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. The Providence settlers signed a compact or agreement in which they promised to obey laws made “by the major consent of the present inhabitants.” Unlike the framers of the Mayflower Compact, Williams dispensed with even a passing reference to God.21 While the Pilgrims wanted to protect true churches from magisterial interference, they expected godly magistrates to support true churches, compel Sabbath observance and church attendance, and punish heresy. Williams disagreed. For him, monarchs and magistrates were not appointed by God as Old Testament judges and kings had been. Thus, civil rulers could neither define nor punish heresy. Accordingly, Providence did not compel anyone to attend worship or to otherwise keep the Sabbath. Settlers possessed liberty of conscience to worship according to their principles, or not to worship at all.
By the 1640s, Williams called this absence of state-controlled religion “soul liberty.” Other Protestants, Williams explained, wanted “their own souls only to be free” and to keep other souls in bondage, but Williams insisted that governments should permit Jews, Turks, and even “Antichristians” to live at peace. He favored soul liberty for everyone. Williams argued that for a government to violate an individual’s conscience was “a soul or spiritual rape … more abominable in God’s eye, than to force and ravish the bodies of all the women in the world.”22 Governments should abandon the goal of religious uniformity because it was impossible to achieve without gross violations of conscience.
Williams did not favor protections for dissenters because he liked and respected them. Quite the contrary. Williams believed that nearly all existing churches were full of Antichrist. In a sense, though, Williams’s own intolerance and zeal led him to embrace religious liberty. He opposed national churches and church establishments out of his desire to fence off Christ from Antichrist, to protect pure worship from the corruptions of the world. As the years passed, Williams became more and more forceful in his insistence that “forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”23
As far as the Congregational settlers of New England were concerned, the stench emanated from Providence and Rhode Island. In 1638, John Winthrop reported that “now men’s wives, and children, and servants, claimed liberty … to go to all religious meetings.”24 In the eyes of puritan magistrates, “soul liberty” bred social disorder. In fact, very few men and women in the transatlantic English world of the mid-seventeenth century favored religious toleration as broad as Williams established in Rhode Island. Most Protestant advocates for liberty of conscience wanted restrictions on certain groups, such as Catholics or atheists. New Plymouth’s William Bradford saw eye to eye with Winthrop on this subject. He found the idea of “soul liberty” repugnant. Nevertheless, some Plymouth Colony settlers agreed with Williams’s understanding of baptism and accepted his arguments for soul liberty. As Williams would have predicted, Plymouth’s magistrates eventually resorted to persecution in an attempt to maintain religious uniformity.