Court of High Commission, consisting of Commissioners, appointed by the Queen. This Court was invested with power to arrest ministers in any part of the kingdom, to deprive them of their livings, and to fine or imprison them at the pleasure of the Court. "Instead of producing witnesses in open court, to prove the charges, they assumed a power of administering an oath ex officio, whereby the prisoner was obliged to answer all questions the Court should put to him, though never so prejudicial to his own defence. If he refused to swear, he was imprisoned for contempt; and if he took the oath, he was convicted upon his own confession."* By this Protestant Inquisition, and by other means, one fourth of the preachers in England are said to have been under suspension. Numerous parishes were destitute of preachers, and so many were filled by illiterate and profligate men, that not one beneficed clergyman in six was capable of composing a sermon.t Thus were learned and pious ministers oppressed, merely for their conscientious scruples about a few ceremonies, their families were ruined, the people were deprived of faithful teachers, the progress of truth was hindered, the papists were gratified, and a state of irritation was produced in the public mind, which led, in a succeeding reign, to the disastrous issue of a bloody civil war.

Nor was the edge of this intolerance turned against the clergy alone. The people were rigorously required to attend regularly at the parish churches.

Measures like these gradually alienated the affections of many from the Established Church, and convinced them, that there was no prospect of obtaining toleration, or of effecting a further reform in the church. They accordingly separated from it, and established meetings, where the ceremonies were not practised. These Non-Conformists were called Puritans, a term of reproach derived from the Cathari, or Puritans, of the third century after Christ. The term, however, was not inappropriate, as it intimated their desire of a purer form of worship and discipline in the church. It was afterwards applied to them on account of the purity of their morals, and the Calvinistic cast of their doctrines.

*Neal, vol. i. preface.

† Neal, vol. i. preface.

This separation occurred in the year 1566. The storm of royal and ecclesiastical wrath now beat the more fiercely on the heads of the Puritans. The history of England, for the succeeding century, is a deplorable narrative of oppression, bloodshed and indescribable misery, inflicted on men and women, of deep piety and pure lives, but guilty of claiming the rights of conscience, and choosing to worship God with different forms from those which the National Church prescribed. No man, of right feelings, can read Neal's History of the Puritans, without sorrow and indignation. Every man ought to read it, if he would understand the reasons why the founders of this country left their native land, to seek an asylum in the wilderness, and if he would rightly estimate the great principles of religious liberty which Roger Williams maintained and defended.

The accession of James I. excited the hopes of the Puritans. He had been educated in the principles of the Reformation, and had stigmatized the service of the Church of England as an evil said mass in English." He had promised, that he would maintain the principles of the Church of Scotland while he lived. But he changed his principles or his policy, after he ascended the throne of England. He then announced the true royal creed, No Bishops, no King. He treated the Puritans with contempt and rigor, declaring that they were a sect "unable to be suffered in any well-governed commonwealth."+ Many of the Puritans, finding their situation intolerable at home, left the kingdom for the continent, or turned their eyes to America for a refuge from persecution.

In the midst of these scenes, Roger Williams was born and educated. His character impelled him to the side of the Puritans. His political principles were then, it is probable, as they were throughout his subsequent life, very liberal; and were entirely repugnant to the doctrines which were then upheld by the court and the dignitaries of the church. James was an obstinate and arbitrary monarch, who inflexibly maintained, in theory and often in practice, those despotic principles, which led his son to the scaffold, and expelled James II. from the throne. A mind, like that of Williams, strong, searching and fearless, would

A

Neal, vol. ii. p. 28.

+ Prince, p. 107.

naturally be opposed to the pretensions and policy of the King.* His patron, Sir Edward Coke, incurred the resentment of James, for his free principles, and his bold vindication of the rights of the people. Charles I. was, if possible, more arbitrary than his father, and more disposed to trample on the constitution, and on the rights of the people.

The tyranny exercised by the Bishops, the severe persecution of the Puritans, and the arrogant demand of absolute submission to the National Church, were still more offensive to a man like Mr. Williams. His principles, as he afterwards expounded them, by his life and in his writings, claimed for all men a perfect liberty of conscience, in reference to religion. Such principles, allied to a bold spirit, must have brought him into notice at such a crisis, and must have attracted upon his head the storm of persecution. Cotton, Hooker, and many other ministers, were silenced. In such times, Mr. Williams could not escape. If he was indeed admitted to a living, it must have been through the indulgence of some mild Prelate, or by the influence of some powerful patron. If Cotton and Hooker were not spared, Williams could not be suffered to preach, for his refusal to conform seems to have been more decided than theirs. †

The same motives, without doubt, which induced others to forsake their native land for America, operated on the mind of Mr. Williams. On the 1st of December, 1630, he embarked at Bristol, in the ship Lyon, Captain William Peirce. His wife accompanied him, a lady, of whose previous history we are more ignorant than of his own. ‡

*Mr. Williams had some personal intercourse with the monarch, but of what kind does not appear. In his letter to Major Mason, he refers to "King James, whom I have spoke with."

"Although the discusser acknowledgeth himself unworthy to speak for God to Master Cotton, or any, yet possibly Master Cotton may call to mind, that the discusser (riding with himself and one other, of precious memory, Master Hooker, to and from Sempringham) presented his arguments from Scripture, why he durst not join with them in their use of Common Prayer." Bloody Tenet made more Bloody, p. 12.

Mr. William Harris, in a letter, speaks of a Mr. Warnard, as a brother of Mrs. Williams, apparently meaning the wife of Roger Williams. This is the only hint which the author has found, re

There is, however, satisfactory evidence, in her subsequent life, of her virtues as a wife and a mother. We cannot doubt, that she was of a kindred spirit with her husband, whose fortunes, both adverse and prosperous, she shared for half a century.

specting the family of Mrs. Williams. Her name, by some strange mistake, is stated, in the records of the church at Providence, to have been Elizabeth, instead of Mary, her real name. These records led Mr. Benedict, in his valuable History, (vol. i. p. 476) into the same error. On his authority, one of the descendants of Roger Williams, now living, named a child Elizabeth, in honor, as she meant it, of her venerable maternal ancestor.

CHAPTER II.

Historical Sketch-View of the condition of the country at the time of Mr. Williams' arrival.

THE first settlement, by Europeans, in North America, was made in 1585, when Sir Walter Raleigh sent a fleet of seven ships from England to Virginia. One hundred and seven persons were landed on the island of Roanoke, near the mouth of Albemarle Sound, in the present State of North Carolina. But discouraged by the want of provisions, and probably by other causes, all the colonists returned to England the next year. Another, and more successful, attempt was made twenty years afterwards, under the authority of a patent from King James, who granted all the territory in North America, comprehended between the 34th and 45th degrees of latitude, to be equally divided between two companies, called, respectively, the London and the Plymouth.

In 1607, three ships, with one hundred emigrants, formed a settlement on the James River, in Virginia, and called the spot Jamestown, in honor of the King.

In the same year, a small colony made a settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec River, in the present State of Maine; but the loss of their stores by fire, and the severity of the winter, induced them all to abandon the undertaking the next year, and return to England.

In 1610, a settlement was commenced at Newfoundland, and in 1614, the Dutch built a fort on the island of Manhattan, where the city of New York now stands, and held the country many years, under a grant from the States' General, by the name of the New Netherlands.*

In 1620, the ever memorable landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth took place. The colonists were a company of Puritans, who left England so early as 1608, with their pastor, the Rev. John Robinson, and settled at Leyden, in Holland. The merciless oppression which they endured in England impelled them thus to abandon their native

* Holmes' Am. Annals, vol. i. p. 146.

?