The American Future (20 page)

Roger Williams sat on the frozen dirt in the winter of 1633 amid the Pokanoket Indians trying his best to make out what they were saying. “God was pleased,” he later wrote, “to give me a painful, patient spirit to lodge with them in their filthy, smoky holes even while I lived at Plymouth and Salem, to gain their tongue.” The accommodation may have been poor, but Williams was not scornful of the Pokanokets and the Narragansetts. “My soul's desire was to do the natives good,” he wrote, and it could not have hurt his ambition to win their trust that, unlike almost everyone else in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he believed the Indians were the legitimate proprietors of the land, and claims made by the Crown and its charters to freely dispose of it were
patently false. Only those contracts made directly between the Indians and newcomers (such as he himself would draft) could properly transfer that land. The chief reason for learning their language was of course to lead the Indians out of pagan barbarism (as he saw it). But Williams already also knew that no church, certainly not his, could prescribe the right way to Christ. That, the natives would have to seek on their own. He could but lead them to the opening in the trees.

It was for thinking such things and, much worse, not keeping them to himself, that Roger Williams had got into bad odor with Governor John Winthrop in Boston and the Great and General Court that had care of bodies and souls in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Sometimes their indignation puzzled him. He was, he thought, no agitator and certainly no Anabaptist rejecting the sway of all earthly princes and powers. Had he not always granted to the magistrates their power to rule in matters of “bodies and goods”? It was the remainder of a man's life (the part, he would have conceded, if pressed, that most mattered) over which no prince on earth could have jurisdiction. And no church either, for, whatever their claims, they were all unregenerate, contaminated by worldly governance, and would remain so until Christ's second coming, in expectation of which Williams had the liveliest hopes. In the meantime the best a true Christian could do was to separate himself from those false churches, and what he called “soul liberty,” with his utmost strength.

There was little in Roger Williams's upbringing to make him purer than the Puritans. His father was a London merchant tailor, but must have moved in powerful circles, for the precocious Roger became adept at shorthand transcriptions of sermons and speeches for Sir Edward Coke, chief justice of the King's Bench and the sharpest thorn in the side of King James's assertions of divine-right sovereignty. Coke was impressed enough to become Williams's patron, sending him to school at Sutton's Hospital and then on, through the school's bursaries, to Pembroke College, Cambridge. But Coke's resistance to Stuart absolutism was legal rather than theological, based on the “immemorial constitution” vested in the common law. Williams was to go altogether another way. The history that spoke to him was not Magna Carta, but what had happened to the “visible church” when it became entangled with, and corrupted by, earthly power. The date that church historians routinely celebrated as a triumph—
AD
313, the edict of Milan promul
gated by the convert Emperor Constantine, making Rome a Christian empire—was, for Williams, a calamitous fall from grace. “Then began the great Mysterie of the Church's sleepe,” he wrote, more than a millennium later: a usurpation of God's provision for history, and still more heinous, the coercion of souls, the “sword of stele” that Christ had expressly rejected. Had not Jesus said “my kingdom is not of this world?” But he had been disregarded by those who claimed to be his apostolic heirs, who had erected a government. That the Roman Church should seek to enforce its authority was no surprise; what distressed Williams was that Protestant churches, including the one into whose service he was supposed to be ordained, had, since King Henry VIII, claimed similar powers of conformity and brutally punished those who resisted it. Williams was unmoved by the argument that such measures were needful to stop apostasy or heresy in its tracks, for no man could find his way to Jesus except through his own free will, and to usurp God's own authority was worse than subjection under Rome. A great disentanglement was needed if true Christians were ever to find their way to salvation. Holiness, which he compared to a garden, needed “a hedge or wall of separation” enclosing it off from worldly matters if it was to hold sway in the hearts of men.

Williams must have been on the edge of these convictions rather than over it when he graduated from Cambridge in 1627 for, as planned, he was ordained into the Church of England, and accepted a chaplaincy with the Puritan Member of Parliament, Sir William Masham. What might have been the beginning of a settled life turned into the opposite. A rejected courtship sent the young chaplain into a sickly fever from which he was nursed by a member of Masham's household, Mary Barnard, whom he married in 1629. But the church whose ministry he was supposed to profess, was falling into the hands of Archbishop Laud, whose reforms were, for the Puritans, tantamount to Catholic Counter-reformation. Lord Chief Justice Coke happened to have an interest as a venturer-investor in the American colonies, so it might well have struck him that the best place for his free-speaking protégé might be the other side of the Atlantic. In December 1630, Roger and Mary sailed on
The Lyon
, arriving at Nantasket Harbor just south of Boston in the first week of February 1631.

Perhaps it was on the long sea voyage that Williams made his own
journey of revelation, for he wasted no time in making trouble for himself. Welcomed in Boston, Williams protested that he could not serve a church that had insufficiently renounced and separated itself from the impious Church of England. For the moment Governor Winthrop was prepared to countenance the young man's eccentricities and sent him north to Salem to serve as teacher and preacher with an older minister. But what Williams began to teach and preach was intolerable. Oaths administered to the “unregenerate” in court, or routinely as an act of allegiance, he said, were blasphemous, since no earthly authority could invoke God's name; he claimed that the Great and General Court could regulate matters threatening civil peace but in no circumstances could prosecute those deemed heretic, much less punish them with flogging as was the prescribed penalty. Representations from Winthrop, who had initially greeted Williams as a likely “godly minister,” failed to have any effect. By 1633 Williams had joined a godly community who called themselves Seekers and who believed that since all churches were corrupt, membership must always be voluntary. That suited Williams, who went south in search of just such a loosely organized gathering at Plymouth. It was there that he took himself off to the Indians, and by the time he returned to Salem the following year as its minister, his conviction that no part of “soul liberty” should ever be surrendered to those who had usurped Christ's own lordship had only hardened.

For Winthrop (who still professed to like him) the impossibly pure Williams had become a threat, a sower of discord. He was duly arraigned before the General Court on 1 October 1635. The gravest accusations were Williams's claim that the government of the colony had no right to punish infractions of the first four of the Ten Commandments and that oaths sworn on the Bible and in the name of God were blasphemous. He freely confessed that he believed no man ought to be obliged to maintain a church establishment whose beliefs he did not share. The sentence was banishment, and constables were sent to his house in Salem to enforce the writ and escort Williams to a sloop that would take him back to England. But he had already fled.

“I was sorely tossed for fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season,” he recalled, “not knowing what bread or bed” he could expect. It was almost certainly his familiarity with Indian languages that saved him,
for it was the natives who provided food and shelter when Williams most desperately needed it. Paddling a canoe up and down the Seekonk and Moshassuck rivers, Williams gradually emerged into the New England spring and in June 1636 did what he bid others, by entering into a direct agreement with the sachems, in this case of the Narragansett tribe, for the purchase of land “upon the fresh rivers of the Mooshausic [Moshassuck] and Wannasquatasket [Woonasquatucket].” It was there that Williams established Providence Plantation, out of the sight and jurisdiction of Massachusetts. From the beginning Providence was to refrain from any acts of forced conformity, nor was it ever to impose tests for the holding of office. It was not just the first American settlement to embrace such freedom of conscience, it was the first in the Western world. Massachusetts would in fact retain some of the moral and religious laws on its statute books until well into the twentieth century. But it had long since ceased to matter. It was the renegade Williams whose views had—eventually—come to prevail.

For some years, Williams spent his time “day and night, at home and on the water, at hoe and oar for bread,” his children given names like Mercy and Providence. A small community of the persecuted clustered in and around the settlement and at Newport, where the minister John Clarke had opened his doors in the same fashion. But both of them realized their colony of conscience would not survive the hostility coming from Massachusetts unless they could get authority for it from England. As luck—or as Williams certainly assumed, providence—had it, Clarke and he arrived there just after the outbreak of the war between Parliament and the king, the quarrel not least being over grand matters of religious coercion. With the authority of the Church of England crumbling, Williams went to see one of the parliamentary leaders, Sir Henry Vane, whom he had met in Boston in 1635 and who, notwithstanding a more orthodox view, was himself a believer in toleration and the disestablishment of a national church. Vane saw no reason not to assent to Providence becoming a place where freedom of beliefs could be absolutely protected. Given the ordeal that England was undergoing, he might well have agreed with Williams's assertion in
The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience
, that “God requireth not a uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civil state, which inforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civill warre,
ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants and of hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.” In 1644 Vane persuaded Parliament to authorize “an absolute charter [of liberty] for those parts of his [Williams's] abode.” In 1651 Williams returned to England to have that charter confirmed, and stayed with Vane at his grand country house and was introduced to the Latin secretary to Cromwell's Council, John Milton, to whom he gave Dutch lessons. Vane had become one of the powers in the land, commissioner for the army and navy, and an intransigent opponent of Cromwell's attempts to browbeat and purge Parliament. That resistance would see him imprisoned, but not before he had managed to extend the life of Williams's colony, the only government Vane could have found ideal.

Four years before, in May 1647, a meeting of delegates from several towns in what would become Rhode Island formally declared that “it is agreed that the forme of Government established [there] is DEMOCRATICALL, that is to say a Government held by ye free and voluntary consent of the greater part of the inhabitants.” Providence Plantation would be governed by an appointed president but would be accountable to an elected assembly of representatives from the townships. Thus, as Roger Williams wished, political and religious liberty were coupled and an American future made before there was a United States of America.

When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Williams must have feared that his little republic of free conscience would also be terminated. Sir Henry Vane had come to a bad end, imprisoned first by Cromwell, then by the Restoration government. Although Vane had disapproved of the execution of Charles I, he was tarred with the brush of the Parliament that had judged the king. In June Vane was tried in Parliament, where he defended to the end its sovereign authority, and was beheaded on Tower Hill nine days later after delivering on the scaffold a characteristically long speech. But in the following year, on 15 July 1663, Charles II signed a renewed charter giving the blessing of the Crown to the “livelie experiment” at Providence Plantation. This act and the document that proclaimed it are so astonishing, in that they follow almost to the letter what Williams would have himself sought, that they are almost unaccountable for a government then very much in the business of reestablishing tests of conformity. But since the charter begins by addressing “our trustie and well-beloved subject
John Clarke,” it may be that Williams's old friend, who had stayed in England, had something to do with what then followed. The document bears quotation at length for it unmistakably makes the very unpuritanical figure of King Charles II rather than, say, William Penn or Thomas Jefferson, the establisher of free conscience in America!

John Clarke and the rest of those who had petitioned on behalf of Providence Plantation, the document proclaims, “professing with peaceable and loyall minds their sober, serious and religious intention of…edifyeing themselves in the holie Christian ffaith and worshipp as they were persuaded, together with the gaineing and conversion of the poore ignorant Indian natives…have not only byn preserved to admiration but have increased and prospered…whereas in their humble address they have ffreely declared that it is their hearts (if they may bee permitted) to hold forth a livelie experiment that a most flourishing civill state may stand and best bee maintained and that among our English subjects with a full libertie in religious concernments and that true pietye and religion grounded upon gospell principles will give the best and greatest security to sovereignty and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest obligations to true loyaltie…Now know that wee beinge willinge to encourage the hopefull undertaking off the sayd loyall and loveinge subjects, to preserve unto them that libertye in the true Christian ffaith…and worshipp of God which they have sought with so much travaill and with peaceable myndes have…thought fit and doe hereby publish, graunt, ordeyne and declare, that our royal will and pleasure is that noe person in the said colonye at any tyme and hereafter shall bee any wyse molested, punished, disquieted or called into question for any differences in matters of religion and doe not actually disturb the civill peace…but that all and every persons may from tyme to tyme and at all herafter freelye and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgment and conscience in matters of religious concernment…they behaving themselves peaceablie and quietlie and not using this libertie to lycentiousness and profaneness nor to the civil injurye and outward disturbeance of others.”