Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/451

 graphical preface by J. T. Bodel Nyenhuis at Utrecht in 1864 under the title ‘Memoriën van Roger Williams.’ The volume forms No. 3 of the ‘Werken uitgegeven door het Historisch Genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht (Nieuwe Reeks).’

[Nyenhuis's introduction to Memorien van Roger Williams, Utrecht, 1864; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss; Camden's Annals; Lady Bertie's Five Generations of a Loyal House, 1845; Cal. State Papers and Hatfield MSS; Motley's The United Netherlands; Camden Society's Miscellany, vol. i.; Birch's Queen Elizabeth, 1754.] 

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 ; cf. , 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