Roger Williams(c. 1603–1683)

Roger Williams was born at Smithfield in the City of London around 1603, son of James Williams, a merchant tailor of the Welsh Williams line, and Alice Pemberton of St Sepulchre Holborn. He was schooled at Charterhouse on the patronage of the eminent Court of Star Chamber clerk Sir Edward Coke, who had taken notice of the boy's shorthand at the Star Chamber where he had been employed taking down the testimony, and through Coke's patronage took the scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1623, his BA in 1627 and his MA in 1630. He was ordained in the Church of England, served as private chaplain to Sir William Masham of Otes in Essex through 1629 to 1630, came under the influence of the Puritan Separatist position that the Church of England was not a true reformed church, and on the increasing Laudian pressure on Puritan ministry sailed with his wife Mary Barnard on the Lyon from Bristol on the first of December 1630 for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, arriving at Boston in February 1631 in his twenty-eighth year.

He was at once offered the senior teaching ministry at the Boston First Church (a position he refused on the ground that the Boston church had not formally separated from the Church of England), took the teaching ministry at the Plymouth Colony from 1631 to 1633, returned to Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and as ministerial pastor at Salem from 1634 became the leading public exponent of the Separatist position. He argued through 1634 and 1635 in three connected publicly-circulated theses that the colonial civil magistrate had no authority to enforce the religious duties of the First Table of the Decalogue (matters of faith and worship), that the colony's land patents from the King of England were void because the land belonged in title to the Native American tribes and required separate purchase, and that the colony charter requiring an oath of fidelity from every adult freeman was a violation of liberty of conscience.

The Massachusetts General Court convicted him in October 1635 of holding diverse new and dangerous opinions and ordered his banishment from the colony within six weeks. He fled in January 1636 through the winter snow with a small group of followers to the south-west, was sheltered by the sachems Massasoit and Canonicus of the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples through the winter, purchased a piece of land at the head of Narragansett Bay from Canonicus by formal deed of bargain in the spring of 1636, and founded there in February 1636 the settlement of Providence Plantations, named in gratitude for the deliverance from the winter. He framed the constitutional compact of the new settlement on the principle of complete separation of church and state and of full liberty of conscience for every settler regardless of religious profession. The colony was the first government anywhere in the European-settled American colonies to operate without an established church and without religious tests for civil office.

He sailed to England in 1643 on behalf of the Providence and adjoining settlements (Newport, Portsmouth and Warwick) to secure a parliamentary patent for the federation of the four towns into a single colony, took the patent in March 1644, was elected the colony's first President under it, and on the second journey to England in 1651 to 1654 secured the more permanent royal charter under Cromwell. He returned in 1654 and served three terms as President of Providence Plantations to 1657. He published in England in 1644 The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, the prose treatise that set out the doctrinal case for liberty of conscience in religion against the Massachusetts and English Presbyterian advocacy of state-enforced religion; the treatise was answered in print by John Cotton (Williams's principal Massachusetts opponent) and replied to by Williams in The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy (1652). He lived out his last quarter-century at Providence, served the small colony into the period of King Philip's War (1675 to 1678) at sixty-eight as captain of the Providence town militia, and died at Providence in April 1683 in his eightieth year. The Rhode Island colony Williams founded was incorporated as the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations into the United States in 1790 under a constitution that bears his name; the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the constitutional guarantee of free exercise of religion and against established religion, is in direct descent from the Providence compact of 1636. The Williams name in modern American constitutional history carries the weight of the February 1636 founding.