Williams

Roger Williams was born in London in 1603, the son of a merchant tailor of Welsh paternal extraction. He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge, took orders, and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 with his wife Mary. Within four years he had been twice charged before the Boston General Court for the radical doctrines that the magistrate had no power over conscience and that the King of England had no title to give away land that belonged to the native peoples. He was sentenced to deportation in October 1635 and ordered held in custody at Salem until the next ship in the spring. On the night of the fifteenth of January 1636, in deep snow, in fourteen weeks of an unusually severe winter, he walked out of his house ahead of the marshal who was coming to take him into custody, and into the woods south of Salem. He spent fourteen weeks of that winter under the hospitality of Massasoit and the Wampanoag and of Canonicus and the Narragansett. In June he founded a settlement at the head of Narragansett Bay, named it Providence in thanks for the deliverance, and bound it to the principle that civil authority extended to civil things only and that no person should be coerced in religion. Rhode Island was the first political community in the English-speaking world built on that principle.

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In the early summer of 1762, in the upstairs room of the farmhouse at Pantycelyn in northern Carmarthenshire that he had inherited from his father in 1742, William Williams Pantycelyn, forty-five years old, the hymn-writer of the Welsh Methodist revival of 1735–62, completed the Welsh-language hymn Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch (Guide me, O thou Great Redeemer in the standard English translation by Peter Williams of 1771, refined by William Williams's son John Williams in 1772; the standard English title since the eighteenth century has been Guide me, O thou Great Jehovah). The hymn was one of about nine hundred Welsh-language and one hundred and twenty English-language hymns Williams wrote between 1744 and his death in 1791, the foundational lyrical body of Welsh-Methodist congregational singing. Cwm Rhondda, the hymn-tune to which the English-language version of Guide me is conventionally sung, was composed by John Hughes of Pontypridd in 1907 for the centenary celebration of the Capel Rhondda chapel; the pairing of Williams's 1762 Welsh text and Hughes's 1907 Welsh tune is the foundational congregational hymn of the modern Welsh and Welsh-diaspora chapel tradition. Cwm Rhondda is the hymn most-commonly sung at the Welsh rugby international match before kick-off, by the Welsh-language post-1990 tradition of the Welsh Rugby Union, with the seventy-five-thousand-strong Cardiff Principality Stadium crowd carrying the three verses by heart in the original Welsh.

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