Roger williams
Roger williams"Roger Williams"
c.1603-1683, clergyman, advocate of religious freedom, founder of Rhode Island b. London. A prot�g� of Sir Edward Coke, he graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1627 and took Anglican orders. He early espoused Puritanism and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1631. Williams became teacher and, after a stay at Plymouth, minister of the Salem church. However, his radical religious beliefs and political theories-he denied the validity of the Massachusetts charter, challenged the Puritans to acknowledge they had separated from the Church of England, and declared that civil magistrates had no power over matters of conscience-alarmed the Puritan oligarchy, and the General Court banished him in 1635. In the spring of 1636 he founded Providence on land purchased from the Narragansett. To Providence, a democratic refuge from religious persecution, came settlers from England as well as Massachusetts. There were four settlements in the Narragansett Bay area by 1643, when Williams went to England. Through the influence of powerful friends such as Sir Henry Vane, he obtained from the Long Parliament a patent uniting the Rhode Island towns of Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick with Providence. In 1651, William Coddington secured a...
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