by Sarah Vowell
According to Winthrop, by the end of August, Roger Williams is so sick he is “not able to speak.” It happens. Williams is under a great deal of stress. It’s understandable his body would give out and he would lose his voice.
But common sense is hardly the only means to diagnose Williams’s illness. The Massachusetts Bay colonists scrutinize every one of life’s ups and downs to deduce a message from God. Like that day in 1632 when some people in Watertown watched a mouse fight a snake and win. For me, the moment the mouse kills the snake would be just another gross but engrossing highlight on the Discovery Channel. For them, it is a big, whopping omen. Winthrop happily records the minister John Wilson’s interpretation: “That the snake was the devil; the mouse was a poor contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom.”
Thus John Cotton later harangues Williams about his post-showdown laryngitis, “When you over-heated yourself in reasoning and disputing against the light of [God’s] truth, it pleased him to stop your mouth by a sudden disease, and to threaten to take your breath from you.” Get well soon!
Meanwhile, in October 1635, Winthrop’s journal marks the arrival in Boston of one of the most endearing and sane men of the seventeenth century, Henry Vane the Younger. Vane will have a long career and meet a sad and unfair end, but wherever he turns up—New England now and the English Parliament later—he is usually a voice of reason, moderation, liberty, and love.
Winthrop describes Vane as “a young gentleman of excellent parts.” Harry Vane is hands down the fanciest person yet to set foot in New England, the twenty-three-year-old son of the financial advisor to King Charles. Vane is of such high birth and immense wealth, his decision to cast off the trappings of his background—castle included—and move to this slapdash shantytown at the edge of the world says a lot about his piety. Winthrop, clearly impressed, praises Vane as “being called to the obedience of the gospel, forsook the honors and preferments of the court, to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity here.”
To the dismay of his overly Anglican parents, Vane the Younger converted to Puritanism as a teenager and made stops on his postcollegiate tour of Europe in Leiden and Geneva, world capitals of Calvinist thought. When he returned to England, his father asked Bishop Laud himself to talk some sense into the boy, but as one of his father’s acquaintances described young Vane in a letter, “No persuasion of our bishops, nor authority of his parents could prevail with him.” Kids today! Vane the Elder had hoped the Younger would go into the family business and work for the king instead of ditching his birthright for some ashram in the woods.
In a letter Vane the Younger sent to Vane the Elder before shipping out to Massachusetts, he is keenly aware that his father feels betrayed by his defection. He just hopes his father comes to terms with his decision “before you die,” otherwise “the jealousy you have of me would break my heart.” “My heart,” he writes, “I am sure is sincere, and from hence flows the sweet peace I enjoy with my God amidst these many and heavy trials which now fall upon me.” Thinking of the Atlantic crossing ahead, and the unknown wilderness of the New World, Vane reassures his father that this spiritual calm “is my only support in the loss of all other things.”
If Harry Vane is on his way to Massachusetts to nurture the sweet peace he enjoys with his God, boy is he in for a surprise. He will spend only two years in New England, but they are the two most turbulent, action-packed years in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He will witness the havoc wrought by an Indian war and an outspoken female heretic and, at the moment of his autumn landing, the controversy with Roger Williams.
Recall that in the summer of 1635 Williams is laid up sick. He couldn’t talk, but he could still write. Come fall, the General Court summons Williams to answer for two incendiary letters, one he sent to the colony’s churches complaining about the magistrates’ treatment of him and Salem, and another addressed to his Salem church, urging the congregation to “renounce communion with all the churches in the bay, as full of antichristian pollution.”
By continuing to agitate, John Cotton informs Williams, he has missed the point of his illness, has failed to learn the lesson that when God takes away one’s voice one should take the hint and shut the hell up. Cotton:
But instead of recoiling . . . you chose rather to persist in your way, and to protest against all the churches and brethren that stood in your way: and thus the good hand of Christ that should have humbled you, to see and turn from the error of your way, hath rather hardened you therein, and quickened you only to see failings (yea intolerable errors) in all the churches and brethren, rather than in yourself.
Before the court, Williams “justified both these letters, and maintained all his opinions,” writes Winthrop. The court offers Williams the option of taking a few weeks to reflect and hopefully repent—“a month’s respite,” Winthrop calls it. I’m guessing there is no small amount of love and mercy in this offer. All the magistrates must have looked at Williams so longingly, hoping that the ride home would soften him. How could he not come around, passing through their rough-hewn New Jerusalem, going by all the humble cabins of good people who try so hard to hate themselves but love their God? How could he wave hello to the men and women with whom he sailed from England and not notice they were all in the same boat still? This cajoling had worked many times before. John Endecott, for example, had caved. He appeared before the court and “acknowledged his fault” in questioning the magistrates and Salem was granted the land in Marblehead Neck.
But Williams must have known that no amount of time, no ministerial interventions, no amount of waving hello to well-scrubbed townspeople was going to change his mind. Williams believed that a conviction, even one that is “groundless, false, and deluded . . . is not by any arguments or torments easily removed.” He tells the court that he doesn’t need any more time. He thinks what he thinks. Reverend Thomas Hooker is asked to debate Williams and talk him out of what Winthrop calls “his errors.” Williams does not back down.
The next morning, they banish him. According to the court record, the grounds for his expulsion include spreading “new and dangerous opinions against the authority of magistrates,” issuing “letters of defamation,” and maintaining the aforementioned dangerous opinions “without retraction.” He has six weeks to “depart out of this jurisdiction.” In his journal, Winthrop adds that all the ministers (except for one, whom he fails to identify) approved the sentence.
By January, Winthrop’s journal notes that, it being winter, the court had deferred Williams’s expulsion until spring on the condition that he lay low and not foment unpleasantness. And yet, Winthrop writes, Williams’s voice had returned and he had been preaching in his house in Salem, spewing “such points as he had been censured for.” Williams “had drawn about twenty persons to his opinion . . . the people being much taken with the apprehension of his godliness.” This was more than mere insubordination. There were rumors, said Winthrop, that Williams and his followers “were intended to erect a plantation about the Narragansett Bay, from whence the infection would easily spread into these churches.”
Williams was no longer a member of their body—he was an infection that needed to be surgically removed. The court dispatched some men under the command of John Underhill, the Bay’s militia captain, to Salem so as to drag Williams to the dock and stick him on a ship bound for England. But, writes Winthrop in his journal, “when they came at his house he had been gone three days before; but whither they could not learn.”
Thirty-four years after his banishment, in a letter, Williams revealed the identity of the mole who tipped him off that the militia was coming for him to ship him back to England. Winthrop! He wrote:
that ever-honored Governor, Mr. Winthrop, privately wrote to me to steer my course to Narragansett Bay and Indians, for many high and heavenly public ends, encouraging me, from the freeness of the place from any English claims or patents. I took h
is prudent motion as a hint and voice from God, and waving all other thoughts and motions, I steered my course from Salem, (though in winter snow, which I feel yet) unto these parts.
Winthrop never admits to warning Williams. As quoted above, in his journal, which he wrote with posterity in mind, Winthrop pretended to be surprised by Williams’s absence and ignorant of his final destination. Obviously, if the truth came out, Winthrop’s comrades on the court would have found his actions contemptible, if not downright treasonous.
This is a sappy way to put it, but the Winthrop who warns Williams is the Winthrop I fell in love with, the Winthrop Cotton Mather celebrates for sharing his firewood with the needy, the Winthrop who scolds Thomas Dudley for overcharging the poor, the Winthrop of “Christian Charity,” who called for “enlargement toward others” and “brotherly affection,” admonishing that “if thy brother be in want and thou canst help him . . . if thou lovest God thou must help him.”
Winthrop acknowledged that if the people of Massachusetts were to stick together as members of the same body, Williams needed to be clipped off like a toenail. But Winthrop is a true Nonseparatist. Just as he refuses to give up on his old friends in the Church of England out of loyalty, affection, and respect, he must have a lingering soft spot for Williams, that “godly minister” whose arrival in Boston Winthrop recorded five years earlier. Williams apparently forgave Winthrop for being one of the magistrates who banished him; as an old man, Williams recalled fondly that Winthrop had “personally and tenderly loved me to his last breath.”
In a letter he wrote in 1670, thirty-four years after his banishment, the elderly Roger Williams is clear that his icy flight from Salem that January long before was the defining event of his life, a source of strength and sorrow. “I was unkindly and unchristianly (as I believe) driven from my house and land, and wife and children (in the midst of a New England winter),” he writes.
At first, he settled down on land he purchased near present-day Rehoboth, Mass., from the Wampanoag sachem (or chief) Massasoit, remembered for the First Thanksgiving, whom Williams had befriended during his stay in Plymouth. But it turned out Massasoit was mistaken about the property line, and Williams was trespassing on Plymouth land. He soon received a letter from his old friend Edward Winslow, the Plymouth governor, “advising me (since I was fallen into their bounds, and they were loathe to displease the Bay) to remove to the other side of the water.” Winslow added that once Williams vacated Plymouth’s jurisdiction “we should be loving neighbors together.”
Did he mention it was winter? Again from Williams’s letter of 1670: “Between those my friends of the Bay and Plymouth I was sorely tossed for fourteen weeks (in a bitter winter season) not knowing what bread or bed did mean.”
Apart from the humiliation of banishment and enduring—we get it!—the cold, Williams points out he suffered financial hardship since he forfeited his Salem business. He writes, “Beside the yearly loss of no small matter in my trading with English and natives, [I was] debarred from Boston (the chief mart and port of New England).” He continues, “God knows that many thousand pounds cannot repay the very temporary losses I have sustained.”
His poverty must have been apparent, because when Winslow visited Williams after his family had joined him a few months later, Williams reports that Winslow “put a piece of gold into the hands of my wife for our supply.”
Along with Winthrop’s initial advice that Rhode Island was outside the bounds of the Massachusetts Charter, the Plymouth governor’s directing him also to Rhode Island confirmed to him “the freedom and vacancy of this place, which in this respect and many other providences of the most holy and only wise, I called Providence.”
Legend has it that when Williams sailed down the Seekonk River and landed at the present site of Providence, a local Narragansett greeted him, “What cheer, netop?” (a combination of the old English phrase for “How’s it going?” and the Algonquian word for “friend”).
The supposed site of this momentous occasion, Slate Rock, is remembered by a little monument in Providence’s Slate Rock Park. Don’t bother looking for the rock, though. In 2007, a Providence Parks Department official told the Providence Journal, “Unfortunately, in 1877, Slate Rock itself was mistakenly blown up, by city workers trying to uncover more of the rock and preserve the symbol of Williams’ arrival.”
Williams asked the two Narragansett sachems, the elderly Canonicus, and his younger nephew, Miantonomi, for permission to settle. Williams drew up a deed and the two men signed with their marks—a bow for Canonicus and an arrow for Miantonomi. Williams was proud of the fact that he did not buy the land. Rather it was a gift and a grant. He later boasted, “It was not price nor money that could have purchased Rhode Island. . . . Rhode Island was purchased by love.”
The site of the original settlement is preserved in downtown Providence as the Roger Williams National Memorial. There, the compass and sundial Williams probably carried with him on the traumatic nature hike that got him here are on display.
Williams was soon joined by a few followers who had bolted from Massachusetts and he divided the land into equal eleven-acre plots. On August 20, 1637, these settlers signed what came to be called the Providence Agreement. It says:
We whose names are hereunder desirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise to subject ourselves in active and passive obedience, to all such orders or agreements as shall be made for public good for the body, in an orderly way, by the major consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, incorporated together into a town fellowship, and others whom they shall admit unto them, only in civil things.
The two most important words in the agreement were, of course, “civil things.” There will be no religious obedience required here.
As Williams points out in a letter to John Endecott in 1651, “My letters are not banished!” From his crude settlement, Williams keeps up an ample correspondence with his acquaintances back in Massachusetts Bay, especially John Winthrop.
Winthrop and Williams will write each other letters until Winthrop dies in 1649. Winthrop’s letters to Williams have been lost, but many of Williams’s many notes to Winthrop survive. They remind me a little of the letters Herman Melville sends to Nathaniel Hawthorne a couple of centuries later; Williams, like Melville, is a tad too excited, too lonely, too longwinded, too strange. At one point Melville even dreams of installing a paper mill in his house so as to provide him an endless supply of paper on which “I should write a thousand—a million—billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you.” That sort of talk must have terrified Hawthorne. Recall Williams’s apology to Winthrop for writing so many sentences “as thick and over busy as mosquitoes.”
Many of Williams’s letters are very hard to read. But their very difficulty might hint at why Winthrop doesn’t write off his younger, weirder friend. I do not envy Glenn W. LaFantasie, editor of The Correspondence of Roger Williams; Williams’s letters are often theologically dense, to put it mildly. One four-and-a-half-page letter to Winthrop, probably written a year or so after Williams’s banishment, requires thirty-seven footnotes to explain Williams’s allusions to more than thirty biblical passages. If Winthrop disagrees with many of Williams’s interpretations of said passages, he cannot deny Williams’s knowledge of and devotion to the Word of God.
In that letter, Williams attempts to answer a series of queries posed by Winthrop in a sort of post-banishment follow-up questionnaire. Winthrop wants to know what Williams has gained by his “newfound practices.” Williams answers that he has traded in such things as “friends” and “esteem” for the “honor” of being one of Christ’s witnesses, that he is “ready not only to be banished, but to die in New England for the name of the Lord Jesus.” If Winthrop was hoping that a few months in exile had made Williams rethink his questionable opinions, he would have been disappointed with Williams’s response, especially since Williams beseeches Winthrop to remove himself “with a holy violence from the d
ung heap of this earth,” by which he means the Boston church. Even so, Williams is cordial toward Winthrop, addressing him as “worthy and well beloved,” acknowledging that Winthrop poses his questions in the spirit of healing their rift, “as a physician to the sick.”
The tone of Williams’s letters and tracts addressed to John Cotton, on the other hand, is accusatory. Even Williams admits, “Some letters then passed between us, in which I proved and expressed that if I had perished in that sorrowful winter’s flight, only the blood of Jesus Christ could have washed him from the guilt of mine.”
Naturally, the most esteemed theologian in New England is unaccustomed to being accused of attempted manslaughter. “As if,” Cotton writes Williams soon after his banishment; Williams claims to have gotten the letter in the “time of my distressed wanderings amongst the barbarians.” This is the letter someone, probably Williams, published later, without Cotton’s consent. In it, Cotton beseeches Williams to halt his accusations, “as if I had hastened forward the sentence of your civil banishment; for what was done by the magistrates . . . was neither done by my council nor consent.” Not that Cotton has a problem with the verdict: “I dare not deny the sentence passed to be righteous in the eyes of God.”