pathy when the scene was over, and were sentenced to pay fines of two pounds each, under the penalty of scourging. But payment of their fines too, notwithstanding their remonstrance, was accepted from other persons by the Magistrates; and they were discharged.1 It may easily be believed that Clarke understood some of the bearings of this transaction better than the punctilious Bridges, who caused him to be apprehended, and even better than the austere Endicott, who pronounced his sentence. When he came to publish in England his account of it, he avowed one of his purposes to be, to show "how that spirit by which they [the rulers in Massachusetts] are led would order the whole world, if either brought under them, or should come in unto them." When the first attempts of Coddington to institute his government had to be made in the midst of an agitation excited by the treatment which Baptists of Rhode Island had received at the head-quarters of the Confederacy of New England, he could not fail to see how embarrassing was the obstacle which had been raised in the path of his ambition. If he had had opportunity to communicate seasonably with the Magistrates of Massachusetts, one imagines that some way would have been found to deprive Clarke and his party of the argument with which they had armed themselves. Mission of England. If, as is probable, arrangements were already in progress for Clarke to proceed to England, to make interest for a reversal of the recent action of the government in Coddington's favor, there was yet anWilliams to other strong reason for his being provided with a recent case of persecution of Baptists by Massachusetts. In fact, before the winter, he sailed upon that mission. Exertions were at the same time made to speed the hitherto fruitless plan of despatching Williams as the envoy of the mainland settlements. Warwick 1 Clarke, Ill Newes, &c., 26-32. 2 Ibid., 1. undertook to raise a hundred pounds for his outfit, and several persons in Providence engaged to contribute ten or twenty pounds each;1 but, after all, he had to provide for himself by selling his property in the Indian country? He embarked for England from Boston, his petition for leave to do so having been granted by the Magistrates.3 Clarke either accompanied him, or joined him abroad.* Though acting for different parties, the business of both was to obtain a repeal of the order creating Coddington's government. Besides the attractiveness of having a principality of his own, and the hope of making an arrangement to associate the islanders with the Confederacy if he could come into a condition to treat for them as a separate jurisdiction, Coddington had wished to be released from his connection with the planters at Providence and Warwick, particularly the latter, on account of the hopeless disorder which he thought he observed in those settlements.5 Clarke and his friends at Newport and Portsmouth had the urgent reasons that have been mentioned for repugnance to becoming connected with a league in which Massachusetts was the controlling power; while Providence and Warwick might apprehend that, losing what security they derived from their union with Rhode Island, they should more easily fall into the hands of one or the other of the two eastern Colonies. Coddington had been able to overcome whatever difficulties confronted him, on his return, in instituting his government on the island. The truncated Colony of "Providence Plantations," consisting now of only the 1R. I. Rec., I. 234. * Letter in Knowles, Memoir, &c., 248. 3 The petition and the vote upon it are in Mass. Hist. Coll., XXXIV. 471. * I do not think it likely that Clarke came to Massachusetts to embark with Williams, considering the treatment experienced by him in that Colony only a short time before. Gorton, of Warwick, had been an extreme annoyance to him (see above, p. 119, note 4, p. 139, note 3), and Coddington had been one of the Magistrates who expelled Williams from Salem in 1636, though the transaction may have created no permanent unfriendliness. • At the first meeting of the Commissioners after Coddington's return, Separation of Providence and War wick from Rhode Island. October. two towns on the mainland, held an election, and chose Samuel Gorton to be President. There is no record evidence that the regular elections for the Colony had been held in the preceding spring; but it is probable that they had been, and that Easton had been rechosen President, and had abdicated that place on Coddington's arrival; for the record of Gorton's election recites that Easton had "of late deserted his office." "1 At the next annual election, Gorton was succeeded as President by John Smith, of Warwick.2 The following spring, the choice fell May 16 upon Gregory Dexter, of Providence, during 1653. whose term of office the four towns were reunited, as will be hereafter seen. Williams and Clarke, leaving America after Gorton's election, reached London just before the breaking out of the Dutch war, and some months passed before they could secure attention. They understood that an interest connected with the other Colonies of New England was engaged to defeat them. They relied on the Coddington's support of the radical leaders, and especially sought the favor of Sir Henry Vane. Revocation of commission. they wrote to him (September 13) to inquire what he meant to do with "notorious delinquents, who, making escape out of several of the Colonies, repaired to his island as to a city of refuge;" whether he would "deliver up and return" them, or "receive and keep such under his protection, until they were pursued and impleaded in his courts." The latter course they "judged very obstructive to the ways of justice." (Records, &c., in Hazard, II. 196, 197.) Mainly they come to be twenty-four years of "Our second obstruction [the first being the Dutch war] is the opposition of our adversaries, Sir Arthur Hazelrig and Colonel Fenwick, who hath married his daughter, Mr. Winslow, and Mr. Hopkins, both in great place, and all the friends they can make in Parliament and Council, and all the priests, both Presbyterian and Independent." (Williams's Letter to Providence, April 1, 1653, in Knowles, 259.) through his interest, as they believed,' they obtained from the Council of State a provisional revocation of Coddington's commission. They remained in England for the present, while William Dyer, who had accompanied or followed them, returned to the Colony with intelligence of their success.2 1652. December. April. The settlements, even singly regarded, had now wellnigh lost what little cohesion they had ever attained. Gorton's administration had been signalized at Warwick by the degradation of his old friend, John Warner, from the place of Assistant; a censure which was soon followed by Warner's disfranchisement, and the laying of an attachment on his property, “upon suspicion of insufferable treachery against the 1 Williams's letter, in Knowles, 258. * R. I. Rec., I. 268, 288. — Dyer had been General Recorder and General Attorney of Providence Plantations while the charter of that government was in force.. The General Assembly wrote to Williams (October 28, 1652), recommending that he should obtain a commission as Governor for one year. (Ibid., 249.) But the proposal was disrelished by some of their constituents; and, after two months' reflection, it was retracted. (Ibid., 256.) It was during this visit to England that Clarke published his "Ill Newes from New England," &c., quoted before; and that Williams published his "Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody," &c.; his "Hireling Ministry none of Christ's," &c.; and a devotional tract entitled "Experiments of Spiritual Health," &c. (See Vol. I. 415.) It was at this time, also, that the correspondence took place between him and the niece of Sir Edward Coke, which I have mentioned in another place (ibid., 405, note). His three letters are dated, "From my lodging in St. Martin's, near the shambles, at Mr. June 22. Davis's house, a shoemaker, at the sign of the Swan." With the first he sent to Mrs. Sadleir a copy of the "Experi ments of Spiritual Health," which he says he wrote, while among the Indians, to his wife, and had just published with a Dedication to Lady Vane. His second letter, which was partly on controverted topics, was accompanied by a copy of the "Bloody Tenent," which Mrs. Sadleir returned without reading, "entreating him to trouble her no more in this kind." But it was not his practice to be so dissuaded. He wrote a third time with increased sharpness; and in her reply his old friend showed herself no mean mistress of his own fence. "It seems," she said among other courtesies, "you have a face of brass, so that you cannot blush...... For the foul and false aspersions you have cast upon that King of everblessed memory, Charles the Martyr, none but such a villain as yourself could have wrote them." Of John Milton, now an emeritus controvertist and not yet author of Paradise Lost, Mrs. Sadleir writes to Williams: "For Milton's book that you desire I should December. town;" and his wife was indicted for a felony.1 Hugh Bewitt, of Providence, the General Sergeant and SolicitorGeneral of the Colony, was arraigned and tried for treason.2 At Newport, in the absence of Clarke, Coddington was at hot feud with Dyer. At Warwick there was new dissension, and Smith and Greene of that place were summoned to Providence to "give answer for their writing and charge against the Court of Commissioners." 5 The prospect of the continuance of any government in the settlements was not brilliant. The prospect of their union under one government of their own was dark. At "an Assembly of the Colony at Portsmouth," held for the purpose of arranging such a union under the authority lately obtained by Williams, it was "ordered, that all officers, that March 1. read, if I be not mistaken that is he that hath wrote a book of the lawfulness of divorce; and, if report says true, he had at that time two or three wives living. This perhaps were good doctrine in New England, but it is most abominable in Old England. For his book that he wrote against the late King that you would have me read, you should have taken notice of God's judgment upon him who struck him with blindness; and, as I have heard, he was fain to have the help of one Andrew Marvell, or else he could not have finished that most accursed libel. God has begun his punishment upon him here; his punishment will be hereafter in hell......I have also read Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying.' I say it and you would make a good fire." "Trouble me no more with your letters, for they are very troublesome to her that wishes you in the place from whence you came." Writing to Winthrop, soon after his return, with some account of his visit to England, Williams says: "The Secretary of the Council (Mr. Milton), for my Dutch I read him, read me many more languages." (Mass. Hist. Coll., XXX. 4.) 1 Some of the charges against John Warner on this occasion have been mentioned (see above, p. 121, note 3). Others were as follows: "First item; for calling the officers of the town rogues and thieves with respect to their office. Item; for his contempt in not appearing before the town now met, being lawfully [cited?] by a summons from the officer with two magistrates' hands to it. Item; for his employing an agent to write to the Massachusetts, thereby going about to enthrall the liberties of the town, contrary to the privileges of the town, and to the great indignity of the honorable State of England, who granted the said privileges to us." (Extract from the Warwick records in Arnold, History of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, I. 287, 288; comp. 241.) R. I. Rec., I. 251. Ibid., 219. |