Williams, ROGER, founder of the state of Rhode Island, and one of the apostles of Toleration, was born about 1600, somewhere in Wales. In his youth he went up to London and attracted the attention of Sir Edward Coke by his shorthand notes of sermons and of speeches in the Star-chamber, and was sent by him in 1621 to Sutton's Hospital (now the Charterhouse School). It is most probable that thereafter he studied at
Pembroke College, Cambridge; and he was afterwards admitted to orders in the Church of England, but soon became an extreme Puritan, and emigrated to New England, arriving at Boston in February 1631. He refused to join the congregation at Boston, because the people would not make public declaration of their repentance for having been in communion with the Church of England; he therefore went to Salem, as assistant-preacher, but was soon in trouble for denying the right of magistrates to punish Sabbath-breaking and other religious offences, as belonging to the first table of the Law. For his opposition to the New England theocracy he was driven from Salem, and took refuge at Plymouth, where he studied Indian dialects. Two years later he returned to Salem, only to meet renewed persecution and banishment from the colony, for denying the right to take the Indians' lands without purchase, and the right to impose faith and worship. He held that it was not lawful to require a wicked person to swear or pray, which were both forms of worship; and that the power of the civil magistrate extends only to the bodies, goods, and outward state of men, and not to their souls and consciences. Banished from the colony in 1635, and threatened with deportation to England in order to prevent the infection of his pernicious doctrine of toleration from spreading, he escaped in midwinter to the shores of Narragansett Bay, accompanied by a few adherents, where he purchased lands of the Indian chiefs, founded the city of Providence (June 1636), and established a government of pure democracy. Having adopted the belief in adult baptism of believers by immersion, Williams was baptised (1639) by a layman, and then baptised him and ten others, thus founding the first Baptist church in America. Later he doubted the validity of this baptism, and withdrew from the church he had founded. In 1643 he came to England to procure a charter for his colony, and published a Key into the Language of America (1643), and The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed (1644), in which the right to religious freedom is argued in a dialogue between Truth and Peace. The chief attempt at an answer he replied to later with The Bloudy Tenent yet more bloudy by Mr Cotton's Endeavour to wash it White in the Blood of the Lamb (1652). After going back to Rhode Island, he returned a second time to England on business of the colony in 1651, when he published Experiments of Spiritual Life and Health, and their Preservations, dedicated to Lady Vane, and The Hireling Ministry none of Christ's. At this period he engaged in an experiment of teaching languages by conversation, and made the acquaintance of Milton, who speaks of him as 'that noble confessor of religious liberty.' He returned to Rhode Island in 1654, and was president of the colony from that year till 1658. He refused to persecute the Quakers, but engaged in 1672 in a famous controversy with them—recorded in George Fox digged out of his Burrowes (Boston, 1676). He died in 1683.
See Memoirs by James D. Knowles (Boston, 1834), William Gannell (Boston, 1845), Romeo Elton (Lond. 1853), Reuben A. Guild (1866), H. M. Dexter (1876), and O. S. Straus (1894). His Letters were edited by J. Russell Bartlett (Providence, 1882); his Works by the Narragansett Club (6 vols. 4to, Providence, 1866-74).