Roger Williams -- Banned in Boston

    Boston's church, with some links still to the Church of England, needs a minister; it appears that Williams needs a job. When church officials ask him to serve, they receive a strange answer. No thanks, Williams says. He won't serve a church that hasn't severed all ties with the Church of England.
 

    Instead, Roger and Mary go to Salem to practice their version of Puritanism, which is more pure than the Puritans'. There he attracts controversy in the church he leads. He lets women speak out, "prophesy", during services. The Puritans forbid women to speak during church. But though egalitarian in one sense, Williams believes that the women should wear veils (contrary to Puritan views).
Williams leaves Salem for Plymouth, and then he returns to Salem after having problems in Plymouth. He is becoming well known as someone with out-of-the-ordinary ideas. One of his most extraordinary ideas, for an Englishman of the time, is that the colonists have no right to claim, in the name of God and the King, the land inhabited by the Indians.
   

    Williams further enrages the colonial leaders by suggesting that as civil leaders they have no right to punish people for violating the first four Commandments of the Bible. The state, he preaches, has no business in matters of the spirit. For these "new and dangerous opinions", colony court officials give him six weeks to get out.
Banned in Boston
 

    So, in October, 1635, the month Mary gives birth to their second child, Freeborn, Williams is banished and soon ordered to return to England.
 

    In the Aldrich House, the pupils of Rhodes School study a sketch of Williams but show little reaction to what surely is one of the most gripping moments in the man's life -- his banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the imagined portrait, Williams looks distraught, his Pilgrim's hat raised high in the air. Mary sits at his side as they pose in their house in Salem. One of their two children holds onto her father; the other clutches her mother's skirt.
 

    Williams will now flee, in search of a new home in the swamps and rivers and thick woods 75 miles or so south, on the edge of the Bay Colony. He moves to an area that one day will encompass the Massachusetts towns of Rehoboth, Seekonk, and Swansea, and the Rhode Island towns of Bristol, Warren, Barrington, and East Providence.

    The tour guide asks the pupils which of the pictures and artifacts they would most like to have in their homes. Most of them cluster around one portrait and stare head-on at Williams. Here, in a 19th century oil painting, he looks out from intense deep-set eyes. Staff in one hand, Bible in the other, he is trekking through snowy, rocky woods. A bitter wind lifts his cape and stirs his long, golden hair.
Throughout his life, Williams referred again and again to his "sorrowful winter's flight" in early 1636. He wore the banishment, historian Glenn LaFantasie says, like a soldier's red badge of courage.

Banishment revisited

    Nearly 300 years later, in January of 1929, Lewis Gray, a Massachusetts legislator from Swansea, asked his colleagues to revoke the banishment. As it had done in 1774, 1776, 1876, and 1900, the Massachusetts House of Representatives refused.
Six years later the idea surfaced again, and a Boston lawyer pleaded with a legislative committee not to revoke the banishment.

    Accompanying his plea was a letter signed by Williams: "Let the sentence stand to be a lasting memorial (against) bigotry ... " Shortly thereafter, though, the lawyer admitted the letter was a hoax.
The pressure for reconciliation peaked in the year of Rhode Island's 300th anniversary, 1936. And in ceremonies at the Rhode Island State House, Massachusetts Gov. James Curley, with the blessings of the Bay State's legislators, formally revoked the banishment.
 

George Fox Digged out of His Burrow
    The visiting schoolchildren, some on tiptoe, peer into a small case that contains an ancient book. Its title evokes the bitterness of 17th century religious debate: A New England Fire-Brand Quenched, Being Something in Answer unto a Lying, Slanderous Book, Entitled: George Fox Digged
 

    This book was written by John Burnyeat and George Fox, an English Quaker who was winning devotees in Newport. It was their answer to Williams's book, George Fox Digged out of His Burrow.
Throughout Williams's life, Christian spirituality was his primary focus. In his early days in Providence, he had founded with some others the congregation that would become the First Baptist Church in America. The group believed in baptism by immersion, and Williams was one of the people who conducted such baptisms. But after a few months Williams left the church, saying he felt that no one had the authority to baptise anyone else, and that the apostles were the last true delegates of Jesus. He became a "seeker".
 

    In his seeking, Williams became quite intense. Witness what he does when he hears that Brother Fox, the Quaker, is visiting Newport.

It is a summer's day, August, 1672, and Williams makes his way by water to Newport, to debate Fox on theology. About 70 years old, he rows or paddles or sails, perhaps alone, the 30 or so miles. He arrives around midnight. Fox has left, but other Quakers are there, and the next day the Quaker meeting house is filled with partisans.
 

    A solar eclipse doesn't still the debate. Williams speaks most of that first day, growing hoarse and being heckled with shouts of "old man, old man". For two more days the debate continues, and then it moves to Providence. The focus is on how a man, a woman, may know God. By the soul's inner light, say the Quakers. By the Bible, sayeth Roger Williams.