Part 4 (1/2)
Williams finds the kind of civic harmony Winthrop strives for to be overrated, a ”false peace” that is no measurement of a society's G.o.dliness. In The Bloudy Tenent The Bloudy Tenent he writes that even American Indians and ”the wildest pagans keep the peace of their towns or cities, though neither in one nor the other can any man prove a true church of G.o.d in these places, and consequently no spiritual and heavenly peace.” he writes that even American Indians and ”the wildest pagans keep the peace of their towns or cities, though neither in one nor the other can any man prove a true church of G.o.d in these places, and consequently no spiritual and heavenly peace.”
Williams goes on to remark that it is the state that is guilty of true disturbance of the peace by inflicting corporeal punishment on people who question the state. He writes, ”Such persons only break the city's or kingdom's peace, who cry out for prison and swords against such who cross their judgment or practice in religion.”
Williams would concur with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, a.s.sertion in his ”Letter from the Birmingham Jail” that ”I am not afraid of the word 'tension.' ” Williams is up for verbal battles and argumentative civil wars in lieu of physical violence and corporeal punishment.
The tragedy of Williams is that he was born about 350 years too early to pursue his true calling-television punditry. What he needs is his own show on cable news. That's essentially how he acts before the General Court of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, as if he and Winthrop and Dudley are squabbling around some big round table on a Sunday-morning show and when they unhook their contact mikes at the end of the broadcast, they'll all go out for a gentlemanly brunch.
Williams will later write that the Ma.s.sachusetts Puritans' disagreements with him are reminiscent of the very disagreements those Puritans had with the Church back home, disagreements that led them to the extreme measure of emigrating to the New World. He poses the question of how can they expect him to tow their party line when they came here because they were unwilling to do the same for Bishop Laud? Williams points out, ”Alas, who knows not what lamentable differences have [they had with] the same ministers of the Church of England,” causing them to abandon ”their livings, friends, country, life, rather than conform?”
Williams takes this logic a step further, putting his conflict with the settlers of Ma.s.sachusetts and their conflict with the Church of England within the larger context of the history of Christianity from its beginnings. He points out that the apostles' preaching caused ”uproars and tumults wherever they came.” When the Protestant Elizabeth I succeeded the Catholic b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, Williams notes that Catholics were suddenly out of fas.h.i.+on and out of favor: ”The fathers made the children heretics and the children the father.”
Williams a.s.serts that disagreement is inherent in religion. The state has jurisdiction over violations against persons and property but not over the soul. He figures that sinners and unbelievers will get more than what's coming to them at world's end, when angels ”shall bind them into bundles, and cast them over the everlasting burnings” of h.e.l.l. But until then, he posits, let's just try not to kill each other: G.o.d requireth not an uniformity of religion to be inacted and enforced in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravis.h.i.+ng of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in His servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.
Is it just me, or is this point still worth lingering over? It's one thing for nonviolent nonbelievers to throw up their hands at the way the faithful of various religious faiths seem to come to blows over dogma. But Williams, a diehard zealot, is unflinching in his recognition that other diehard zealots are equally set in their ways. And while he would happily-happily!-harangue any other persons of faith for days on end about how wrong they are, he does not think they should be jailed or hit or stabbed or shot for their stupidity, the eternal flames of h.e.l.l being punishment enough.
Stranger still, Williams does not mean that a civil state should allow merely all the variations of Christianity, from Catholicism on down. He means that a civil state should permit all forms of religion, including ”the most paganish, Jewish, Turkish [Islamic] or Antichristian consciences.” These forms of wors.h.i.+p should be legal for ”all men in all nations and countries.” Not that Williams will be hosting any interfaith prayer breakfasts. He insists other religions should be ”fought against.” It's just that the only weapon used to fight them should be ”the sword of G.o.d's spirit, the Word of G.o.d.”
According to Winthrop's journal, on July 8, 1635, the court summons Williams to New Town to explain his ”dangerous opinions” to ”the magistracy and the churches.” They grill him on the following beliefs: the notion that magistrates ”ought not to punish the breach of the first table” of the Ten Commandments; that oaths should only be administered to visible saints; that visible saints should not pray with the unclean, even their own wives and children. The court also discussed admonis.h.i.+ng the church of Salem for once again calling Williams to be its teacher. Winthrop notes: The said opinions were adjudged by all, magistrates and ministers, (who were desired to be present,) to be erroneous, and very dangerous, and the calling of him to office, at that time, was judged a great contempt of authority. So, in fine, time was given to him and the church of Salem to consider of these things till the next general court, and then either to give satisfaction to the court, or else to expect the sentence; it being professedly declared by the ministers, (at the request of the court to give their advice,) that he who should obstinately maintain such opinions . . . were to be removed.
There is a lot going on in that pa.s.sage. For starters, the ultimatum, obviously, that unless Williams recants by the next court he will be banished. Notice they are in no hurry to carry out this sentence. Williams is not some outsider mope like Philip Ratcliffe. Williams is one of them, a visible saint (albeit an exasperating one). So they give him the seventeenth-century equivalent of a time-out to think through his opinions and come around to theirs. As Winthrop put it in ”Christian Charity,” they remain ”knit together in a bond of love.”
Notice also that in Winthrop's description of the hearing, when he brings up the presence of the ministers, he makes it clear that they were invited, and that their role is purely advisory. The colonists actually agree with Williams on the separation of church and state-kind of. It's just that Williams wants a wall between them and Winthrop is happy with a wisp of velvet rope. Ma.s.sachusetts Bay is not a true theocracy in that the colony would not dream of letting the ministers hold office. Winthrop and his s.h.i.+pmates came here to get away from Bishop Laud, not create another one, and Laud's recent attacks on the Charter only confirm that clergymen should not moonlight as magistrates. The a.s.sistants make their decision in consultation with the ministers, but the ministers' advice is not legally binding. Cotton and the others act as a human law library, a source for interpreting the Bible's legal instructions. To Williams, however, this liaison means the ministers are dragging the snow-white robes of Christ through the wilderness muck of government; that's probably why Cotton, more than any of his other Boston critics, becomes the object of Williams's lifelong scorn.
Winthrop writes that at the same meeting some Salem residents pet.i.tioned the court for the deed to ”some land in Marblehead Neck,” near their town. The court refuses them because, says Winthrop, ”they had chosen Mr. Williams their teacher, while he stood under question of authority, and so offered contempt to the magistrates.” On its face, this retaliation is just plain petty. But the court also displays a troubling disregard for one of its own deeply held principles. Namely, that a Congregationalist church is its own authority and therefore is not beholden to magistrates in their own or any other town. It is an abuse of power for the court to strong-arm a town because said town's congregation picked its own minister-a congregation choosing its own minister being the definition of a Congregationalist church. Recall that the court had pulled this four years earlier, when Salem first tried to hire Williams. Salem backed down back then, but at some point the townspeople got the nerve to protest. Winthrop notes that the court's decision prompts the Salem church to ”write to other churches, to admonish the magistrates of this as a heinous sin.” Out of spite, then, the magistrates bar John Endecott and the other Salem men from the next court ”until they should give satisfaction about the letter.”
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 Ma.s.sachusetts Bay colonists scrutinize every one of life's ups and downs to deduce a message from G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 [G.o.d'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 s.h.i.+pping out to Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 G.o.d 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 rea.s.sures 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 Ma.s.sachusetts to nurture the sweet peace he enjoys with his G.o.d, 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 G.o.d takes away one's voice one should take the hint and shut the h.e.l.l 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, pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d? How could he wave h.e.l.lo 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 h.e.l.lo 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 G.o.dliness.” 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 s.h.i.+p 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 ident.i.ty of the mole who tipped him off that the militia was coming for him to s.h.i.+p 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 his prudent motion as a hint and voice from G.o.d, 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,” admonis.h.i.+ng that ”if thy brother be in want and thou canst help him . . . if thou lovest G.o.d thou must help him.”
Winthrop acknowledged that if the people of Ma.s.sachusetts 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 ”G.o.dly 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, Ma.s.s., from the Wampanoag sachem (or chief) Ma.s.sasoit, remembered for the First Thanksgiving, whom Williams had befriended during his stay in Plymouth. But it turned out Ma.s.sasoit was mistaken about the property line, and Williams was trespa.s.sing 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 hards.h.i.+p 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, ”G.o.d 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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, 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.” ”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 compa.s.s 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 pa.s.sive 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 fellows.h.i.+p, 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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.”