The book against the patent. Williams was yet only a private member of the church in Salem, but in the illness of the pastor he "exercised by way of prophecy"—that is, preached without holding office. An alarming report was soon in circulation that he had written a book against the king's patent, the foundation of the colonial authority. This treatise, we have said, was written in Plymouth for the benefit of Governor Bradford. [Note 9.] Like many of the manuscript books that have come down to us, it appears to have been a small quarto, and, if it resembled other books of the sort, it was neatly stitched and perhaps even bound by its author in the favorite pigskin of the time. Williams sent his book promptly to be examined. Some of the "most judicious ministers much condemned Mr. Williams's error and presumption," and an order was made that he "should be convented at the next court." In the charges no fault was found with the main thesis of the book, that the king could not claim and give away the lands of the Indians; but it was thought that there were disloyal reflections cast upon both James and Charles—at least those eager to condemn construed the obscure and "implicative phrases" of Williams in that sense—and these supposed reflections were the subject of the charges. Williams wrote a submissive letter, and offered his book, or any part of it, to be burned after the manner of that time. A month later, when the governor and council met, the whole aspect of the affair had changed. Cotton and Wilson, the teacher and the pastor of the Boston church, certified, after examination of Williams's quarto, that "they found the matters not so evil as at first they seemed." It was decided to let Williams off easily. There are some things unexplained about the affair; the eagerness of the "judicious ministers" and court to condemn without due examination, the failure even to specify the objectionable passages at last, and the unwonted docility of Williams—all leave one to infer that there was more in this transaction than appears. Laud and his associates were moving to have the Massachusetts charter vacated, and it may have seemed imprudent for the magistrates to found their authority on a base so liable to disappear. If the charter had been successfully called in, Williams's ground of the sufficiency of the Indian title to lands might have proved useful as a last resort. Williams asserted, long afterward, that before his troubles began he had drafted a letter addressed to the king, "not without the approbation of some of the chiefs of New England," whose consciences were also "tender on this point before God." Reply to Cotton, 276, 277. This letter humbly acknowledged "the evil of that part of the patent which relates" to the gift of lands. Had the letter been sent to its destination it would have cut a curious figure among the worldly-minded state papers of the time.
An abstract principle. It is probable that most of the land of the colony had been secured from the natives by purchase or by treaty of some sort; at least the Indians were content, and the little quarto had at that time no practical bearing whatever, but that did not matter to Williams. The more abstract a question of right and wrong, the more he relished a discussion of it. It was of a piece with his exquisite Separatism, a mere standing up in the face of heaven and earth for an abstract principle. His purpose was not to right a specific and concrete wrong, for there had been none, but to assert as a broad principle of everlasting application that a Christian king may not dispose of the land owned by heathens merely because of his Christianity. Williams was not a judge or a lawgiver; he was a poet in morals, enamored of perfection, and keeping his conscience purer than Galahad's.
IX.
The alarm. It was in the winter of 1633-'34 that the book about the patent was called in question. Skelton, pastor of Salem, died in the following August, and the Salem people, in spite of an injunction from the magistrates, made Williams their teacher in his stead. 1634. The country was now full of alarm at news from England that the charter was to be revoked, that a general governor of New England was to be appointed, and that a force was to be sent to support his authority. Laud was put at the head of a commission for the government of the colonies in April, 1634. There could be no doubt of the meaning of this measure. For more than a year the alarm in Massachusetts continued. The ministers were consulted regarding the lawfulness of resistance to force. A platform was constructed on the northeast side of Castle Island, and a fortified house was proposed to defend the platform. The trainbands were drilled, muskets, "bandeleroes" or cartridge belts, and rests were distributed to the several towns, and pikemen were required to learn to use the cumbrous musket of the time. Puritans in England, angry that Laud, the new archbishop and old persecutor, should stretch a long arm to America, sent powder and cannon to their co-religionists, the object of whose military vigilance could easily be covered by dangers from the savages, from the French, or from the Spaniards.
Debates not appeased. But these assiduous preparations, under the supervision of a military commission which had "power of life and limb," did not abate in the least the discussion of questions of doctrine and casuistry. Refinements of theology were quite as real and substantial to the Puritan mind as trainbands and fortifications. Sound doctrine and a scrupulous observance of the "ordinances" conciliated God; they were indeed more important elements of public safety than drakes and demi-culverins.
Reform in dress. The General Court of September, 1634, undertook to provide for the public safety in both respects. Mass. Records, 3d September, 1634. Along with regulations and provisions of a military nature, it set out to remove those flagrant sins that had provoked the divine wrath. The wearing of silver, gold, and rich laces, girdles, and hatbands was forbidden; slashed clothes were also abolished, "other than one slash in each sleeve and another in the back"; ruffs and beaver hats, which last were apparently a mark of dudishness, were not to be allowed. Long hair and other fashions "prejudicial to the general good" were done away with in this hour of penitence. Compare Ward's Simple Cobbler, passim. Men and women might wear out the clothes they had, except their "immoderate great sleeves, slashed apparel, immoderate great rayles, long wings," which were to go at once without reprieve or ceremony. The use of tobacco, socially and in public, or before strangers was made an offense. If taken secretly or medicinally, the Court did not take cognizance of it.
X.
The fast-day sermon. Seeing that the millinery sins recounted in this act had cried to Heaven, and that, beside the danger from England, there was the desire of Hooker's party to remove to the Connecticut, and a dissension concerning the power of the Upper House that threatened trouble, the Court appointed the 18th of September a solemn fast-day, hoping by repentance, prayer, and the penance of hunger to avert the manifold disasters that threatened them. 1634. Roger Williams was sure to speak like a prophet on such an occasion. He did not stop at slashed garments, great sleeves, and headdresses with long wings; he preached on eleven "public sins" that had provoked divine wrath. We have no catalogue left us. The list may have included some of those amusing scruples that he held in common with other Puritans, or some of those equally trivial personal scruples that Williams cherished so fondly. But no sermon of his on public sins could fail to contain a declaration of his far-reaching and cherished principle of religious freedom, including perhaps a round denunciation of the petty inquisition into private opinion which had been set up in Massachusetts. The Sabbath law, the law obliging men to pay a tax to support religious worship, the requirement that all should attend religious worship under penalty, and the enforcement of a religious oath on irreligious and perhaps unwilling residents, the assumption of the magistrate to regulate the orthodoxy of a church under the advice of the ministers, were points of Massachusetts law and administration that he denounced at various times; and some of them, if not all, were no doubt put in pillory in this fast-day sermon in the early autumn of 1634. Judged by modern standards, the sermon may have had absurdities enough, but it was no doubt a long way in advance of the General Court's mewling about lace, and slashes, and long hair, and other customs "prejudicial to the general good." To this sermon, whatever it was, Williams afterward attributed the beginning of the troubles that led to his banishment.
XI.
Williams dealt with ecclesiastically. Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but ever large-hearted, had been superseded in the governorship by Dudley, open and zealous advocate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was always hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of hand with the bold "teacher" of the church in Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the ministers first, since Williams was an "elder," and even among Puritans there was a sort of benefit of clergy. Cotton had developed a complete system of church-state organization hammered out of, or at least supported by, Bible texts linked by ingenious inferences, and from the time of Cotton's arrival there was a strong effort to secure uniformity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he was nothing if not orderly and ecclesiastical. Williams was an elder, entitled as such to be proceeded with "in a church way" first. As leader and spokesman of the clergy Cotton expressed his charitable conviction that Williams's "violent course did rather spring from scruple of conscience than from a seditious principle." The clergy proposed to try to convert him by argument, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success as from a conviction that this was the orderly and scriptural rule. [Note 10.] Dudley, impatient to snuff out Williams at once, replied that they "were deceived in him if they thought he would condescend to learn of any of them." But the "elders" now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from Scripture. The individual church must deal with its own member; the sister churches might remonstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for example, could appeal to the Boston church to appeal to the Salem church to appeal to Williams, and in this order much of the correspondence went on.