He was of course charged with being in alliance with Philip. A force of a thousand men with such Indian allies as could be mustered, was marched immediately into his country. This was the force engaged on the 19th of December in the famous Swamp Fight, the most sanguinary battle of Philip's War. Six hundred warriors were slain, six hundred wigwams were burned, and an unknown number of women, children and old men perished in the flames. The English loss exceeded two hundred, among whom were several brave officers. From this moment the fortunes of Canonchet were identified with Philip's, and he is supposed to have commanded in many of the attacks upon the frontier towns. About the last of March, 1676, he visited the Connecticut River to urge, if not to superintend the planting of corn. Finding his people destitute of seed, he returned to obtain a supply, but was arrested at Seekonk and executed at Stonington. His death was a sad blow to Philip, and the occasion of a great joy in the colonies. When told that he must die, he said:
"It is well. I shall die before my heart is soft. I will speak nothing which Canonchet should be ashamed to speak. It is well."
Thus fell Canonchet, the last great chief of the Narragansets. A man so noble and chivalric in his spirit that his life and death commanded the admiration of his worst enemies. They vainly imagined that some disembodied spirit of Greece or Rome had revisited the earth in the vast physical and mental proportions of Canonchet.
Forty years before, the friendship of his father, Miantonomo, and the qualified hostility he assumed towards Sassacus and the Pequots had saved the infant colonies from destruction. Sassacus, the Pequot chief, had proposed to Canonicus an alliance against the English, but in consequence of the advice of Roger Williams, Miantonomo visited Governor Winthrop at Boston, was received and entertained with great ceremony, and finally concluded with the colonies a treaty of peace and alliance. Its main provisions were these:
1st. Peace with Massachusetts and the other English plantations.
2nd. Neither party to make peace with the Pequots without the consent of the other.
3rd. Neither party to harbor Pequots.
4th. Murderers escaping from either party to be put to death or delivered up to the other.
5th. Fugitive servants to be returned.
This treaty rendered the cause of the Pequots hopeless, and secured the safety of the English.