“Myself have seen the Old Testament of the Jews, most curious writing, whose price (in way of trade) was threescore pound, which my brother, a Turkey merchant, had and showed me.”
Roger’s younger brother Robert became, like himself, a Rhode Island colonist. He was one of the first settlers of Providence and later became a schoolmaster at Newport.
Like many another boy, Roger Williams owed his start in life to a great man. Sir Edward Coke was a brilliant English lawyer when Roger was young. His friendship for the lad is best described by Sir Edward’s daughter:
“This Roger Williams, when he was a youth, would, in a short-hand, take sermons and speeches in the Star Chamber, and present them to my dear father. He, seeing so hopeful a youth, took such liking to him that he sent him in to Sutton’s Hospital, and he was the second placed there.”
The Star Chamber was a London Court, so called because the room in which it met had a ceiling decorated with gilt stars. The school mentioned in the letter is better known as the Charter House School. On its roll of students are such famous names as Addison, Steele, John Wesley and Grote. That Roger Williams remembered his early friend with gratitude is shown by these words written in middle life:
“And I may truly say, that beside my natural inclination to study and activity, his example, instruction and encouragement have spurred me on to a more than ordinary, industrious and patient course in my whole course hitherto.”
There is, indeed, every reason to think that Roger Williams proved to be the kind of pupil Sir Edward hoped he would be, for while at the Charter House he successfully prepared himself for college. Yet of his real life as a schoolboy—his chums, his sports, his pranks, his holidays—we know almost nothing. One tiny bit of information has come down to us, however, which would seem to show that Roger Williams was not very different from other boys. Thackeray, the great novelist, who was himself a scholar at the Charter House School years later, once said, in a lecture in Providence, that he had found in a beam of the old school the letters “R W” which Roger Williams cut there as a boy. Whenever Thackeray had to educate his boy characters, he usually sent them to this venerable old institution. This is the way he pictures it in “The Newcomes”:
“Under the great archway of the hospital he could look at the old Gothic building; and a black-gowned pensioner or two crawling over the quiet square, or passing from one dark arch to another. The boarding-houses of the school were situated in the square, hard by the more ancient buildings of the hospital. A great noise of shouting, crying, clapping forms and cupboards, treble voices, bass voices, poured out of the schoolboys’ windows: their life, bustle and gaiety contrasted strangely with the quiet of those old men, creeping along in their black gowns under the ancient arches yonder, whose struggle of life was over, whose hope and noise and bustle had sunk into that gray calm.”
In all probability, Roger Williams continued his education at Pembroke College. Being the college of the great man who had interested himself in the boy, it was the one that would most likely be chosen. After graduating with a degree, Roger Williams studied law for a time. Then, deciding to become a minister, he took orders in the Church of England and obtained a position as chaplain in the household of Sir William Masham of Otes, in the county of Essex.
