40 Fun Facts About Roger Williams

When Providence opened Roger Williams's grave in 1860, what had grown into the shape of a human body?

An apple tree root had followed his spine, split at the hips and bent at the knees. The Rhode Island Historical Society has looked after the root ever since as a stand-in for the founder.

How did Providence workers accidentally destroy Slate Rock, the traditional landing place of Roger Williams, in 1877?

City workers blew it up with dynamite while trying to uncover a buried part of the boulder, and it was blasted to pieces. A monument in Roger Williams Square now marks the spot.

Narragansetts greeted Roger Williams in 1636 by calling "What cheer, netop"; what does netop mean?

Friend is what netop means in Narragansett. "What cheer" was casual English for hello, so the welcome mixed two languages in three words.

Which animal's name did Roger Williams's 1643 phrase book of the Narragansett language help to popularize in English?

Moose is among the words his book A Key into the Language of America helped popularize, along with squash, succotash and powwow. He wrote it at sea on a voyage to England.

Which disaster destroyed the church records of Roger Williams's birth, leaving his exact birthday a mystery?

The Great Fire of London swept through St Sepulchre's Church in 1666, and the parish registers went with it. Williams gave conflicting accounts of his own age, so historians settle for about 1603.

Which Founding Father later echoed Roger Williams's image of a wall between church and state in a famous letter?

Thomas Jefferson wrote of a wall of separation in a letter to a group of Connecticut churches. Williams had pictured a hedge or wall between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world more than a century earlier.

Roger Williams Park in Providence has held which attraction since 1872, among the oldest of its kind in America?

A zoo opened in the park in 1872 with raccoons, guinea pigs, peacocks and anteaters. The land was the last of the Williams family farm, left to the city by his descendant Betsey Williams.

At about 70, Roger Williams rowed 25 miles to Newport for a three-day debate with members of which faith?

Quakers were his opponents, and he went home to write a whole book against their beliefs. He still insisted they stay free to preach in his colony without punishment.

Which Wampanoag leader, an ally of the Plymouth Pilgrims, sheltered Roger Williams through the winter of 1636?

Massasoit sheltered the fugitive in a winter so cold that Narragansett Bay froze over. In spring Williams began his first settlement on land from Massasoit along the Seekonk River.

Which famous English poet took Dutch lessons from Roger Williams and taught him other languages in return?

John Milton, the future author of Paradise Lost, swapped language lessons with Williams. As a boy Williams had picked up Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Dutch and French.

Roger Williams founded America's oldest congregation of which Protestant denomination in Providence in 1638?

Baptist worship in America began when Williams and about a dozen others were baptized together in 1638. Their congregation still meets in Providence, in a meeting house finished in 1775.

Roger Williams's ideas on religious liberty are credited with shaping which part of the US Constitution?

The First Amendment keeps government out of religion, an idea Williams had already put into practice in Providence. His town voted on civil matters only and left worship to each person.

Which banished Puritan woman did Roger Williams help to buy land on Aquidneck Island for a new settlement in 1638?

Anne Hutchinson was expelled from Massachusetts for preaching her own religious views, and settled at what became Portsmouth. Her arrival confirmed the colony as a refuge for people of every belief.

A student at which Ivy League university cracked the secret code Roger Williams scribbled in a book's margins?

Brown undergraduate Lucas Mason-Brown broke the code in 2012, solving the riddle of the so-called Mystery Book. The margins held notes on geography and medicine and an original essay.

Of which two offences did the Massachusetts General Court convict Roger Williams before banishing him in 1635?

Sedition and heresy were the charges, for spreading what the court called new and dangerous opinions. The sentence was delayed because he was ill and winter was coming.

Roger Williams angered colonial leaders by arguing a royal charter gave no right to land unless settlers did what?

Settlers must first have paid the tribes for it, he said, because a king could not give away what was not his. He even accused King James of a solemn lie for claiming to have discovered the land.

On the 1936 half dollar marking Rhode Island's 300th birthday, Roger Williams kneels in what, one hand raised?

A canoe carries him toward a Narragansett who greets him with an outstretched hand, a scene borrowed from the city seal of Providence. The other side of the coin shows the anchor from the state seal.

Which practice did Roger Williams condemn in 1670 as a stench in God's nostrils?

Forced worship, meaning any religion compelled by law, was his target. He also wrote of the oceans of blood spilled by rulers who tried to force everyone into one faith.

Roger Williams stands in stone beside Oliver Cromwell on the Reformation Wall, a monument in which European city?

Geneva began the wall in 1909, the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, whose own statue stands at its centre. It is built into the old city fortifications.

What did England's Parliament order done with Roger Williams's 1644 book The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution?

Burned by the hangman was the order, but Williams was already at sea, sailing home with a charter for his colony. The book argued that governments have no business policing belief.

Why did the sculptor of Roger Williams's 1872 statue in the US Capitol have to imagine the founder's face?

No known portrait exists, and Williams is not known to have posed for any artist, so every statue and coin shows a guess. The marble figure in the Capitol was carved in Rome by Franklin Simmons.

Which unusual name did Roger Williams, founder of a haven for dissenters, give one of his New England-born daughters?

Freeborn was one of three daughters, and she had a brother named Providence after the town their father founded. All six Williams children were born in America.

Roger Williams once stood hostage for the Wampanoag sachem Metacom; by what name did the English know Metacom?

King Philip was the English name for Metacom. In 1671 Williams gave himself up as a hostage so that the sachem could safely answer a summons to court.

During the 1675–76 war that left Providence in ashes, which job did the town give Roger Williams, then in his 70s?

Militia captain was the post the town elected him to. When a Narragansett army arrived he walked out to negotiate with its leaders, but the town was burned anyway, his own house included.

Roger Williams talked the Narragansetts out of allying with which tribe at war with New England's colonists in 1637?

Pequot leaders lost a possible ally when Williams stepped in at the request of Massachusetts, the colony that had just banished him. The Narragansetts sided with the colonists instead.

What did Roger Williams sell in 1651 to pay for a voyage to England to defend his colony's charter?

His trading post at Cocumscussoc, near Wickford, had been his main source of income. The trip worked: a rival's commission to govern part of the colony for life was cancelled.

Which natural feature, still marked at a downtown memorial, led Roger Williams to site Providence there?

A freshwater spring emptied into a salt cove there, and Williams built his house just across the street from it. The memorial around the site covers only about four and a half acres.

How did Roger Williams respond when Boston's church offered the newly arrived minister its pulpit in 1631?

He turned it down because the Boston congregation had not broken away from the Church of England. The refusal opened five years of quarrels with the leaders of Massachusetts.

At which university did Roger Williams study on a scholarship, graduating in 1627, before becoming a minister?

Cambridge took him in at Pembroke College, where he was one of eight students given a scholarship. He became a Puritan there, which ended his prospects in the Church of England.

Which king approved the 1663 royal charter that guaranteed religious freedom in the colony Roger Williams founded?

Charles II had only recently been restored to the throne when the charter was sealed. It served as the basic law of Rhode Island until 1843, long after independence.

Which famous English judge noticed the teenage Roger Williams's skill at shorthand and sponsored his schooling?

Edward Coke, chief justice of the King's Bench, sent the boy to Charterhouse School. Coke later wrote the Petition of Right, a landmark limit on the power of the crown.

In which Massachusetts Bay town was Roger Williams acting pastor when the colony's court ordered him removed in 1635?

Salem backed its outspoken pastor until the General Court refused to hear the town's claim to land on Marblehead Neck unless he went. Williams then gathered his followers at home.

Roger Williams soon left the Providence congregation of 1638 and never joined another church, earning which label?

A Seeker held that every organised church of the day was corrupt and chose to wait for God's revelation. Williams still agreed with his former congregation on most matters.

Roger Williams wrote The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution as a dialogue between which two speakers?

Truth and Peace talk through a reply to John Cotton, the Boston minister who defended enforcing one religion by law. Cotton answered with a book of his own, and Williams hit back with a sequel.

Which Newport physician sailed to England with Roger Williams in 1651 and stayed over a decade to win a royal charter?

John Clarke drafted the charter of 1663 himself and presented it to the king. Williams had gone home in 1654, leaving his colleague to speak for the colony alone.

Which Narragansett sachem, sender of a snakeskin bundle of arrows to Plymouth, gave Roger Williams land for Providence?

Canonicus welcomed the exile and granted the land in 1636 together with his nephew Miantonomi. Conanicut Island in Narragansett Bay still carries a form of his name.

Which Massachusetts Bay leader quietly warned Roger Williams in 1636 that officers were coming to arrest him?

John Winthrop was no longer governor at the time and was on good terms with Williams, and the two kept writing to each other for years. When the sheriff arrived, Williams had been gone for three days.

Which title did Roger Williams take when chosen in 1654 as elected head of his united colony?

President was the title under the patent Williams had brought back from England, and he held it from 1654 to 1657. That patent had joined Providence, Newport, Portsmouth and Warwick under one government.

Which federal agency looks after the memorial to Roger Williams on the site of the original Providence settlement?

The National Park Service runs the memorial, which for decades was its only site in Rhode Island. The visitor centre occupies a house built in 1736.

Roger Williams and his wife Mary sailed from Bristol for Boston in December 1630 aboard which ship?

The Lyon anchored off Nantasket in February 1631 after a winter crossing of about two months. Williams had decided he could not stay in England under Archbishop William Laud.