wife Mary, upon her recovery from illness, entitled ‘Experiments of Spiritual Life and Health’ (London, 1652, 4to; reprinted Providence, 1863, 4to; cf. Allibone, Dict.)
Williams's lodgings in London were in St. Martin's near the Shambles. He often visited Hugh Peters [q. v.] at Lambeth, and seems to have been on intimate terms with him, for it was to him that Peters confided the melancholy and trouble that oppressed him amid seeming prosperity. It is very probable that he had some intercourse with John Owen and Richard Baxter, to whom he subsequently addressed a letter prefixed to his treatise against the quakers. Among others with whom he is known to have associated while in London between 1652 and 1654 were Thomas Harrison (1606–1660) [q. v.], the regicide, whom he described as ‘a heavenly man, but most high flown for the kingdom of the saints;’ Henry Lawrence [q. v.], another member of Cromwell's council of state; and the eccentric genius, Sir Thomas Urquhart [q. v.], for the mitigation of whose imprisonment he seems to have employed such influence as he possessed, thereby earning a flaming tribute from the knight of Cromartie. By his generosity and by his ‘many worthy books with some whereof he was pleased to present me,’ says Urquhart, ‘he did approve himself a man of such discretion and inimitably sanctified parts that an archangel from heaven could not have shown more goodness with less ostentation’ (Epilogue to Logopandecteision; Willcock, Urquhart, 1899, p. 91).
Williams seems, moreover, to have come frequently in contact with Milton, whose acquaintance it is quite possible that he may have made in 1643. He spoke afterwards with appreciation of Milton's skill in languages, and he mentions in a letter that he was able to give the blind poet some instruction in Dutch, of which Milton possessed but little. Less successful was his endeavour to open relations with the family of his old benefactor, Sir Edward Coke, through the medium of Coke's daughter Mrs. Anne Sadleir. This lady was an unbending royalist, and she took very ill a recommendation from Williams to amend her opinions by reading Milton's ‘Eikonoclastes.’ ‘It seems,’ she wrote to him, ‘that you have a face of brass and cannot blush. … As for Melton it is he, if I be not mistaken, that wrote a book of the “Lawfulness of Divorce,” and, if report says true, had at that time two or three wives living. This perhaps were good doctrine in New England, but it is most abominable in Old England. As for his book against the king, God has began his punishment upon him here, who struck him with blindness;’ and she concluded: ‘Trouble me no more with your letters, for they are very troublesome to her who wishes you in the place from which you came.’ Here this correspondence ceased.
In the summer of 1654, after two and a half years' sojourn in England, Williams returned to Providence, bearing letters from Vane to some of the leading Rhode Island settlers. He had succeeded in the immediate objects of his mission; but he found the colony in a very disorganised and divided state, and he addressed himself at once to an endeavour to restore some degree of unity to the scattered townships. It was not altogether unnatural that his doctrine of liberty should have been interpreted here and there to mean license. The necessary distinction and the need for subordination in secular affairs were drawn out in a memorable letter of Williams, dated January 1655, in which the Commonwealth is likened to a ship. In the meantime, on 12 Sept. 1654, he had been elected president or governor of Rhode Island, an office which he retained until May 1657. During this period Williams rendered important service to the neighbouring colonies, as he had done on former occasions, by his influence with the Indians, and by giving warning of impending hostilities (Winthrop, Hist. of New England, pp. 237 sq.) But he earned some unpopularity in 1656 by issuing a warrant for the arrest on a charge of high treason of one of his old followers, William Harris, who had given an absurd application to Williams's views by promulgating anarchical doctrines, such as the unlawfulness of ‘all earthly powers’ and the ‘bloodguiltyness’ of all penal discipline.
In 1656 the quakers made their appearance in New England, and were cruelly persecuted in most of the colonies. They found a refuge, however, in Rhode Island, where, despite the remonstrances from Massachusetts and elsewhere, Williams (though he held the views of the quakers in the greatest abhorrence) steadily refused to lend his influence either to expel or to persecute them. George Fox visited the colony subsequently, in 1672, and was in Providence at the same time as Williams. The two champions did not meet; but no sooner had Fox returned to Newport than Williams sent him a challenge to a public discussion. Williams subsequently rowed himself down the bay (a distance of some thirty miles) to Newport, in order to hold a dispute with three of Fox's ‘journeymen and chaplains,’ after which, as is usually the case in such combats, both sides claimed the victory and
