published diverse accounts of the arguments employed. The ‘New England Firebrand Quenched’ by George Fox and John Burnyeat remains to illustrate the talent for obloquy possessed by the quakers (see Smith, Friends' Books and Bibliotheca Anti-Quakeriana, 1873, p. 452). But Williams, who may be said to have sat at the feet of Milton, was not easily to be eclipsed as regards controversial vocabulary, and his quarto treatise of 335 pages, called ‘George Fox digg'd out of his Burrowes’ (Boston, 1676; dedicated to Charles II), is a remarkable testimony to the unfailing vigour of his expletives if not of his mind.
When a new charter was obtained for Rhode Island on 8 July 1663, Williams became one of the assistants under the new governor, Benedict Arnold, and he was re-elected in 1667 and 1670. In 1677 he was again elected, but declined to serve. During the alarming rising of the Indians, known as Philip's war, in 1675, he accepted a commission as captain in the militia and drilled companies in Providence. When the Indians were subdued he served on the committee which allotted the captives as slaves among the heads of families residing in Providence. The trade which he had maintained with the Indians probably suffered by the war, and during the last years of his life Williams was badly off, and was maintained apparently by his son. Williams's last letter, to Governor Bradstreet at Boston, was dated Providence 6 May 1682, and he died at Providence in all probability in the early part of April 1683 (cf. Savage, iv. 479; Straus, p. 230 n.; Hodges, Notes concerning Roger Williams, Boston, 1899). He was buried in a spot which he himself had selected on his own land, a short distance from the place where forty-seven years before he had first landed. He left issue: Mary, born in 1633; Freeborn, born at Salem in October 1635, who was twice married but left no issue; Providence, born in September 1638, who died unmarried in 1686; Mercy, born on 15 July 1640, who married three times and had numerous children; Daniel, born in February 1642; and Joseph, born in December 1643. Charts giving the first five generations of the descendants of Roger Williams were published by Austin in his ‘Ancestry of Thirty-three Rhode Islanders’ (Albany, 1889; cf. Savage, Genealog. Dict. iv. 479).
Milton spoke of Williams as an extraordinary man and a noble confessor of religious liberty, who sought and found a safe refuge for the sacred ark of conscience. His associates in the new world described him in terms less exalted. Bradford calls him a man godly and zealous, having many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgment (Hist. of Plymouth Plant. p. 310). Cotton Mather spoke of his having a windmill in his head (Magnalia, vii. 7); Sir William Martin and Hubbard both praised his zeal, but thought it overheated (Hutchinson Papers, p. 106). Southey held his memory in ‘veneration,’ which seems hardly the word to apply to a man so profoundly contentious as Williams was. Lowell is substantially just to him when he writes, ‘He does not show himself a strong or a very wise man,’ though ‘charity and tolerance flow so noticeably from his pen that it is plain they were in his heart’ (Among my Books, p. 246). Williams's place as a religious leader has perhaps been exaggerated by his eulogists. His views were not in advance of those of many of his contemporaries, his cardinal doctrine that ‘there is no other prudent Christian way of preserving peace in the world but by permission of different consciences’ being scarcely more than a reaffirmation of John Smith's dictum of 1611 to the effect that Christ being the lawgiver of the conscience, the magistrates were not entitled to meddle with religious opinions. His mind had none of the roominess of Fuller's, or of the elevation of Milton's; but he certainly had a firm grip of the necessity of a principle of toleration, and he was one of the very first to make a serious effort to put that principle into practice.
Such memorials to Roger Williams as exist are for the most part of quite recent date. In 1871 a descendant left a hundred acres of land at Providence to be formed into a ‘Roger Williams park,’ which was inaugurated on 16 Oct. 1877, when a statue to the pioneer of the city was also unveiled and a medal struck (see Diman, Address on Roger Williams, 1877). In 1871, too, a statue by Franklin Simmons was erected in the capitol at Washington at the expense of the state of Rhode Island, and in the year following a monument nearly 200 feet in height was commenced on Prospect Hill, Providence. A few relics are preserved at Providence, and Williams's house at Salem is still pointed out (see Essex Bulletin, April 1870; Mudge, Footprints of Roger Williams, p. 272). In 1874 a petition was forwarded to the Massachusetts legislature asking that body to revoke the order of banishment uttered in 1635. The inference that the general court of Massachusetts had acted with injustice in banishing Williams is combated with great zeal and erudition by Dr. Henry Martyn Dexter in his ‘As to Roger
