here Samuel Gorton,
the mystic and transcendentalist, one of the most individual of men in
an era of striking individualities, after many vicissitudes found an
abiding place. He was of London, "a clothier and professor of the
misteries of Christ," a believer in established authority as the surest
guardian of liberty, and an opponent of formalism in all its varieties.
Arriving at Boston in 1637 at the height of the Hutchinsonian
controversy, he had sought liberty of conscience, first in Boston, then
in Plymouth, and finally in Portsmouth, where he had become a leader
after the withdrawal of Coddington. But in each place his instinct for
justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts
rendered by self-constituted authorities led him to seek further for a
home that would shelter him and his followers. No sooner, however, was
he settled at Shawomet, than the Massachusetts authorities laid claim to
the territory, and it was only after arrest, imprisonment, and a narrow
escape from the death penalty, followed by a journey to England and the
enlisting of the sympathies of the Earl of Warwick, that he made good
his claim. Gorton returned in 1648 with a letter from Warwick, as Lord
Admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plantation affairs,
ordering Massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people, and he
named the plantation Warwick after his patron.

Samuel Gorton played an influential and useful part in the later history
of the colony, and his career of peaceful service to Rhode Island belies
the opinion, based on Winslow's partisan pamphlet, _Hypocrasie
Unmasked_, and other contemporary writings, that he was a blasphemer, a
"crude and half-crazy thinker," a "proud and pestilent seducer," and a
"most prodigious minter of exorbitant novelties." He preferred "the
universitie of humane reason and reading of the volume of visible
creation" to sectarianism and convention. No wonder the Massachusetts
leaders could not comprehend him! He questioned their infallibility,
their ecclesiastical caste, and their theology, and for their own
self-preservation they were bound to resist what they deemed his
heresies.

Thus Rhode Island at the beginning was formed of four separate and
independent communities, each in embryo a petty state, no one of which
possessed at first other than an Indian title for its lands and a
self-made plantation covenant as the warrant for its government. To
settle disputes over la