powers. But he had reckoned without the
people whom he was to govern. Learning of the outcome of Coddington's
mission and hearing that he had had secret dealings also with the Dutch
at New Amsterdam, the inhabitants of the islands rose in revolt, hanged
Captain Partridge and compelled Coddington to seek safety in flight.
Williams again went to England in 1651 and procured the recall of
Coddington's commission and a confirmation of his own patent, and
Coddington in 1656 gave in his submission and was forgiven. The early
history of Rhode Island thus furnishes a remarkable exhibition of
intense individualism in things religious and a warring of disruptive
forces in matters of civil organization.

Connecticut was settled during the years 1634 to 1636 by people from
Massachusetts. Knowledge of the fertile Connecticut valley had come
early to the Dutch, who had planted a blockhouse, the House of Good
Hope, at the southeast corner of the land upon which Hartford now
stands. Plymouth, too, in searching for advantageous trade openings had
sent out one William Holmes, who sailed past the Dutch fort and took
possession of the site of Windsor. In the autumn of 1634 a certain John
Oldham, trader and rover and frequent disturber of the Puritan peace,
came with a few companions and began to occupy and cultivate lands
within the bounds of modern Wethersfield. Settlers continued to arrive
from Massachusetts, either by land or by water, actuated by land-hunger
and stirred to movement westward by the same driving impulse that for
years to come was to populate the frontier wherever it stretched. The
territory thus possessed was claimed at first by Massachusetts, on the
theory that the southern line of the colony, if extended westward,
would include this portion of the Connecticut River. It was also claimed
by the group of English lords and gentlemen, Saye and Sele, Brooke, and
other Puritans, who, as they supposed, had obtained through the Earl of
Warwick from the New England Council a grant of land extending west and
southwest from Narragansett Bay forty leagues. These claims were of
course irreconcilable, but the English lords, in order to assert their
title, sent over in 1635 twenty servants, known as the Stiles party, who
reached Connecticut in the summer of that year. Thus by autumn there
were on the ground four sets of rival claimants: the Dutch, the Plymouth
traders, various emigrants from Massachusetts, chiefly from the town of
Do