“A Second Magna Charta of Highest Liberties”: American Protestants, Religious Freedom, and the Heritage of the Magna Carta

Abstract

In 1644, Roger Williams was in England on a tricky mission to obtain a royal charter for his new colony, the Providence Plantation—forerunner of the state of Rhode Island. He had arrived in England in the middle of the English Civil War between King Charles I and Parliament, and on the heels of agents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who were intent on obtaining a charter that would absorb Rhode Island into the Bay Colony. Somehow, in the midst of these turbulent times and the pressure of political enemies, Williams was successful in obtaining a charter for his colony. At the same time, he also managed to write several treatises on church and state, works that revealed a profound connection between his charter and the venerable Magna Carta.1 The most notable and remembered of Williams’s works was a 400-page book known as The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution.2 Addressed to the English Parliament, the work was a sustained, passionate, voluble criticism of the doctrine of civil persecution for the “cause of conscience.” Written in haste, under the deadline of his impending departure for Rhode Island, the book was not actually printed until after Williams set sail for home. This delay was probably a good thing—the contents shocked Parliament, generating fervent interest (a second edition had to be printed after three weeks to meet demand), as well as profound outrage.