Roger Williams is an important person in American history. An Englishman and a separatist he came over to Massachusetts to find religious freedom. He didn’t find it.

As pastor of the separatist church at Plymouth he fell foul of the Massachusetts rulers who considered him a heretic. This was in part prompted by John Cotton. The two entered into a printing war, with Williams accusing Cotton of supporting persecution in a book entitled The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. Cotton replied in a book entitled The Bloudy Tenent washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lamb. Cotton argued that everyone had freedom of conscience, but that once a person’s conscience had been instructed in the truth (as preached by Cotton on the matter of the relationship between church and state) to go against the truth was to sin against your own conscience, so persecution was then justified, and was not persecution on the grounds of conscience (more information on this can be found in my 1997 Congregational Studies Conference paper Heroes and Villains: The Dispute between John Cotton and Roger Williams). Williams had to flee the Massachusetts Bay Colony in mid-winter and established the new colony of Rhode Island where he allowed full religious liberty. He also bought land from the Indians at a fair price. His principles of religious freedom eventually became enshrined in the US Bill of Rights (although this came about because the different denominations dominating in different states could not be given precedence over the others and so it was agreed that Congress would not establish any particular one of them. This amendment to the US Constitution is now used by American humanists to suppress public expressions of Christian truth—something that the framers of that Amendment never intended).

So we drove to Providence looking for his statue. Looking at the map it was just off exit 23 on I-95, so we set off for a leisurely 30 mile drive, before retracing our steps and visiting Plymouth Rock and Plymouth Plantation.

Coming off I-95 at exit 23 nothing looked familiar. We passed something called the Roger Williams Memorial park, but this was not what I was looking for. After driving in circles I stopped and looked at the map again. We were in the wrong place, we wanted exit 17! Once we regained I-95 and came off at exit 17 we saw signs to where we wanted to go and within 5 minutes we were there. Just as we walked up to the statue a family in an SUV pulled up to eat their burgers. ‘O bother!’ I thought. But in fact they were not in the way and we had a pleasant chat with them. They had loved London, but thought it very expensive—with the current exchange rate that’s not surprising. America seems quite cheap to me!

After taking plenty of photos and some video, we set off for Plymouth along I-95. Very quickly plans changed. Marianne began developing a migraine and it was clear that she was in no fit state to go anywhere. So Plymouth was cancelled and we set off for the hotel I’d booked on the north west side of Boston at Woburn (pronounced Woobun here). We stopped en route at an Applebees for a cup of tea (for Marianne) and a burger (it was enormous, for me).

We decided to have a lazy evening, and after getting some sandwiches we settled down to watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (no, that’s not a typo—that’s the title over here. Hollywood insults the intelligence of the American cinema going public by deciding that they wouldn’t understand Philosopher’s Stone even though that is what JK Rowling wrote and refers back to something that alchemists really were searching for in the middle ages.).