Episode Details

By 1634, the Massachusetts Bay Colony had survived its first winters, built its courts and churches, and prepared to fight England itself to protect its charter. It looked, from the outside, like a success. From the inside, it was cracking.

Two fault lines ran through the commonwealth simultaneously. The first was political: a constitutional standoff between the elected justices and the magistrates, who claimed veto power the charter didn't give them — and got it anyway. The second was theological: a young minister named Roger Williams, trained in the law by the great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who had concluded that the Bay's entire architecture was wrong. The state had no business in the first table of the commandments. Forced worship, he said, stinks in God's nostrils.

This is the story of how the Bay Colony tried to silence him, failed, and banished him into a January blizzard — and how the people it called savages gave him shelter when the people of God would not. And what he built in the wilderness after.