Williams consistently counselled moderation and compromise between the unqualified assertion of the royal prerogative and the puritan views of popular liberties which were now coming to the front. He warned Buckingham and Prince Charles of the perils of their project for the Spanish marriage, and after their return from Madrid he encountered their resentment by opposing war with Spain. The lord keeper's counsel of moderation was less pleasing to Charles I. than it had been to his father. The new king was offended by Williams's advice to proceed with caution in dealing with the parliament, with the result that within a few months of Charles's accession the Great Seal was taken from Williams. In the quarrel between the king and the Commons over the petition of right, Williams took the popular side in condemning arbitrary imprisonment by the sovereign. In the matter of ecclesiastical administration he similarly followed a middle course; but he had now to contend against the growing influence of Laud and the extreme high church party. A case was preferred against him in the Star Chamber of revealing state secrets, to which was added in 1635 a charge of subornation of perjury, of which he had undoubtedly been guilty and for which he was condemned in 1637 to pay a fine of £10,000, to be deprived of the temporalities of all his benefices, and to be imprisoned during the king's pleasure. He was sent to the Tower. In 1639 he was again condemned by the Star Chamber for libelling Laud, a further heavy fine being imposed for this offence. In 1641 he recovered his liberty on the demand of the House of Lords, who maintained that as a peer he was entitled to be summoned to parliament. When the Long Parliament met, Williams was made chairman of a committee of inquiry into innovations in the church; and he was one of the bishops consulted by Charles as to whether he should veto the bill for the attainder of Strafford. In December 1641 the king, anxious to conciliate public opinion, appointed Williams archbishop of York. In the same month he was one of the twelve bishops impeached by the Commons for high treason and committed to the Tower. Released on an undertaking not to go to Yorkshire, a promise which he did not observe, the archbishop was enthroned in York Minster in June 1642. On the outbreak of the Civil War, after visiting Conway in the Royalist interest, he joined the king at Oxford; he then returned to Wales, and finding that Sir John Owen, acting on Charles's orders, had seized certain property in Conway Castle that had been deposited with the archbishop for safe-keeping, he went over to the Parliamentary side and assisted in the recapture of Conway Castle in November 1646. Williams, who was a generous benefactor of St John's College, Cambridge, died on the 25th of March 1650.
WILLIAMS, JOHN (1796-1839), English Nonconformist missionary, was born at Tottenham near London on the 29th of June 1796. He was trained as an ironmonger, and acquired considerable experience in mechanical work. Having offered himself to the London Missionary Society, he was sent, after some training, in 1816 to Eimeo, in the Society Islands, where he rapidly acquired a knowledge of the native language. After staying there for a short time, he finally settled at Raiatea, which became his permanent headquarters. His success as a missionary here and elsewhere was remarkable. The people rapidly became Christianized and adopted many of the habits of civilization. Williams was fairly liberal for his age, and the results of his labours among the Pacific Islands were essentially beneficial. He travelled unceasingly among the various island groups, planting stations and settling native missionaries whom he himself had trained. From the Society Islands he visited the Hervey group, where he discovered, and stayed for a considerable time on, the island of Rarotonga. Most of the inhabitants of the group were converted in a remarkably short time, and Williams's influence over them, as over the people of other groups, was very great. Besides establishing Christianity and civilization among them, he also, at their own request, helped them to draw up a code of laws for civil administration upon the basis of the new religion. While at Rarotonga he, with the help of the natives, built himself a 60-ft. ship, “The Messenger of Peace,” within about four months; with this he returned to Raiatea, and made voyages among other island groups, including Samoa and the neighbouring islands. Williams returned to England in 1834 (having previously visited New South Wales in 1821); and during his four years' stay at home he had the New Testament, which he had translated into Rarotongan, printed. Returning in 1838 to the Pacific, he visited the stations already established by him, as well as several fresh groups. He went as far west as the New Hebrides, and, while visiting Eromanga, one of the group, for the first time, was murdered by cannibal natives on the 20th of November 1839.
His Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands was published in 1837, and formed an important contribution to our knowledge of the islands with which the author was acquainted. See Memoir of John Williams, by Ebenezer Prout (London, 1843); C. S. Horne, The Story of the L.M.S., pp. 41-54.
WILLIAMS, ROGER (c. 1604-1684), founder of the colony of Rhode Island in America and pioneer of religious liberty, son of a merchant tailor, was born (probably) about 1604 in London. It seems reasonably certain that he was educated, under the patronage of Sir Edward Coke, at the Charter House and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received his degree in 1627. According to tradition (probably untrue), he studied law under Sir Edward Coke; he certainly devoted himself to the study of theology, and in 1629 was chaplain to Sir William Masham of Otes, in the parish of High Laver, Essex, but from conscientious scruples, in view of the condition of ecclesiastical affairs in England at the time, refused preferment. He soon decided to emigrate to New England, and, with his wife Mary, arrived at Boston early in February 1631. In April he became teacher of the church at Salem, Mass., as assistant to the Reverend Samuel Skelton. Owing to the opposition of the ecclesiastical authorities at Boston, with whose views his own were not in accord, he removed to Plymouth in the summer, and there remained for two years as assistant pastor. In August 1633 he again became assistant teacher at Salem, and in the following year succeeded Skelton as teacher. Here he incurred the hostility of the authorities of the Massachusetts Bay Colony by asserting, among other things, that the civil power of a state could properly have no jurisdiction over the consciences of men, that the King's patent conveyed no just title to the land of the colonists, which should be bought from its rightful owners, the Indians, and that a magistrate should not tender an oath to an unregenerate man, an oath being, in reality, a form of worship. For the expression of these opinions he was formally tried in July 1635 by the Massachusetts General Court, and at the next meeting of the General Court in October, he not having taken advantage of the opportunity given to him to recant, a sentence of banishment was passed upon him, and he was ordered to leave the jurisdiction of Massachusetts within six weeks. The time was subsequently extended, conditionally, but in January 1636 an attempt was made to seize him and transport him to England, and he, forewarned, escaped from his home at Salem and proceeded alone to Manton's Neck, on the east bank of the Seekonk river. At the instance of the authorities at Plymouth, within whose jurisdiction Manton's Neck was included, Williams, with four companions, who had joined him, founded in June 1636 the first settlement in Rhode Island, to which, in remembrance of “God's merciful providence to him in his distress,” he gave the name Providence. He immediately established friendly relations with the Indians in the vicinity, whose language he had learned, and, in accordance with his principles, bought the land upon which he had settled from the sachems Canonicus (c. 1565-1647) and Miantonomo. His influence with the Indians, and their implicit confidence in him, enabled him in 1636, soon after arriving at Providence, to induce the Narragansets to ally themselves with the Massachusetts colonists at the time of the Pequot War, and thus to render a most effective service to those who had driven him from their community. Williams and his companions founded their new settlement upon the basis of complete religious toleration, with a view to its becoming “a shelter for persons distressed for conscience” (see Rhode Island). Many settlers came from Massachusetts and elsewhere,
