This separation occurred in the year 1566. The storm of royal and ecclesiastical wrath now beat the more fiercely on the heads of the Puritans. The history of England, for the succeeding century, is a deplorable narrative of oppression, bloodshed and indescribable misery, inflicted on men and women, of deep piety and pure lives, but guilty of claiming the rights of conscience, and choosing to worship God with different forms from those which the National Church prescribed. No man, of right feelings, can read Neal’s History of the Puritans, without sorrow and indignation. Every man ought to read it, if he would understand the reasons why the founders of this country left their native land, to seek an asylum in the wilderness, and if he would rightly estimate the great principles of religious liberty which Roger Williams maintained and defended. The accession of James I. excited the hopes of the Puritans. He had been educated in the principles of the Reformation, and had stigmatized the service of the Church of England as “an evil said mass in English.”[15] He had promised, that he would maintain the principles of the Church of Scotland while he lived. But he changed his principles or his policy, after he ascended the throne of England. He then announced the true royal creed, _No Bishops, no King_. He treated the Puritans with contempt and rigor, declaring that they were a sect “unable to be suffered in any well-governed commonwealth.”[16] Many of the Puritans, finding their situation intolerable at home, left the kingdom for the continent, or turned their eyes to America for a refuge from persecution. In the midst of these scenes, Roger Williams was born and educated. His character impelled him to the side of the Puritans. His political principles were then, it is probable, as they were throughout his subsequent life, very liberal; and were entirely repugnant to the doctrines which were then upheld by the court and the dignitaries of the church. James was an obstinate and arbitrary monarch, who inflexibly maintained, in theory and often in practice, those despotic principles, which led his son to the scaffold, and expelled James II. from the throne. A mind, like that of Williams, strong, searching and fearless, would naturally be opposed to the pretensions and policy of the King.[17] His patron, Sir Edward Coke, incurred the resentment of James, for his free principles, and his bold vindication of the rights of the people. Charles I. was, if possible, more arbitrary than his father, and more disposed to trample on the constitution, and on the rights of the people.