In Virginia, the opposition to the Baptist movement was bitter and unrelenting. The early settlers of Virginia left England, when their church, the Established Church of England, had won a complete victory over all other persuasions. The Virginians sought to duplicate in the new land the spirit of the victors across the sea and make religion uniform in their colony. Laws were passed against popish recusants as early as 1643. Other laws were passed by their assembly between the years 1659 and 1663 against those who failed to have their children baptized. The Quakers especially found these laws most severe. The early Baptists of Virginia were of the common people; their ministers were illiterate; and for a while they escaped notice. The first imprisonment of Baptists was in the county of Spottsylvania, Va., June 4, 1768. Three Baptists, John Waller, Lewis Craig, and James Childs, with others, were arrested for disturbing the peace. (There was no law against preaching.) The opposing lawyer in the court-room made this charge: May it please your worships, these men are great disturbers of the peace; they cannot meet a man on the road, but they ram a text of Scripture down his throat. Mr. Waller so defended himself and his brethren that their enemies were somewhat puzzled to know how to proceed against them. They offered to release them on promise to refrain from preaching in the county for a year and a day. The defendants refused the offer and were sent to prison. Other Baptist ministers were arrested, and soon thirty were under arrest. The prisons became Baptist pulpits, and multitudes gathered around them to hear the preachers. Their opponents engaged drummers to drown the preaching; high enclosures were in some cases erected before prison windows, and suffocating materials were burned near the prisons. Baptists from the beginning were unremitting in their struggle to secure religious liberty. They secured the support of Patrick Henry, a member of the Established Church, but a firm friend of all who stood for liberty, civil and religious. He helped the Baptists to win the complete victory. The Baptist cause was destined to have a more congenial atmosphere in Pennsylvania when we remember that William Penn, its illustrious founder, had an English Baptist father and a Dutch mother, undoubtedly of Anabaptist descent. He received his charter in 1681, forty-five years after Roger Williams’ banishment from Massachusetts. Penn possessed broad and liberal ideas and was opposed to any church establishment. He provided that all persons who confess and acknowledge the Almighty and Eternal God to be the Creator, Upholder, and Ruler of the world, ... should in no ways be molested, nor compelled to frequent or maintain any religious worship. Yet only those confessing faith in Jesus Christ could become freemen in Penn’s domain. The separate Quakers in the colony of Pennsylvania were arrested, fined, and imprisoned for dissent.