Meantime Williams was, to use his own figure of speech, "steering his course" "in winter snow" toward Narragansett Bay. "I was sorely tossed for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season," he says, in his vivid and hyperbolic fashion of speech, "not knowing what bed or bread did mean." He began one settlement on the eastern bank of the Seekonk River after getting land from the Indians, but his old enemies the royal patents now had their revenge. Winslow, governor of Plymouth, a kind-hearted, politic man, the one born diplomatist of New England, warned him that he was within the bounds of Plymouth, and asked him to remove to the other side of the water, because they "were loath to displease the Bay." It was not enough to drive a heretic from the bounds of Massachusetts; the pragmatic Puritanism of the time would have expelled him from the continent had its arm been long enough. Williams had already begun to build and to plant, but he removed once more to the place which he named Providence. He planted the germinal settlement of the first state in the world that founded religious liberty on the widest possible basis, reserving to the law no cognizance whatever of religious beliefs or conduct where the "civil peace" was not endangered. [Illustration: The early settlements on Narragansett Bay.] XV. [Sidenote: Williams's banishment an act of persecution.] [Sidenote: Note 17.] Local jealousy and sectarian prejudice have done what they could to obscure the facts of the trial and banishment of Williams. It has been argued by more than one writer that it was not a case of religious persecution at all, but the exclusion of a man dangerous to the state. Cotton, with characteristic verbal legerdemain, says that Williams was "enlarged" rather than banished. The case has even been pettifogged in our own time by the assertion that the banishment was only the action of a commercial company excluding an uncongenial person from its territory. But with what swift indignation would the Massachusetts rulers of the days of Dudley and Haynes have repudiated a plea which denied their magistracy! They put so strong a pressure on Stoughton, who said that the assistants were not magistrates, that he made haste to renounce his pride of authorship and to deliver his booklet to be officially burned, nor did even this prevent his punishment. The rulers of "the Bay" were generally frank advocates of religious intolerance; they regarded toleration as a door set open for the devil to enter. Not only did they punish for unorthodox expressions; they even assumed to inquire into private beliefs. Williams was only one of scores bidden to depart on account of opinion. [Sidenote: Intolerance as a virtue.] [Sidenote: Note 18.] [Sidenote: Note 19.] [Sidenote: Simple Cobbler of Agawam, pp. 3 and 6.]