As for Rhode Island, on the other hand, it was regarded with strong dislike by the other colonies. It was a curious and noteworthy consequence of the circumstances under which this little state was founded that for a long time it became the refuge of all the fanatical and turbulent people who could not submit to the strict and orderly governments of Connecticut or Massachusetts. All extremes met on Narragansett bay. There were not only sensible advocates of religious liberty, but theocrats as well who saw flaws in the theocracy of other Puritans. The English world was then in a state of theological fermentation. People who fancied themselves favoured with direct revelations from Heaven; people who thought it right to keep the seventh day of the week as a Sabbath instead of the first day; people who cherished a special predilection for the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel; people with queer views about property and government; people who advocated either too little marriage or too much marriage; all such eccentric characters as are apt to come to the surface in periods of religious excitement found in Rhode Island a favoured spot where they could prophesy without let or hindrance. But the immediate practical result of so much discordance in opinion was the impossibility of founding a strong and well-ordered government. The early history of Rhode Island was marked by enough of turbulence to suggest the question whether, after all, at the bottom of the Puritan's refusal to recognize the doctrine of private inspiration, or to tolerate indiscriminately all sorts of opinions, there may not have been a grain of shrewd political sense not ill adapted to the social condition of the seventeenth century. In 1644 and again in 1648 the Narragansett settlers asked leave to join the Confederacy; but the request was refused on the ground that they had no stable government of their own. They were offered the alternative of voluntary annexation either to Massachusetts or to Plymouth, or of staying out in the cold; and they chose the latter course. Early in 1643 they had sent Roger Williams over to England to obtain a charter for Rhode Island. In that year Parliament created a Board of Commissioners, with the Earl of Warwick at its head, for the superintendence of colonial affairs; and nothing could better illustrate the loose and reckless manner in which American questions were treated in England than the first proceedings of this board. It gave an early instance of British carelessness in matters of American geography. In December, 1643, it granted to Massachusetts all the territory on the mainland of Narragansett bay; and in the following March it incorporated the townships of Newport and Portsmouth, which stood on the island, together with Providence, which stood on the mainland, into an independent colony empowered to frame a government and make laws for itself. With this second document Williams returned to Providence in the autumn of 1644.