Sidenote: The Coddington faction. The following year Coddington, as the head of a faction, obtained a separate charter for Newport and Portsmouth,--much to the disgust of many of the inhabitants of those as well as of the other towns. A bitter feud lasted until 1654, when Williams once more appeared as peacemaker and secured the reunion of all the towns under the general charter of 1644, with himself as president. The old law code was restored. Sidenote: Characteristics of Rhode Island. Rhode Island was founded by a religious outcast, and always remained as an asylum for those sectaries who could find no home elsewhere. The purpose was noble, and Williams persisted in his policy, despite the fact that life was often made uncomfortable for him by his ill-assorted fellow-colonists, who were continually bickering with each other. Throughout the seventeenth century Rhode Island was a hot-bed of disorder. Fanaticism not only expressed itself in religion, but in politics and society; and no scheme was so wild as to find no adherents in this confused medley. The condition of the colony served as a warning to its neighbors, seeming to confirm the wisdom of their theocratic methods. 61. Maine founded (1622-1658). Sidenote: Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of Plymouth in England, became interested in New England, we have seen, as early as 1605. Ten years later he assisted John Smith in organizing an unsuccessful voyage to the northern coast; in 1620 we find him a member of the council of the Plymouth Company; in 1622 he and John Mason (not the hero of the Pequod war), both of them Churchmen and strong friends of the king, obtained a grant of the country lying between the Merrimack and Kennebec Rivers; and it was Gorges who sent out Maverick to settle on Noddle's Island, and Blackstone to hold the Boston peninsula. Later (1629), Mason obtained an individual grant from the Plymouth Council of the territory between the Merrimack and the Piscataqua (New Hampshire), and Gorges that from the Piscataqua to the Kennebec (Maine); these grants were similar in character to the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. When the Plymouth Company threw up its charter in 1634, and New England was parcelled out (1635) among the members of the council, Gorges and Mason secured a confirmation of their former personal grants. Mason died a few months later, leaving the settlements in his tract to be annexed to Massachusetts in 1641. Sidenote: Becomes Lord Proprietor of Maine.