The lands around Narragansett Bay had been known for some time to be attractive as sites for colonizing, when Williams made his way thither after his banishment, in the winter of 1636. In spite of frequent trading with the Indians, however, only one settler had as yet located there permanently. William Blackstone, who had left England because he disliked the tyranny of the Lord-bishops, and who had, as we have seen, an equal aversion for that of the Lord-brethren, had quietly left his plantation in Massachusetts, and betaken himself to the wilderness north of Providence.[446] A lover at once of peace, of books, and of freedom, there is something singularly attractive in his little known personality. He called his new home “Study Hill”; and there in his orchard grew the first “yellow sweetings” ever known, which, later, when he occasionally preached to the newcomers, he handed around, “to encourage his younger hearers.” Footnote 446: Lechford, _Plain Dealing_, p. 97. _Cf._ Adams, _Three Episodes_, vol. I, p. 328 _n._ Some time before Blackstone settled, Winter, Trelawney's agent in Maine, thought of settling about Narragansett, and claimed that he had Warwick's permission to plant a colony. _Trelawney Papers_, vol. I, p. 20. Thus, while, owing to the great services Williams was to render the colony, he is entitled to the name of its founder, he was not its first settler, nor was the little band that planted Providence with him in 1636 the only one to lay the foundations of the future commonwealth. Nor had he himself, apparently, any intention of doing so. “It pleased the most high,” he wrote, many years afterward, “to direct my steps into this Bay, by the loving private advice of that very honored soul Mr. John Winthrop the Grandfather, who, though he was carried with the stream for my banishment, yet he personally and tenderly loved me to his last breath. It is not true, that I was imployed by any, made covenant with any, was supplied by any, or desired any to come with me into these parts.”[447] The others came, however, and the leading idea of the settlement was reiterated four years later in the proposals for a form of government, when the “arbitrators” noted that they agreed “as formerly hath bin the liberties of the town, so still, to hould forth liberty of conscience.”[448] Footnote 447: Williams's answer to the charges of Harris, in Rider, _Rhode Island Tracts_, No. 14 (Providence, 1888), p. 53. But Williams's statements are often contradictory. Footnote 448: _R. I. Records_ (Providence, 1856), vol. I, pp. 14, 28.