Laud at the head, had been appointed to administer the affairs of the colonies, had so alarmed them that the colonists had started to fortify Dorchester, Charlestown, and Castle Island. Nothing perhaps is more astonishing than the bitter intolerance of those who had fled to find toleration; but to the Puritan toleration was only significant of indifference, and was therefore an abhorrent principle at the very time he so sorely needed it. The religious dissensions during the early years of the colony of Massachusetts illustrate the fanatical and bigoted character of the Puritan quite as clearly as any particular event or series of events in English history. It is painful to find even in the first few months of the settlement, when Endecott was still in command, many evidences of intolerance. John and Samuel Browne collected a congregation and conducted the service according to the Book of Common Prayer; but so horrible did this appear to Endecott that these luckless men were expelled from the colony. Two years later political and social rights were intimately connected with religious privileges by an ordinance that no one was to be a freeman unless he belonged to a church; and this was still further extended in 1635, so that no man could vote at a town meeting unless he possessed the ecclesiastical qualification. Religious troubles were fomented, after 1631, by the able but bigoted Roger Williams. He was a man of very considerable gifts, being both an energetic and attractive preacher, but at the same time filled with an intense hatred of Erastianism. As soon as he arrived he was chosen minister of Salem, where he exhibited his imperfect sense of proportion and gained for himself the title of "a haberdasher of small questions."[118] His energy and impulsiveness led him astray, and the more intellectual could hardly fail to see that his mind was incapable of distinguishing the vital from the trifle. His political doctrines forced him into extraordinary actions, such as that of persuading Endecott to cut the cross out of the royal ensign; while at the same time he not only denied the English sovereign's right to grant territory in North America, but also with equal vehemence repudiated all secular control in religious affairs. For four years the freemen of Massachusetts quietly suffered Roger Williams' whimsicalities, but in October 1635 their patience had come to an end, and the General Court of the Colony banished him with twenty of his disciples, as his sympathetic chronicler says, "and that in the extremity of winter, forcing him to betake himselfe into the vast wilderness to sit down amongst the Indians."[119] The kindly governor, John Winthrop, does not seem to have approved of the verdict, for many years afterwards Roger Williams wrote "that ever honoured Governour Mr Winthrop privately wrote to me to steer my course to Nahigonset Bay.... I took his prudent motion as an hint and