THE PROBLEM of the Rhode Island Cavaliers is a new field in historical 
study. At least it has the condition of unpublished memoirs and 
uncollected data. In one sense it is ancient history, for the real Rhode 
Island Cavalier has disappeared into the American amalgamation of races 
and ideals of the nineteenth century. Many of its records, too, were never 
written. They were in the hearts and minds of its gentlemen, and in the 
blue blood in their veins. As collectable data, the time has gone past 
when much can be obtained. However, the Cavalier of Rhode Island was a 
real and positive character in the life of the Colony and first years of 
the State. The evidence is too strong and the recollections of living 
families too certain to doubt the fact of his existence.

Let us first see the historic field in which we shall have to look for 
this Cavalier. Charles I came to the throne in 1625. Cavaliers and London 
merchants had already begun the settlement of Virginia and the Carolinas, 
beginning with Wocoken in 1584, but only successfully since Jamestown in 
1607. By 1625 the south region was becoming well known to explorers and 
settlements grew rapidly.

In the North, settlements were not as far advanced. Beginning with the 
unsuccessful trading settlement at the Kennebec in 1607 and the successful 
settlement of Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620, a Newfoundland experiment in 
162_, then Cape Ann and Saco in 1623, and Albany and Manhattan in 1624, 
New England and New Netherland could hardly be said to have had more than 
a beginning when Charles I took the throne.

This reign, which lasted twenty-four years, ending in 1649, saw an 
extensive migration to the shores on the western side of the Atlantic, and 
the beginning of movements that were epoch making. Bermuda had begun 
settlements in 1616. In the year of Charles' accession settlements began 
at Barbadoes in the West Indies. The Dutch bought Manhattan the next year 
(1626) and established New Amsterdam. Salem, the same year, began the 
Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1629 the town of New Providence in the 
Bahamas was settled. New Hampshire towns were begun before 1630. From 1630 
to 1640 the increase of Puritans in Massachusetts was considerable. 
Antigua arid Montserrat in the West Indies began settlement in 1632. 
Maryland began in 1633; Connecticut in 1635; Rogers Williams' Providence 
Plantations in 1636; the Rhode Island Colony of Anne Hutchinson and 
Coddington in 1637; and the Swedes at New Sweden (now Wilmington, 
Delaware), in 1638. In 1641 there were English settlements made on the 
Schuylkill river and at Salem, New Jersey. In 1643 there were eighteen 
different languages spoken at New Amsterdam. During the '40s Virginia grew 
extensively, and New England added mightily in numbers by the Puritans.

Then, in 1649, the Puritans conquered England, beheaded Charles I, and 
started a tide of Cavalier migration to Virginia, the Barbadoes, and the 
Bermudas. Along the Narragansett Bay and adjacent to the Baptist Colony of 
Providence Plantations, that had already granted religious liberty, there 
fled a few Cavaliers that constituted more than half of all of the 
Cavaliers that went into the northern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century.

In the more southern English Colonies the ascendency of Cromwell drove 
many families of opposite tendencies, some Cavaliers and some unsuccessful 
mercenaries. The South was not all Cavalier. Neither was New England all 
Puritan. The great majority of the people cared for neither principle. 
They were submerged, the unregenerate, the low caste peoples, swayed 
entirely by their passions, economic slaves, ignorant and vicious. Out of 
these, later families of some quality have arisen, but in Colonial days 
they were the majority in all the Colonies, in England and in all Europe.

In the Colonial South the upper classes were Cavaliers and Puritans, many 
of the latter, but probably more of the former. Certainly the greater 
power and influence in the South came from the Cavaliers. In Colonial New 
England the upper classes were also Cavaliers and Puritans, but with the 
Puritans greater in numbers and power. But the condition of the Colonies 
cannot be comprehended until it is understood that both Cavaliers and 
Puritans were in all of the Colonies, but both together outnumbered by 
servants, slaves, and the morally and mentally deficient constituting the 
lower non-Cavalier, non-Puritan classes.

In Virginia, where in a generation or two the ideals of the commonwealth 
became those of the dominant party, Cavalier, and in Massachusetts, where 
the ideals of that commonwealth became unqualifiedly Puritan, it is easy 
to forget that other elements existed genealogically in those Colonies. It 
is so simple to call Virginians Cavaliers and name every Massachusetts man 
a Puritan; and in a broader sense Virginia is today a great representative 
of what Christian democracy can do, interpreted through Cavalier ideals. 
Massachusetts is equally as great a representative of what Christian 
democracy can do interpreted through Puritan ideals.

It might occur even to the best of thinkers, if he were not well grounded 
upon the differences in Puritan and Cavalier philosophy, what difference 
it made to society and government whether a man was a Cavalier or a 
Puritan, outside of the particular point at issue in relation to Charles 
I. If men will rise above the brutish, slavish classes, what matters it if 
they decide to become Cavaliers or Puritans, or maybe even adopt some one 
of the philosophies of continental Europe? 

And why emphasize the fact that Rhode Island had Cavaliers in a much 
larger proportion than Massachusetts and Connecticut?

These questions cannot be answered by a sentence or two. And in reality it 
can be answered two ways. One way might be to say that this is the 
Twentieth Century. The past is gone and irreparable. Rhode Island is not 
the same as a century ago, America is beyond its settlement and 
revolutionary stages, and England has far outgrown the struggles between 
one kind of people and another for the mastery. The results in all these 
cases are composites, with much added that is entirely new. This is a 
popular philosophy of the day. It has emanated from the slums, breeds in 
commercialism, develops in socialism, and results logically in anarchism. 
It would forget the past, only looking to the bounding success of the 
present, admitting no cause but individual effort or a grasped chance to 
raise the person or the nation or the army or the commercial enterprise to 
a temporary success. This is an ancient philosophy of despair, the heathen 
philosophy of chance existence that existed centuries before Christianity. 
It is the main philosophy of the undercurrents of society today, for not 
many are really Christianized yet.

But those who know that present social conditions have causes that run far 
back into the lives of persons and families that were ancestral to the men 
of power today, are willing to inquire into causes, respect the methods, 
and learning from previous errors, cut away the harmful, perpetuate the 
helpful, and tolerate or even enjoy the harmless detail of custom and 
habit.

Merrie old England was not so delightful a place after all. There were 
turmoils century after century. The only people of any power were a few 
thousand families scattered here and there over the realm. Under them were 
the slavish, ignorant thousands, many thousands more than their social 
superiors. There was no middle class except in rare localities for a 
century or two. A man was a gentleman or nothing. Every man with power 
could raise an army, and every army was a menace to his neighbor. The 
first excuse meant war wherein the serfs and villains were mowed clown in 
large numbers, and a few knights and gentlemen of honor reaped rewards or 
death. The chivalrous life became an essential feature of that 
civilization. A family was honored by the deeds of daring of its heroes. 
Coat-Armor became a thing of pride and the label of respectability.

The Norman invasion seemed but to supplant some Saxon families by Norman 
ones, and added slightly to the number of gentle families. It did more, 
however. It increased the spirit of Christian philosophy in a country that 
was nominally but not seriously Christian. The Celtic Christians had 
understood the philosophy of doing unto others (all others) as they should 
be done by. The Irish and later the Welsh, Cornish, and many of the Scotch 
clans had carried the new philosophy so far that the slavish masses were 
gradually diminishing, and the number of useful citizens and reliable 
leaders gradually increasing. Ethnographic and historic causes tended to 
prevent the rise of middle classes, and also produced the union of the 
Celtic churches with the great central power of Rome on the Continent. The 
Norman and his descendants compelled acquiescence to the one Church, and 
they also revived in Great Britain the philosophy that even the meanest 
can rise to something.

In the heathen world, in all great successful peoples, the power of the 
nobles was supreme, the masses were but serfs or slaves. The insistence in 
which the doctrine of Christ was taught to all classes of people in Great 
Britain after the Norman Conquest was alarming to many of the gentry. It 
was revolutionizing the minds of the people. It was making them uneasy. It 
promised them much they could never get through some of the scholars. Let 
the idle fools, the priests and bishops, prate. It would soon die out. The 
villains would be villains still. They were nothing. They could be nothing.

But this was not the talk of the better England. The country gentry, 
uncontaminated by the court gaity and the crass commercialism of London 
trade, dominated in the end. A century would wear out a family of London 
imitators of court life and degrade a commercial family through sins to 
the brutish masses again. Only the glitter of the temptation to other 
country people perpetuated the so-called higher court and society circles 
in London.

The ideals of the country gentry-rather than court ideals-were therefore 
perpetuated from century to century as England's ideals. They were loyal 
to the Church. They believed in distinctive principle of tile Christian 
faith. They were willing to see the principle of love to all carried out 
practically among their own serfs.

Norman conditions were hardly amalgamated with Saxon conditions before 
signs were increasing of a decided change in the living of the lower 
classes. More and more the centuries had been learning a little at a tinge 
of the better way of living, until in the Sixteenth Century a most unheard-
of condition was growing with every decade into alarming proportions. New 
families were rising into prominence with such rapidity that many of the 
old families were startled and alarmed.

The centuries since the Norman Conquest had worked marvels among the 
common people. No people in history had worked such wonders upon its 
lowest classes as had the British gentry. Had the old families of England 
been less wise (or maybe more wise), there might never have developed a 
new social class. The new families might have been absorbed in the social 
body of the men who made England. But the first few generations of the new 
families were not more than half civilized. This reformation that was 
going on in Great Britain in the two centuries before 1650 was the Puritan 
reformation.

The practical operations of this revival, through the diffusion of 
Christian ideals to the lower classes in Great Britain, added very greatly 
to the self-respecting population, made men out of brutes, placed reason 
instead of passion in authority over thousands of reformed human beings, 
and started hundreds of families, at first very imperfectly, but surely 
and safely, out of slavery to the rank, or at least to the quality, of the 
older English gentlemen. The imperfections of the developments of these 
new families are apparent to this day to any one who may study British and 
American social and economic life in any decade since Cromwell's time.

Crassness, grossness, and mediocrity call now the same as two centuries 
ago with authority on every side. Money becomes increasingly a root of 
evil. The principles of Christian democracy that made these new families 
and their powers possible, degenerated in many cases into a swollen 
autocracy of the nouveau riche. Christian democracy stands appalled at its 
own work and is often tempted to fall back into a mediaeval attitude of 
respectable autocracy, disdaining its own work in raising the masses. And, 
too, these raw, undeveloped masses turn upon those who would uplift them, 
accuse Christian democracy of being cruel, heartless, and autocratic; 
sneer at the descendants of their teachers, and presume their half-thought-
out ideas to be worth the ideals that have been ingrained in families for 
many centuries. Not all new families learn as poorly as the average new 
family appears to learn. Two generations only have often stood between a 
hopeless brute and a family of high character and Good standing. But the 
rule, instead of the exception, is only too apparent to all sociologists 
of Christendom.

But conditions are changing. The new learning, the new tolerance, and the 
ripening of the best of the Puritan families, have reacted for good upon 
the older families. Then, too, the half-growth of so many families, their 
greed and avarice, their temporary successes, and the startling wealth 
that has grown out of the new science with its new industrialism and its 
new gamhung chances, have been awful temptations to old and new families 
alike.

And in 1625 Charles I took the throne. Can you imagine the social 
condition of England? The new families were developing a newer England on 
the old soil. Their radicalism and imperfect ideas did not blind them to 
the economic faults, the mighty faults of the English government. Reforms 
and reformers sprang up everywhere, each with a grain of truth and a 
basketful of freakish eccentricities. With the new raw families it was the 
grain of truth that caught, and the eccentricities were adopted as a 
matter of course. What mattered it how eccentric were Jack Cade, and 
Thomas Cartwright, the Brownist preachers and the Anabaptist communisms? 
All had their followings, and all were developing more and more along 
eccentric lines that kept them out of sympathy with the Established Church 
of England, and out of sympathy with the government of England. The older 
English families retorted too often in bitter denunciations. Little effort 
was made to make over these new Englishmen into real Englishmen.

One result was inevitable. The new lands across the sea appealed to the 
new families. The old England was not much, sentimentally, to many of 
theta. They were a new creation. They needed a new world. But their going 
in large numbers from 1630 to 1645 to Massachusetts and elsewhere along 
the coast did not reduce the troubles at home. Charles was finding all 
kinds of ways for raising taxes. The Puritans were treated with harshness. 
The court life became increasingly immoral. The gentry of the country for 
the first time in English history was sneered at by London society for its 
simple virtues.

Then came the radical organizer, Cromwell, the one forceful character who 
could unite the new elements for a temporary fusion. And the crash came on 
poor old England and on the great families that had brought the country up 
to its high state of culture. There had been a great glory in being an 
Englishman at the opening of the Seventeenth Century. In art, literature, 
shipping, the comforts of life, agriculture, theology, and learning, the 
British came into the reign of Charles I on the top of the wave of 
European culture. When the time came that the Puritans tool: up arms 
against their king in his own country, it seemed to many that the upheaval 
must permanently ruin great and powerful England.

In London the court and society were naturally with Charles. The criminal 
classes were glad to ally themselves with Cromwell hoping that a change 
would in some way favor their fortunes. In the counties near London that 
knew the real workings of the court there was a great coolness of old 
families and also a great enthusiasm of the Puritans. In the west and 
north, where. England was yet the old respectable, unspoiled Britain, 
where London society influence was weak and the court little known, the 
old families rallied to the support of Charles with immense enthusiasm. In 
the west, too, the gentry were on better terms with the common people.

It is said that then in County Glamorgan the gentry were almost a unit for 
Charles and the common people always with the gentry. The west of England 
and South Wales held out to the last for the king. Though Charles refused 
theta the leader they wanted and brought in the imperious Prince Rupert; 
though Charles begged and pleaded for more money and soldiers than reason 
could allow: yet the gentlemen of the west gave their lives and fortunes 
to the cause, to be finally defeated by the Puritans and insulted by the 
king's councillors. Finally they, too, revolted and would help no more.

In the despair that followed the death of Charles I and the accession of 
Cromwell many Cavaliers left England for the Colonies. This migration was 
mainly from 1649 to 1660. Virginia, the Carolinas and the West Indies 
profited much, but Rhode Island received few.

What kind of men the old Cavalier gentlemen of the west of England were is 
well described by Marie Trevelyn's description of the old Welsh squires 
now only visible "in oil-painted portraits and curious silhouettes more or 
less touched with age," "in ancient mansions and quaint old manor houses." 
"Their hunting-crops are hung up in the wainscoted halls; their spurs 
untarnished by rust, undimmed by dust, swing from oaken pegs; their 
saddles and bridles are hustled with similar rubbish in the old saddle-
room; their top-boots, scarlet coats, velvet caps, white breeches, and 
smart waistcoats are locked up in disused wardrobes, and down in the quiet 
old studies, where once they were to be found, but are known no more." 
Some of them "were terrors in their way-so strong of lung that their 
voices could be heard afar off, and so sound of limb that their angry foot-
stamp reverberated through the great hall, caused the clogs to start from 
their slumbers." They "had an individuality of their own. They punctually 
headed the stately family procession to church the dais of high-backed 
pews, with railings and curtains on top of them, en closing the occupants 
in a room. He (to change the pronoun) was the very quintessence of 
punctuality and promptitude....He was always the first to put in an 
appearance at church, first on the field, in a ball room, in a funeral or 
at a wedding.... He called the middle classes his 'good neighbors. In him 
the poor found their best friend.... His purse was ever open to those who 
were overtaken by unexpected losses, and his study was the confessional 
for all classes of the community." They "lived in the hearts of the 
people, and were, in a manner, one of them. They were an easy-going, 
hospitable, race of gentlemen, who seldom went away from home, and then, 
perhaps, only Bristol, Bath or London. They believed in warming pans, and 
mutton broth thick with sliced leeks, and elderberry wine, and night-caps, 
and whipped cream with a 'drop' of port or spirit in it, and cordials and 
ginger brandy, and they like. They supported the Church and helped Dissent 
and very often went to hear the eloquent 'itinerant dissenting preachers. 
There was an old-fashioned gallantry, too, in the squire then, as may have 
been seen when he took the pretty village lass by the tips of her fingers 
as though she were a born lady-and assisted her over a gutter, or out of a 
puddle. Contact with the people never injured the dignity of the squire of 
that day--on the contrary, it rather enhanced it."

These are the kind of men that made up the New England Cavalier migration, 
centering at Newport and on the west side of the Narragansett Bay. Only a 
very few stayed with the Puritans in Boston or were scattered in the other 
settlements from the Penobscot to the Connecticut towns. I have a theory 
that the influence of the gentry of Wales and the Welsh marches was 
predominant among the Rhode Island Cavaliers. What can be said of the 
Welsh gentry is equally applicable to the Rhode Island Cavalier-in a 
greater degree than in the Southern Colonies, where London traders and 
friends of the court were most common.

Long before the war broke out in England, each Colony was having its 
troubles between parties that favored the king and those that favored the 
Puritans. In many cases the alignments were peculiar. The settlement at 
Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1637 and 1638 which ripened into the Rhode 
Island Colony was not the least peculiar of the Colonial quarrels.

Later discussions, particularly of a theological nature, have 
misinterpreted the causes that entered into the making of the Rhode Island 
Colony. The founding of the Rhode Island Colony was a very distinct thing 
from the founding of the Providence Plantations. Roger Williams and the 
men of the Providence Plantations (which was begun in 7636) were 
Massachusetts Puritans of a more advanced or eccentric type. As a 
community, the Colonial Providence was essentially Puritan, though the 
church organization was called Baptist.

Recall now that the present State of Rhode Island has a bay, the 
Narragansett, that projects up into the centre of the State nearly three-
fourths of the distance to the northern boundary. The Providence 
Plantations were at the head of the bay.

In 1637 and 1638 another party came to the Narragansett Bay from 
Massachusetts and settled on Aquidneck, or Rhode Island, the largest 
island, and lying on the east side of the bay. The colony became 
established in 1638 at Portsmouth on the north end of the island. These 
had also been driven out of Massachusetts, but for a very different reason 
than Roger Williams. In the main the men of Portsmouth were a very 
different class of men socially, intellectually, and genealogically. Most 
of them were members of old families of England or Wales. Carried away by 
the spirit of adventure to new settlements beyond the seas, or caught in 
the whirlpool of growing social discontent that was sweeping over England 
with the rise of the new families and their Puritanism, there were young 
men who drifted out to the colonies whose hearts when matured were with 
the older families, the older England, and the king.

They were distinctly loyal. When Massachusetts reflected the policies of 
the Puritans at home, William Coddington and others resented the 
constraint of the liberties that the old England was accustomed to. The 
few Cavaliers threw their allegiance to the defense of a woman who was 
preaching opposition to the theology as believed by the leading preachers 
of Massachusetts. This woman, Anne Hutchinson, intensely radical in 
Massachusetts, and increasingly so in Rhode Island and in New York in her 
later years, was the centre of the movement that collected most of the 
voting men of the older families of England resident in Boston in 1637. It 
was an early skirmish of the Puritans and Cavaliers; but it was a decided 
Puritan victory.

Not all the Cavaliers of New England were collected together. Symonds and 
a few others stayed in Boston. Nichols at Stratford, Connecticut, Mason, 
of New Hampshire, and the few other Cavaliers back of Boston were 
undisturbed by the Boston furore raised by Anne Hutchinson and the 
Cavalier leader, William Coddington. But most of the Cavaliers then in 
Massachusetts were drawn into the trouble. They were expelled and founded 
the town of Portsmouth, on Rhode Island.

To those who have believed that the Rhode Island Colony was radically 
Puritan this might be considered to be an attempt to stretch a point to 
find Cavaliers in Rhode Island. For that reason I will step from general 
statements to genealogical particulars to prove the stand that is taken.

William Coddington, the leader of the Cavaliers at Boston, founder of the 
Rhode Island Colony (as distinct from Roger Williams' Providence 
Plantations), was of the old Coddingtons of Lincolnshire. He came to 
Massachusetts, not as a Puritan, but as an official appointed of the 
crown. He was a magistrate to represent the king at Salem. He opposed the 
Governor Winthrop's Puritan party bitterly. When the Massachusetts Colony 
attempted to prevent Anne Hutchinson's tirades Coddington led her defense.

Her most detested doctrines were those that struck at fundamentals in 
Puritan theology, that a person must be first justified by faith and then 
sanctified by works. Her argument was that a person in a state of grace is 
already sanctified, has the Holy Ghost already in his heart, and needs not 
worry about the outward aspect of his works. Sir Harry Vane, and some of 
the most prominent Boston men, believed in her doctrines.

Coddington and his followers were not so much interested in these 
theological doctrines as they were in showing a deckled opposition to 
Puritanism. Even after the town of Portsmouth on Rhode Island was founded 
Governor Coddington was opposed by Roger Williams and John Clarke, the 
leading New England Baptists, and they finally drove him from power when 
Cromwell was ruler of England. Coddington was well known as a Royalist, 
and his activity for the ping was particularly offensive to those who 
wished to unite the Rhode Island and Providence towns into one colony and 
join a New England Puritan confederacy. Coddington had tried to form a New 
England confederacy, but with religious liberty and the recognition of 
Rhode Island as separate from Providence.

When Charles II came to the throne Coddington's influence increased and 
lie was again chosen Governor. To be sure, he had in the meantime joined 
the Society of Friends, or Quakers, but so did many of the daring spirits 
of the day.

In New England we find many of the champions of the king allied with the 
Friends, and in times of war the fighting Quaker was a common instance, in 
spite of his creed. In secondary affairs, in local matters, he could ally 
himself with the Friends.

As for Anne Hutchinson, she was intensely Puritan, intensely independent, 
and cared nothing for constituted authority in England or America. After 
Coddington and the gentlemen who had helped her in Boston had built a 
colony in which she could preach unmolested, she turned against them and 
after a few years she went on to Westchester, New York, where she was 
killed by the Indians.

The Coddingtons remained a prominent family in Rhode Island, where William 
Coddington, second, became Governor in 1683.

John Coggeshall was another of the English gentlemen who defended Anne 
Hutchinson in Boston and helped Coddington in founding Rhode Island, in 
1638. Coggeshall was of the old family of Coggeshall, of Essex, England. 
Where Coddington was politically, there could also be found John 
Coggeshall. He was Governor in 1647, but died in office. His son, John, 
was Deputy Governor from 1686 to 1690.

Nicholas Easton was another of Coddington's followers. It is not so 
certain about his family in Great Britain. His family are claimed both for 
Lymington, Hertfordshire, and for Wales. His attitude in America was 
unquestionably with the Cavalier gentlemen. He was chosen Governor at 
various times. His son, Peter, married Ann, daughter of Governor 
Coggeshall.

William Brenton, another of Coddington's followers, was of unquestioned 
Cavalier connections in England, though his personal attitude in America 
was not shown except in his close alliance with Coddington. The Brentons 
were an old and wealthy family of Hammersmith, near London. He was 
Governor after Charles II came to the throne.

Doctor John Cranston, son of the Reverend James Cranston, a chaplain to 
Charles I, came to Newport and was made a freeman in 1644. He was one of 
Coddington's followers and known to be unusually friendly to the king's 
party. Cranston and William Dyer met the English Royal Commissioners at 
New York in 1664 to thank the king for the charter. Doctor John Cranston 
was chosen Governor in 1678, and his son, Samuel, was chosen Governor just 
twenty years later, in 1698.

Francis Brinley, who came to Newport during the Cromwellian ascendancy, 
was a young man of the Cavalier family of Brinley, of Datchet, in Bricks. 
His father, Thomas Brinley, was an auditor of the revenues under King 
Charles I and owner of various estates in other counties than Bucks. The 
family suffered reverses during the Puritan regime. Francis fled to Rhode 
Island, the home of religious liberty. He went back to England while 
Cromwell was yet in authority, but did not find conditions safe for him to 
remain there. He soon returned to America. The father, Thomas Brinley, did 
not come to America, and seems to have been restored to his office of 
auditor on the accession of Charles II, in 1660, but died the next year.

Francis Brinley, the immigrant, was in Boston the last years of his life 
and was buried at King's Chapel. He wrote a book on the settlements about 
the Narragansett Bay. Francis Brinley had but two sons. The older son, 
Thomas, returned to London, but his only grown son came to Roxbury, 
Massachusetts, at which place that branch of the family established 
itself. The other son of Francis Brinley, the immigrant, was William 
Brinley, who settled in Newport, Rhode Island, and was one of the founders 
of Trinity Church, Newport. Butthe family ceased to exist very early in 
Rhode Island, for this William Brinley had but one grown son, also named 
William, who went to Shrewsbury, New Jersey, and became the ancestor of 
the New Jersey Brinleys. Henry Bull came from South Wales to Boston in 
1635, was immediately involved in the troubles of Coddington, and went 
with him to Rhode Island in 1638. He was a Church of England man, but late 
in life allied himself with the Friends. For his third wife he married the 
widow of Governor Nicholas Easton. Bull was chosen Governor in 1685. His 
grandson, Henry Bull, was prominent in the Colony fifty years later, 
becoming the first chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, in 1749.

Edward Wanton was supposed to have a record in the Cavalier army before 
coming to America, but this cannot be proven. During the Cromwellian 
ascendancy he came to Boston and was at that time a Church of England man. 
He became one of the leaders in opposition to the persecution of the 
Friends and soon became a Friend himself. He removed to Scituate, in the 
Plymouth Colony, in 1660. Three sons, William, John, and Joseph, became 
prominent in the Rhode Island Colony. They started as Church of England 
men, but all went over to the Friends. William Wanton was in the local 
wars, established shipyards at Portsmouth, and became Governor in 1732. 
His brother, John Wanton, was known as the Fighting Quaker, but why more 
than the other Cavalier Quakers it is hard to say. They were all heretical 
when it came to armed loyalty and defense of constituted authority. John 
Wanton became Governor in 1734. Joseph Wanton's son, Gideon, became 
Governor in 1745 ; and Governor William Wanton's son, Joseph Wanton, was 
the last Colonial Governor of Rhode Island. The family had been so devoted 
to the king that Governor Joseph remained a Loyalist throughout the 
Revolution and was one of the greatest of the Americans opposed to the 
Revolution. He died in 1780.

A family of hardly less importance in Rhode Island than the Wantons were 
the Gardiners. George, Robert, and Edward Gardiner were of the already 
famous Cavalier Gardiners of England. These three brothers were descended 
from Sir Thomas Gardiner, of Collyngbyn Hall, whose brother, the Right 
Reverend Stephen Gardiner, was Lord Bishop of Winchester and Lord 
Chancellor of England.

George Gardiner, who became a resident of Newport in 1638, seems to have 
been the most prominent of the Gardiner immigrants. He became a large land 
holder in Newport and across the bay in the Narragansett country. He held 
many positions of civil and military importance in the colony. George 
Gardiner married Sarah, the daughter of Paris Slaughter, the Lord of the 
Manor of Upper Slaughter in Gloucestershire.

The descendants of George Gardiner have been unusually active in public 
life. John, the grandson of George Gardiner, became Deputy Governor in 
1754 and chief justice in 1756. Sylvester and another John Gardiner were 
two of the most eminent men of the Narragansett country and delegates to 
the Continental Congress. Another Sylvester Gardiner became one of the 
Kennebec purchasers and his son, John, graduated at Glasgow University in 
1755, studied law at the Inner Temple and was later attorney-general for 
the Colony of St. Christopher in the West Indies. Later he came to 
Massachusetts, where he was a member of the General Court until his death.

The present head of the family is our distinguished New York citizen, 
Colonel Asa Bird Gardiner, whose eminent services are too well known to 
repeat to his friends.

The Nichols family of Rhode Island belongs to the ancient family of 
Nichols of Glamorganshire, Wales. The family was established in Glamorgan 
during the Norman Conquest and was but remotely related, if at all, to the 
distinguished families o£ the same name in Essex, London, Connecticut, and 
Long Island.

Two of the Nichols of Glamorgan, Edmund and Thomas, were soldiers under 
Prince Rupert in the King's army when Cromwell besieged and took Bristol, 
in 1645. The Nichols brothers were engaged in shipping. The conditions 
were so unsatisfactory under Cromwell that they sailed for America in 
their own ships and made Newport, Rhode Island, their home. Their ships 
took rum to Africa, trading it for slaves. The slaves were taken to the 
West Indies and exchanged for molasses. The molasses was taken to New 
England and made into rum, which in turn was carried to Africa for more 
slaves, and so on in the triangular route.

Edmund Nichols left no children, but Thomas Nichols left children, among 
whom were Captain Benjamin Nichols, of the Narragansett country, who 
continued the shipping interests, and Jonathan Nichols, who was Deputy 
Governor of Rhode Island in 1727.

William Freeborn and John Albro came to Boston together in 1634. Though 
they were by tradition Cavaliers, the proofs are hard to find. Only two 
small facts are known to uphold the tradition, but these are sufficient. 
William Freeborn allied himself with Coddington and went with him to Rhode 
Island, in 1638. John Albro was in Rhode Island when the downfall of the 
Cromwellian commonwealth occurred. Albro showed his pleasure at the 
downfall and was in sympathy with the accession of Charles II. William 
Freeborn became a Friend, but the Albros remained in the Church of 
England. John Albro's son, Samuel, was warden at the church at Newport 
when it was established.

Edmund Calverly and John Rice seem to have come to America together, but 
when and from where it is not known, except that Calverly was in the 
King's army, and probably John Rice was also. They came to the 
Narragansett country in 1661, just after the accession of Charles II. Both 
Calverly and Rice and their-families were in the Church of England at 
Narragansett. There have been many attempts to prove relationship between 
John Rice, of the Narragansett, and Edmund Rice, the founder of one of the 
most distinguished of the Massachusetts' Puritan families, but the status 
of this Rice historical search at present would make the Puritan Rices of 
Hertfordshire ancestry, migrating earlier from Wales. John Rice, of 
Narragansett, seems to find no place in the Hertfordshire family. We 
prefer to consider him a Cavalier, and though the proofs are shadowy, we 
believe them sufficient.

There was a William Richardson who was a Cavalier, but which one of three 
performed the various circumstances of Cavalier attachment we cannot he 
certain. There were William the immigrant, William the son, and William 
the grandson. The son or grandson, or both, were Church of England men and 
one of them wrote a pamphlet in defense of the church in the Colonies and 
in opposition to Cromwell. The immigrant or his son was at one time a 
member of the Friends and buried as such in the Coddington burying ground. 
Most likely this was the immigrant. Either he or the son (it seems more 
likely the son) was one of Coddington's assistants in founding the Colony 
and was antiPuritan. At any rate, the descendants of these Seventeenth 
Century William Richardsons are Scions of Colonial Cavaliers.

The north of England has produced many long family names ending in son. 
One of these is the family of Richardson. Another was represented in Rhode 
Island by Anne Hutchinson, or rather her husband, William Hutchinson. 
There is nothing to show that the Hutchinsons were a Cavalier family. 
Certainly Anne, the reformer, showed few traits, if any, of a lady of 
Cavalier family. What her husband's family may have been is another 
problem that, at present, we are unable to solve. There is a great 
suspicion that there was something more than Anne Hutchinson's ability to 
fight the Puritan theology that drew to her this brilliant and aggressive 
body--of young Boston Cavaliers. Her cause became theirs in Boston, but 
once in Rhode Island the Cavaliers were content, while she was all 
discontent. It may be that the Hutchinson men, like the Richardsons, were 
Cavaliers.

But if we are in doubt about Hutchinson, we are certain not only of 
Richardson but Wilkinson. Lawrence Wilkinson was a lieutenant in King 
Charles' army at Newcastle when the Cromwellians took that town. 
Lieutenant Wilkinson's property at Lanchester, in Durham, was sequestered 
by the Puritan Parliament and he fled to America, arriving here some time 
before 1648. His descendants have been Cavalier-like. One of his 
descendants, William Wilkinson, was an early librarian of Brown University.

We cannot ignore William Dyer in the list of Rhode Island Cavaliers, 
although it was not as a Cavalier gentleman, but rather as an ardent 
fighting Quaker, and enthused by Anne Hutchinson's antinomianism that drew 
him into the company of Cavaliers. He was a London milliner who came to 
Boston in 1635 and became a radical supporter of Anne Hutchinson's 
theology. He was clerk of the settlement at Portsmouth in 1638 and at 
Newport in 1639 and probably eight or ten years after that. He turned 
against Coddington and was captain of the Rhode Island forces upon the sea 
in 1653 during the threatened troubles with the Dutch.

His wife, Mary Dyer, was deeply imbued with the missionary spirit and made 
herself particularly obnoxious in England and Massachusetts. She courted 
martyrdom, and on June 1, 1660, she was hanged in Boston for being a 
Quaker.

With the rise of William Coddington again after the restoration of Charles 
II, William Dyer yet remained prominent in the colony. He was 
Commissioner, General Solicitor and Secretary at various times. It seems 
stretching a point to call him a Cavalier. It is stretching a point. He 
did some things in aid of the Cavaliers, but it was because he was anti-
Puritan. His descendants have been among the most notable families of 
Rhode Island and their Cavalier connections in later generations are 
undoubted.

Another name that cannot be overlooked is that of William Aspinwall, of 
the Aspinwalls of Lancashire. He was one of the leaders in the defense of 
Anne Hutchinson of Boston, became a strong supporter of Coddington on 
Rhode Island, but returned to England. The Aspinwalls of America are not 
his descendants.

There were two of Coddington's associates who appear to have been very 
closely associated. It may be they came to America together. They were 
Philip Sherman and his son-in-law, Thomas Mumford. Philip Sherman 
(ancestor of the late Vice President Sherman) was from Dedham, England, 
and bore the Arms of the Shermans of Suffolk, a family loyal to Charles I. 
Philip Sherman came over in 1634 and joined with Coddington in the 
opposition to the Puritan policies of the Colonial officers. When they 
went to Rhode Island, in 1638, Philip Sherman became Secretary of the 
Colony under Governor Coddington It was Philip Sherman who wrote the 
clause of the agreement in the organization mentioning their colony as 
"Loyal" (with a capital "L") to Charles I.

The agreement began: "We, whose names are under (written do acknowledge) 
ourselves the Loyall subjects of his Majesty) King Charles." About this 
time it became apparent that Thomas Mumford, who married Philip Sherman's 
daughter, was a close friend of Sherman. Thomas Mumford was an opponent of 
Cromwell and was a Church of England man, though Sherman had joined the 
Friends.

From the strong hold that the Friends had on the sympathies of those 
Cavaliers it is very apparent that the membership of the Society of 
Friends and the members of the Church of England were on much better terms 
in Rhode Island than in Old England or the South. But the brand of 
Quakerism that Rhode Island produced had other features that were 
different from Quakerism in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, the 
Southern Colonies, and different even than the adjacent settlements of 
Providence Plantations and Nantucket. The Rhode Island Friend was loyal, 
as a rule, to kingly authority, and was willing to take up arms in 
opposition to those who defied the king. The early Rhode Island Friend was 
on most excellent terms with the Church of England.

I have shown that some of them were of Church of England families. 
Undoubtedly most of them were; but it is not safe to assume in any Colony 
that a churchman was necessarily a Cavalier and that a dissenter was 
Cromwellian. That may have been nearer true in Colonies like Virginia and 
Maryland, but in New England there were Church of England men who cannot 
be listed as Cavaliers. Such were the Narragansett church families of 
Jeremiah Brown, Michael Phillips, Joseph Smith, Buckmaster, and Keltridge.

The Rhode Island Colony founded by Coddington was essentially a loyal 
Colony and it was essentially Quaker. Neither will it do to assume that 
every one who went into that Colony before 1660 was a Loyalist. Only those 
who showed by deeds of heroism and devotion that they opposed the rule of 
Cromwell and wished the Stuarts back on the throne can be safely classed 
as Cavaliers on Rhode Island. It mattered not what sect they favored. It 
mattered least of all in Rhode Island, where religious liberty was a 
foundation stone of government.

And here it is well to repeat that Roger Williams did not found the Rhode 
Island Colony. He founded the Providence Plantations. Roger Williams had 
no authority over Rhode Island when Coddington and his associates made 
religious liberty one of its principles. Williams, eventually a Puritan, 
established religious liberty at Providence in 1636. Coddington, a 
Cavalier, then tried it in Rhode Island, in 1638. Later, and before Roger 
Williams died, the two Colonies united under the name of Rhode Island and 
the Providence Plantations, continuing the policy of religious liberty.

This name, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, was carried into the 
Nineteenth Century, and the State had for most of the century two 
capitals, Newport and Providence. It was Rhode Island rather than 
Providence Plantations that developed the Narragansett country on the west 
side of Narragansett Bay, and here it was the Church of England 
established the Narragansett church that had such unusual strength for New 
England Episcopacy. The Narragansett settlers spread out to the west until 
they reached the Scotch Presbyterians of Voluntown, who had allied 
themselves with the Connecticut Colony.

Throughout the Narragansett country the Cavalier was pre-eminent. Loyalty 
to the king was so strong a sentiment that even when the Revolution came, 
led by that great Cavalier Washington, the new issues could not move many 
of the old Narragansett families from their loyalty to the king. There 
were some who fought under Washington before July, 1776, when the war was 
against Parliament, but who became lukewarm after the Declaration of 
Independence from the king, and would fight no more.

It was this sentiment that made West Greenwich and Coventry known as Tory 
towns.

No reference to Rhode Island and the Revolution is complete without 
reference to the great General Greene, second in importance only to 
Washington. [The Cavaliers cannot claim the great General Greene, from the 
Narragansett, whose activity was so important in winning the Revolution. 
Neither can the Puritans claim him. Greene's ancestors of the Cromwellian 
era were noncombatant Quakers, taking no sides on the great issues of 
English politics.]

Long before 1700, the Narragansett country was settled by a group of 
Cavalier families. All along the west shore of the Narragansett there were 
large estates (quoting Alice Moore Earle), "owned by a comparatively small 
number of persons. Farms of five, six, even ten miles square existed. Thus 
the conditions of life in Colonial Narragansett were widely different from 
those of other New England Colonies. The establishment of and adherence to 
the Church of England, and the universal prevalence of African slavery, 
evolved a social life resembling that of the Virginian plantation rather 
than of the Puritan farm. It was a community of many superstitions, to 
which the folkcustoms of the feastdays of the English church, the evil 
communications of witch-seeking Puritan neighbors, the voodooism of the 
negro slaves, the pow-wows of the native red men, all added a share and 
infinite variety. It was a plantation of wealth, of vast flocks and herds, 
of productive soil, of great crops, of generous living; all these have 
vanished from the life there today."

"Twelve days of Christmas were celebrated every year with great 
festivities in Narragansett. The fishing and fowling and hunting of 
rabbits, squirrels and partridges were interlarded with dinners and 
parties. Weddings among the great families were frequently attended by 
hundreds of guests. One of the greatest as well as one of the last of 
these gala days was given in 1790 by Nicholas Gardiner, 'a portly, 
courteous gentleman of the old school,' when six hundred guests were in 
attendance. Esquire Gardiner, 'dressed in the rich style of former days, 
with a cocked hat, full bottomed white wig, snuff colored coat, and 
waistcoat with deep pockets, cape low so as not to disturb the wig, and at 
the same time display the large silver stock buckle of the plaited neck 
cloth of white linen cambric, small clothes, and white-topped boots, 
finely polished."

There were many families that settled around this Narragansett bay that 
represented the families of the older, the Loyal and Cavalier families of 
Great Britain. It is only from lack of evidence at hand that they are not 
all credited as Cavaliers. We know there were others. It is not hard to 
guess who some of them were.

But the proofs are lacking. As a sample of probable Cavaliers there were 
the Tanners. Nicholas Tanner, of Swansea, Wales, and Swansea, 
Massachusetts, was probably father or grandfather of the brothers, John 
and James Tanner, at Newport. Nicholas was probably brother or father of 
William, of South Kingstown, who was father of William, of North 
Kingstown, and maybe, also, of Thomas Tanner, of Cornwall, Connecticut. [A 
published conjecture that the early Tanners were Baptists and Cromwellians 
has no basis of evidence. As they do not appear in America until after the 
death of Charles I it would seem more likely they were Cavaliers.]

We have given specific cases showing how eighteen Cavalier immigrants 
founded families in Rhode Island. It is as certain that eighteen was not 
half of the number of Cavaliers who settled in Rhode Island as that 
Coddington rallied around him the Cavaliers of Boston, and that 
Coddington, the Cavalier, and not Anne Hutchinson, was the founder of the 
government and settlement of Rhode Island. It is certain, too, that the 
sentiments of the Cavalier were very strong in the Colony and State until 
about 1800.

It is perfectly true that the wealth, the vast flocks and herds, the 
productive soil, the great crops, and the generous living have vanished 
from the life of the Narragansett country. After the Revolution it became 
known to the people along the Atlantic coast that there were vast areas in 
the interior, west of the Catskills and the Alleghanies, that were as 
rich, maybe far richer, than the seashore acres, where stony hillsides and 
salt marshes were too common. Besides this the old Indian population was 
nearly extinct over vast western areas. The tales of the rich Indian 
fields of the Iroquois Confederacy in central and western New York that 
were told by returning soldiers of Sullivan's army were almost unbelieving 
but wonderfully alluring.

The soil of Rhode Island was not equal to that of England and South Wales, 
and under the old style of farming when the soil was not strengthened, it 
took only about a century to produce an industrial revolution. The old 
families would not stay on the soil where with slaves and Indians and free 
negroes and white servants to support, the profits became less and less, 
and gradually faded away. New generations made new conditions. The negro 
and Indian populations were turned adrift to shift for themselves. The old 
plantations were sold off into small farms to those who were once servants.

Many of the new generation of old families went west and scattered, oh, so 
thinly, over a vast area three thousand miles long by a thousand miles 
wide. Others went into the towns in commerce and the professions. The 
growing cities of Boston, New York, and Providence needed the genius and 
intelligence, loyalty and devotion of the Cavalier families. In 
surprisingly large numbers they became urban rather than rural within the 
limits of a single generation.

The Rhode Island Cavalier has not changed, but he has moved. The soil 
which for a time perpetuated the old ideas of loyalty, and the customs of 
the older England, knows them no more. It is a wonderful picture in human 
history, this picking up of a little party of human beings by the hand of 
God and scattering them widely, very widely, like grain across a rich and 
fertile field.

The Southern Cavalier had another mission to work out. His was the working 
out of the peculiar and necessary problems that only the combination of 
Cavalier and negro, freedom and culture, loyalty to home and institutions, 
a warm climate and peculiar crops could produce. The value of the South in 
the past and present was and is of incalculable benefit to American 
civilization.

But the Rhode Island Cavaliers have in the same proportion been valuable, 
scattered though they are. The new generation of Rhode Island Cavaliers 
ripening into manhood in the opening years of the Twentieth Century hardly 
knows that it is of Cavalier stock. But it does know wherever it lives 
that there is inherent in its instincts a high sentiment, a regard for the 
things that count high in the cultured world, an intense loyalty to one's 
own, and a keen devotion to ideas.