I, Roger Williams

A panorama of war and love in which freedom of conscience is an idea worth dying for. Roger Williams, through whose eyes this great novel is told, was the most compelling figure in colonial America. Plucked from obscurity to clerk for the celebrated English jurist Sir Edward Coke, Williams had a ringside seat on the brutal politics of Jacobean London. He was witness to the pomp of the Star Chamber, to the burning of a dissenter, to the humiliation of his master by King James and his favorite, the dangerously beautiful Buckingham. Haunted by ambition and by love for a woman above his station, he fled to New England, where repression and conformity wore different clothes. Mary Lee Settle's arresting novel layers the approaching civil war in England with the emergence of a new order in Rhode Island, the first colony anywhere grounded on freedom of conscience. Banished by his fellow colonists in the dead of winter, Williams endured years of exile among the Narragansett Indians, and narrates this tumultuous tale in the peaceful last years of his life. To him we owe the gift of our political freedom, and to Mary Lee Settle, our most distinguished historical novelist, the gift of this book.