"Roger Williams, through whose eyes this 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; the burning of a dissenter; and the humiliation of his master by King James and his favorite, the dangerously beautiful Buckingham.

Haunted by ambition and love for a woman above his station, he fled to New England, where repression and conformity wore different clothes.".

"Mary Lee Settle's arresting narrative layers the approaching civil war in England with the emergence of a new order in Rhode Island, the first colony grounded in freedom of conscience and in the separation of church and state. Williams was, first and last, a champion of the individual against the entrenched power of any establishment, but such commitment had a cruel price.

Banished by his fellow colonists in the dead of winter, he endured years of exile among the Narragansett Indians, during which time he wrote the first book on the language and customs of the native North Americans."--BOOK JACKET.