If the claim of Massachusetts was valid in the case of the New Hampshire
towns, it was equally so for those of Maine. But it was not till 1652,
after Gorges was dead and the settlers in Maine (at York, Wells, and
Kittery) had set up a government of their own, that these towns were
brought under her authority. Later (1677), Massachusetts bought up the
claim of the heirs of Gorges, and came into possession of the whole
province.

[Illustration: ROGER WILLIAMS FLEES TO THE WOODS.]

RHODE ISLAND.--Among those who came to Salem in the early days of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a Puritan minister named Roger Williams. [7]
But he had not been long in the colony when he said things which angered
the rulers. He held that all religions should be tolerated; that all laws
requiring attendance at church should be repealed; that the land belonged
to the Indians and not to the king; and that the settlers ought to buy it
from the Indians and not from the king. For these and other sayings
Williams was ordered back to England. But he fled to the woods, lived with
the Indians for a winter, and in the following summer founded Providence
(1636). [8]

And now another disturber appeared in Boston in the person of Anne
Hutchinson, [9] and in a little while she and her followers were driven
away. Some of them went to New Hampshire and founded Exeter (p. 60), while
others with Anne herself went to Rhode Island in Narragansett Bay, and
founded Portsmouth and Newport.

For a time each of the little towns, Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport,
arranged its own affairs in its own way, but in 1643 Williams obtained