A year or two later William Coddington, loyal ally of Anne Hutchinson, with others--Clarke, Coggeshall, and Aspinwall, who resented the aggressive attitude of Boston--purchased from the Indians the island of Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay and at the northern end planted Pocasset, afterwards Portsmouth, the second settlement in the colony of Rhode Island. They, too, entered into a covenant to join themselves into a body politic and elected Coddington as their judge and five others as elders. But this modeling of the government after the practices of the Old Testament was not pleasing to a majority of the community, which desired a more democratic organization. After a few months, in the spring of 1639, Coddington and his followers therefore journeyed southward and established a third settlement at Newport. Here the members adopted a covenant, "engaging" themselves "to bear equall charges, answerable to our strength and estates in common," and to be governed "by major voice of judge and elders; the judge to have a double voice." Though differing from the system as developed in Massachusetts, the Newport government at the beginning had a decidedly theocratic character.
The last of the Rhode Island settlements was at Shawomet, or Warwick, on the western mainland at the upper end of the Bay. There Samuel Gorton, the mystic and transcendentalist, one of the most individual of men in an era of striking individualities, after many vicissitudes found an abiding place. He was of London, "a clothier and professor of the misteries of Christ," a believer in established authority as the surest guardian of liberty, and an opponent of formalism in all its varieties. Arriving at Boston in 1637 at the height of the Hutchinsonian controversy, he had sought liberty of conscience, first in Boston, then in Plymouth, and finally in Portsmouth, where he had become a leader after the withdrawal of Coddington. But in each place his instinct for justice and his too vociferous denial of the legality of verdicts rendered by self-constituted authorities led him to seek further for a home that would shelter him and his followers. No sooner, however, was he settled at Shawomet, than the Massachusetts authorities laid claim to the territory, and it was only after arrest, imprisonment, and a narrow escape from the death penalty, followed by a journey to England and the enlisting of the sympathies of the Earl of Warwick, that he made good his claim. Gorton returned in 1648 with a letter from Warwick, as Lord Admiral and head of the parliamentary commission on plantation affairs, ordering Massachusetts to cease molesting him and his people, and he named the plantation Warwick after his patron.