Roger Williams was a man who was too far ahead of his time. A separatist—like the colonists at Plymouth, a Puritan who wanted to start his own church as opposed to reforming the Church of England—he showed up in Massachusetts in 1631, soon after the colony in Boston had been established by other Puritans. Once he started preaching in Plymouth Colony, his ideas scandalized the Puritans in Boston: he had the gall to suggest that the colonists should respect the local Native communities of Pequots and Narragansetts as children of God, and that all people should have the opportunity to worship as they wished without coercion. In an era when Christians were warring in Europe over whether Protestant or Catholic souls were going to heaven, religious freedom of conscience was considered blasphemous. By 1635 Williams had been exiled, and he formed a colony he named Providence, which eventually became Rhode Island. In need of a colonial charter to obtain protection by the English Crown, he sailed back to England in 1644, and he found his native country in the midst of its own religious civil war between Puritans and their king, Charles I.