RI Celebrates Its ‘Lively Experiment’ — Happy Royal Charter Day

(7.8) How to get kids interested in history? You could start with this guy. While we have just finished celebrating our ultimate break with the British monarchy, let’s not forget the good times. On July 8, 1663, King Charles II granted Rhode Island a most unusual royal charter endorsing Roger Williams’ revolutionary concepts of religious liberty. Author John M. Barry writes that Williams had “created the first government in the world which broke church and state apart.”*

This was extraordinary. For a while there, we were it. Local historian James A. Warren** writes:

. . . galling to the Puritan Fathers was the king’s endorsement of the Roger Williams’s bold idea—put into words in the text of the charter by his friend John Clarke—that the citizenry of Rhode Island “hold forth a lively experiment that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained, and that among our English subjects, with a full liberty in religious concernments.

And who doesn’t enjoy galling Puritans. (They executed Charles’s father for one thing.) Go here for the full text of the charter.

When the Smithsonian Channel launched its limited series “Private Lives of the Monarchs” there was no doubt in my mind that Charles the II would be a featured subject. It is not for nothing that he was dubbed the “Merry Monarch” — 17 children by 8 mistresses? — and the show focuses on all the fun things like sex, food, fashion, and the customs of the day.

After ten years of exile, Charles Stewart was invited back to England by Parliament to reclaim his throne in May 1660. Upon his return, he ended the joyless Commonwealth years and restored the institution of the monarchy, but that is not how Charles II is best remembered. We reveal a 25-year reign full of extravagant indulgences and amorous exploits involving a sex-starved king, countless mistresses, and one court official known as the Pimp Master General.

So make time to visit the Royal Charter Museum at the Rhode Island state house and then come home and watch the show — you know best if your kids are ready to learn about merkins. (Charles was also a patron of the arts and sciences, founded the Royal Observatory, and supported the Royal Society, a scientific group whose early members included Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton. It’s just not covered in this particular show.)

This Royal Charter remained our governing document until the adoption of the Constitution in May of 1843.

*The definitive book on Williams — including extensive material on his early life in England — is “Roger Williams and the Creations of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty” by John M. Barry.

**James Warren’s book “God, War, and Providence” focuses on the forty-year resistance campaign waged by Williams and the Narragansetts against the Puritans, providing the context for Rhode Island’s urgent need for a new charter. I recommend both these books.

We even have these words etched in stone.