Warwick, Rhode Island: A Siege, a Trip to London and an Earl

Warwick, Rhode Island, was Shawomet when Massachusetts troops besieged it in 1643. Its leader, Samuel Gorton, renamed it for an earl who backed him. Gorton had sailed to England to complain about the siege, and he came home with powerful protection.

Shawomet and the Gortonists

Samuel Greene Arnold, who published a history of the state in 1859, calls Gorton “the founder of Warwick,” and writes that “no man has suffered more in reputation from the calumny of his enemies.” They called him “a proud and pestilent seducer,” “a beast” and “arch heretic,” among other things. Like Roger Williams, he’d clashed with the Puritan authorities in Massachusetts.

Gorton and his followers left Pawtuxet and bought land at Shawomet, beyond the limits of Providence. Arnold says Miantonomi, chief sachem of the Narragansetts, sold it for “one hundred and forty-four fathoms of wampum peage,” and that Pomham, the local sachem of Shawomet, witnessed the deed. In 1643, though, Pomham and the sachem of Pawtuxet put themselves under Massachusetts, and Pomham denied he’d ever agreed to the sale. That gave Massachusetts its opening. John Hayward’s 1839 gazetteer still describes Warwick as “the Indian Shawomet.”

Forty soldiers and a riddled flag

Massachusetts sent Captain Cooke, Lieutenant Atherton and Edward Johnson “with forty soldiers.” Arnold says the women and children fled, some into the woods and some by boat, while the men fortified a house. They hung out the English flag to show they were loyal subjects. “It was immediately riddled by the shot of their assailants,” Arnold writes.

The siege lasted some days. The settlers gave up, were marched to Boston as prisoners and put on trial. The next year they were ordered out of their own homes at Shawomet and took refuge on Aquidneck, the island in Narragansett Bay. As Arnold puts it, “The settlement of Warwick was for a time suspended.”

The earl in London

So Gorton took the fight to England. The colonies then answered to a committee of Parliament headed by the Earl of Warwick, who held the title “Governor-in-Chief and Lord High Admiral of the Colonies.” Gorton went to complain against Massachusetts “in behalf of the people of Shawomet,” and the commissioners ordered Massachusetts to let them back and leave them alone.

Arnold ties the name to that win. He calls them “the lands of Warwick, so named by Gorton in compliment to the Earl through whose influence his mission was successful.” The earl’s help kept working, too. When Gorton landed back in Boston, the court ordered his arrest, and “a letter which he brought from the Earl of Warwick saved him from imprisonment.” Even then, he got home only by the governor’s tie-breaking vote.

Both sides courted the same earl

Here’s the twist. Massachusetts sent its own agent, Edward Winslow, to London to answer Gorton, and Winslow wrote a book against him. Arnold notes that it was “Dedicated to Robert, Earl of Warwick.” Both sides of the Shawomet fight were appealing to the same man, and it was Gorton who put his name on the map.

The federal place-name database describes the town as “Named for Earl Warwick, signer of patent of Providence Plantations,” and the 1905 USGS bulletin by Henry Gannett simply says “named for the Earl of Warwick.” If you look at an 1890 survey sheet of the area, you can still spot the town’s first name: it marks Shawomet Beach on the shore.

Sources & further reading

• Samuel Greene Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, vol. 1 (1859). P. 113: the Earl of Warwick’s committee and title. P. 163: Gorton as “the founder of Warwick” and the insults against him. P. 168: Winslow’s book “Dedicated to Robert, Earl of Warwick.” Pp. 175–177: the Shawomet purchase and Pomham’s submission to Massachusetts. Pp. 181–183: the 40 soldiers, the flag and the surrender. Pp. 189–193: the banishment, Gorton’s mission and the naming “in compliment to the Earl.” P. 217: the earl’s letter that kept Gorton out of jail.
• John Hayward, The New England Gazetteer (1839). Warwick as “the Indian Shawomet.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 316. Warwick “named for the Earl of Warwick.”
• GNIS feature 1220018 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Warwick and its note on the earl.