But he was not an ordinary law-breaker, and in Providence, in 1641, Gorton and his friends refused to submit to a distress ordained by the magistrates, for the reason that these magistrates, having no charter, had no better authority to make laws than any private person.[9] The next year, 1642, thirteen citizens of Providence petitioned Boston for assistance and protection against him; and not long after, four of the petitioners submitted their persons and lands to the authority of Massachusetts.[10] Although to accept this submission was to step beyond their bounds under the Massachusetts charter, the authorities at Boston, in October, 1642, gave a formal notice of their intention to maintain the claim of the submissionists.[11] To this notice Gorton replied, November 20, 1642, in a letter full of abstruse theology and rancorous invective.
Nevertheless, he and his party left Patuxet and removed to Shawomet, a tract beyond the limits of Providence, and purchased in January, 1643, from Miantonomoh, the great sachem of the Narragansetts.[12] Gorton's letter had secured for him the thorough hatred of the authorities in Massachusetts, and his removal by no means ended their interference.
The right of Miantonomoh to make sale to Gorton was denied by two local sachems; and Massachusetts coming to their support, Gorton was formally summoned, in September, 1643, to appear before the court of Boston to answer the complaint of the sachems for trespass.[13] Gorton and his friends returned a contemptuous reply, and as he continued to deny the right of Massachusetts to interfere, the Boston government prepared to send an armed force against him.[14] In the mean time, a terrible fate overtook the friend and ally of Gorton, Miantonomoh, at the hands of his neighbors in the west, the Mohegans, whose chief, Uncas, attacked one of Miantonomoh's subordinate chiefs; Miantonomoh accepted the war, was defeated, and captured by Uncas.

Gorton interfered by letter to save his friend, and Uncas referred the question of Miantonomoh's fate to the federal commissioners at Boston.

The elders were clamorous for the death penalty, but the commissioners admitting that "there was no sufficient ground for us to put him to death," agreed to deliver the unhappy chieftain to Uncas, with permission to kill him as soon as he came within Uncas's jurisdiction.

Accordingly, Miantonomoh was slaughtered by his enemy, who cut out a warm slice from his shoulder and declared it the sweetest morsel he had ever tasted and that it gave strength to his heart.[15] Thus fell Miantonomoh, the circumstances of whose death were "not at all creditable to the federal commissioners and their clerical advisers."[16] Massachusetts sent out an armed force against the Gortonists, and after some resistance the leaders were captured and brought to Boston.
Here Wilson and other ministers urged the death penalty upon the "blasphemous heretics." But the civil authorities were not prepared to go so far, and in October, 1643, adopted the alternative of imprisonment.

In March, 1644, Gorton and his friends were liberated, but banished on pain of death from all places claimed to be within the jurisdiction of Massachusetts.
They departed to Shawomet, but Governor Winthrop forbade them to stay there; and in April, 1644, Gorton and his friends once more sought refuge at Aquidneck.[17] Gorton, having contrived to reach England, returned in May, 1648, with an order from the Parliamentary commissioners for plantations, directed to the authorities of Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut, to permit him and his friends to reside in peace at Warwick, which they were then permitted to do.[18] In 1652 Gorton became president of Providence and Warwick.[19] In December, 1643, the agents of Massachusetts in England obtained from the Parliamentary commissioners for plantations a grant of all the main-land in Massachusetts Bay; and it appeared for the moment as if it were all over with the independence of the Rhode Island towns.
Fortunately, Williams was in England at the time, and with indomitable energy he set to work to counteract the danger.
In less than three months he persuaded the same commissioners to issue, March 14, 1644, a second instrument[20] incorporating the towns of "Providence Plantations, in the Narragansett Bay in New England," and (in flat contradiction of the earlier grant to Massachusetts) giving them "the Tract of Land in the Continent of America called by the name of Narragansett Bay, bordering Northward and Northeast on the patent of the Massachusetts, East and Southeast on Plymouth Patent, South on the Ocean, and on the West and Northwest by the Indians called Nahigganeucks, alias Narregansets--the whole Tract extending about twenty-five English miles unto the Pequot River and Country." The charter contained no mention of religion or citizenship, though it gave the inhabitants full power "to rule themselves and such others as shall hereafter inhabit within any Part of the said Tract, by such a Form of Civil Government, as by voluntary consent of all, or the greater Parte of them, they shall find most suitable to their Estate and Condition." Williams returned to America in September, 1644.