Lay hold on Coddington

What happened

Samuell Gorton had already been driven out of Plymouth for standing up for a servant against the magistrates, and by 1640 he was at Portsmouth on Aquidneck. There a serving girl was hauled into court for quarrelling with an old woman over a trespassing cow, and Gorton took her side. He called the justices "just asses" and denied that a court chosen by no royal charter and no vote of the people held any authority over him. Chief justice William Coddington ordered him seized, crying, "You that are for the King, lay hold on Gorton." Gorton answered, "All you that are for the King, lay hold on Coddington." A hand-to-hand fight followed, and Coddington's armed guard won it. Gorton was arrested. His friend John Wickes, who had also defended the servant, went into the stocks; Gorton was whipped and banished from the island, and Wickes and other Gortonites were banished with him. Rothbard calls Gorton the most thoroughgoing individualist in early New England, punished in one colony after another for denying that magistrates who made themselves prosecutor and judge had any right to try him. The retort turned Coddington's own appeal to the King back on him, and it took the guards to settle the argument. Whipped and banished, Gorton went on to Providence.