Four: THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT

In a little room built of brown logs, and with casement windows open to the sun and the sounds of early summer, the pilgrim elders of Plymouth sat at table discussing a scandal on the coast. The abomination was amongst them, the sighing after strange flesh, yea, the very Calf of Horeb! At a plantation on the sylvan shores of the Great Bay of the Massachusees (for so was Boston Harbor anciently known) there had been held a scandalous carousal, much “quaffing and drinking of wine and strong liquors” and “friskings” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians.”

So Morton of Merry-Mount, the Lord of Misrule, was still at his tricks! This vagabond lawyer from London, this poet whose verses “tended to lasciviousness,” this scholar who hurled Latin puns at the saints of the elect, had gone far enough. “Afeast of the Romans goddess Flora” in their unprofaned and sanctified wilderness! Captain Standish shall bring this scoffer to the rod, and his immoral merriment shall be stamped upon and quenched as men quench the embers of a fire. Presently a drum sounds its note of authority in the Plymouth street, and Standish marches away on an expedition which is still echoing down New England history.

It is not difficult to imagine the scene in the log-built room, the sombre elders with their lips drawn thin and judgment in their eyes, the old, angry phrases of punishment and vengeance coined thousands of years before under the desert’s pitiless sky, the narrator of the events leaning forward to tell his unseemly news of the impious merriment, and in the lulls of quiet and shocked meditation, the trills of a New England cricket and the neighbourly talk of birds.

Morton of Merry-Mount, first of American defenders of cakes and ale, song, music and the dance! The tale of how this man from Shakespeare’s London scandalised the righteous of Massachusetts Bay, fought their tyrannous abuse of power, and set them by the ears with a defiant jollification is the first of American comedies. It begins with a prologuein old England, a manor house in a wooded English park, and the lamentations of a lady in distress.

Dame Alice Miller, widow of a well-to-do gentleman of Swallowfield in Berkshire, was in trouble and distress of mind,—she was at odds with her own son. This son, co-executor with his mother of his father’s will, was cruel, violent, and ungovernable; he had been summoned to court for throwing a neighbour’s wife out of her pew during a church service; he was now attempting to brutalise his mother into giving him full control of all inherited property. As the poor woman had the interest of five little daughters and a posthumous son to protect from this ruffian, her days were anything but happy ones. Driven to the very last wall, she engaged an attorney to protect her and her minor children. His name was Thomas Morton, and he had been bred to the law in London at Cliffords Inn.

In the year 1617, James I being on the British throne, this advocate, Thomas Morton, was a man a little over forty, of robust body, and of fair height and agreeable presence. He was a man to knowsomething of the properties in the case, for he was himself of the landed gentry; his father had been a soldier of the old queen, and he had been brought up in the country in the style befitting the son of an English country gentleman. With his great boots rising to flaring tops, his Stuart dress, long hair, and hat with a plume, this advocate from London must have had somewhat the air of a Cavalier.

Actually, however, the Stuart dress misdated him, for Master Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn was like his client, Dame Alice, an Elizabethan born and bred.

An Elizabethan, the fact explains both the man and his adventures. The boyhood of this advocate with the plumed hat had been spent in an England which was still the Merry England of Shakespeare’s artisans and Oberon and Titania. Brought up as the son of an English country gentleman, he had known and spoken to Bottom and Peter Quince at the doors of their thatched cottages; he had shared in the field sports, the hunting and the falconry which were the pleasures of rural gentlefolk. From this Shakesperian countryside, the youth had passed to the little, glorious London of Elizabeth.

Outwardly, the London of the old Queen was still largely mediæval. The libraries were ancient and churchly, the taverns vast as the Tabard Inn of Chaucer’s pilgrimage, and the streets through which the bedizened old Queen moved in the pageantry she loved were narrow and puddly. The story of Raleigh’s cloak preserves no empty courtesy. Dwelling as a student of law in this city of the poets and the theatres, the spirit of the great yet vanishing age had possessed the young man from the country; he had its zest of life, its eagerness to find and make use of beauty, its adventurousness of the spirit and the flesh, its honest, earthly good humour, its literary conventions, and even its delightful pedantry. He read Don Quixote, the plays of Ben Jonson, and a quaint world of Latin writers whose names only scholars nowadays remember, and he may well have seen the Man from Stratford in the street.

One imagines the picture, the ancient, oaken room in the red brick manor, the quiet of England, and the drowsy murmur of the trees, the brocaded chairs, the distressed lady, and the lawyer from London gathering the case together with shrewdness and intelligence.

Now follow other conferences, time ripens, the courts are slow and the years are long. The case of Dame Alice Miller and her little children against their ruffianly kinsman becomes a thing of writs and counter writs, processes, summons, visitations and suits and counter suits.

Presently George Miller, the ruffian, hears news which causes him to burst into a rage of foul-mouthed oaths,—his mother has married the London advocate!

As the case had now been dragging on for some five years, the advocate can hardly be accused of artfully hurrying a distressed lady into marriage. Morton and his wife now moved to the manor-house, the case became a matter of “Thomas Morton et Ux” against George Miller, and the hatred which the ruffian had borne to his mother’s protector blazed up into fresh malignity. The point is important, for in this blackguard Morton’s relentless and cruel foes of the Puritan bay were to find an unexpected and valuable ally.

Matters now become more complicated than ever; there is talk of riots and assaults, the year 1623 arrives, and then, ... silence.

What had happened? No certain answer canbe made, but everything seems to point to the death of Dame Alice Morton as having occurred in either 1623 or ’24. There were other complications as well. Certain decisions in the case had gone against Morton, and he had been slow to follow their decrees. The attitude is a not unnatural one for a man who has fought a long battle with a scoundrel, and loathes giving the smallest advantage to a vindictive and unchivalrous foe. Morton cannot be held guilty of having committed any serious breach of the law. Indeed in all this rather ugly and unnatural business, Thomas Morton’s conduct as an attorney and as a man of honour appears above reproach. His management of the case had been alert and aggressive, and he had shown a sound knowledge of seventeenth century law.

Now comes a second mystery,—Morton himself disappears. George Miller, succeeding to his mother’s inheritance, takes over the manor house in the ancient wood by Swallowfield, and finds his stepfather gone no one knows where. Nothing remains to tell of the advocate of Cliffords who stepped so strangely into this tangle of lives and wills; even his hunting dog has disappeared. Silence in the old house. One hears George Millershout some dull-tongued foulness in a tone that is blend of anger and relief, and then away he rides, this prince of cads, wondering how he may best defraud the minor heirs.

Where was the man of Cliffords Inn? The Elizabethan adventurer in him had led him travelling. Did he seek forgetfulness? His wife dead, the long, turbulent dispute settled in a kind of way, had he sought to close a door on the makers of strife and the memories of disorder? He had surely vagabonded to the south, for he once set down this, “I am not of opinion with Aristotle, that the landes underTorrida Zonaare altogether uninhabited, I myself having been so neare to the equinoctiall line that I have had the sun for my Zenith.”

Suddenly he emerges again into the light of history. Something brings him in touch with one Captain Wollaston, an English trader who is fitting out a ship for a trading expedition to America. This Wollaston has gathered thirty young and youngish Englishmen, “his servants,” and with their labour he will establish a trading post on the still uninhabited coast of New England.

It is a day in the early spring of 1625, and Wollaston’s ship is going to sea. Upon the upper deckof theMayflower-like vessel, stands the vagabond advocate, muffled in the great cloak of the period. A hunting dog stands near.

Surely Thomas Morton “of Cliffords Inn, Gent.” thus bidding farewell to England, must have remembered the manor at Swallowfield,—the woodsy afternoons and the long, long twilights, the hunts with dog and gun, the falcons leaping to the blue, and the call of the hunter’s horn far away in the forest,—the most beautiful, the most melancholy-golden music in the world. And because it was the early spring, perhaps he recalled to mind the May day revels of the village, the dance about the garlanded pole, the merry, rustic clowneries, and the shouts and laughter. Alas! something was happening to his Merry England. Bottom and Peter Quince had taken to reading the theology of St. Paul, and cracking each other’s pates over its precise interpretation. Whither might it not lead? Perhaps even to civil war.

Thomas Morton was accompanying Wollaston as an investor in the trading enterprise. He was now a man of robust middle age, nearer fifty than forty, and mellowed by years, books, and a genial philosophy of life.

Unless all signs fail, there was a copy of Don Quixote in his baggage. Little did he know that he was soon to have his own battle with the windmills!

“The Great Bay of the Massachusees,” for so was Boston Harbor anciently known, is a pleasant place with its long, whaleback islands, its countrified, hillocky shores, drumlin mounds, and inland glimpse of the little mountains known as the Blue Hills; it still retains something of a sylvan air; in 1625 it was a sylvan wilderness. Until very recent years, the most conspicuous feature of the bay was a vast field, almost a domain, sloping from a thicket of inland trees to the curving beach of the pleasant Quincy shore. In July, when the grass of the field had ripened to yellow hay, this pleasant open land poured down to the sea like a river mouth of gold. Cleared and cultivated, by the Indians long before the arrival of the whites, the old domain had that mellow quality which Nature sometimes assumes when long allied with man.

A pleasant field, for the presence of the sea dwelt there and was not terrible and alien,—a field in which the hot, earthy odours distilled by an Augustsun mingled pleasantly with the fragrance of salt meadows. The sea birds of the North knew it, and ran along the edge of the ebbing tide, shadows of gulls passed swiftly over its bending grass, the plover rose piping from the reeds, and there were pondlets in it, in tiny round hollows, by whose shores yellow-speckled turtles sunned their backs. The Indians called the field Passonagessit.

Such was the domain of open land which Wollaston, the English trader, saw upon the greenwood shore of the “Bay of Massachusees” on a morning in early summer in the year 1625. The wilderness was his alone. Save for a small and declining trading station established at Wessagusset on what is now the Weymouth shore, the sylvan bay was an uninhabited land. The great Puritan migration of 1630-31, which was to found the town of Boston, was still six years away, and only at Plymouth, some forty miles south along the coast, did the New England forest echo to the day-long sermon soon to thunder through the land.

The imagination rebuilds the scene of the landing, Wollaston’s vessel anchored off the field, the shallop and her little boats plying between her and the shore, the ferrying over of the indenturedbondmen, all well sunburnt from their long voyage and longing for a smell of fresh victuals on their wooden plates, the unloading of the stores, “the implaments,” the ancient muzzle loading muskets and fowling pieces, and the bags of powder and ball. One sees Thomas Morton, in great-boots, cape and plume, coax his hunting dog into the boat, one hears the scrape of the keel upon the gravelly beach, and an excited barking—the advocate of Cliffords Inn and his cherished “dogge” have arrived in the new world.

Presently a brave ring of the axe,—a sound that echoes through American history,—floats down the field to the bay; houses and chimneys rise, and the little plantation takes shape in the Massachusetts wilderness.

The vagabond advocate, beholding the vast, unsullied greenwood, loved it with a devotion few have equalled. He wandered everywhere north and south, he visited Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, he went north beyond the beaches of New Hampshire to the surf and the ledges of Maine. It was in truth a noble wilderness, and to Thomas Morton it became a veritable promised land, a “New English Canaan.” His own “Bay ofMassachusees” he thought “the paradise of those parts,” and meditating on its virtues, his mellow spirit broke into a fine, old-fashioned Elizabethan panegyric.

“The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel’d, for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty, fine, round, rising hillucks, delicate, faire, large plaines, sweet cristall fountaines, and cleare running streams that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmuring noise to hear as lull the senses with delight asleepe, so pleasantly do they glide upon the pebble stones....”

The very words, “the bewty of the place,” reveal the man; the style of the passage his Elizabethan attitudes. In later years, he was to celebrate his love of the American landscape in the rich, full-flowered English of an Elizabethan marriage song.

“If Art and Industry should doe as muchAs Nature hath for Canaan not such,Another place, for benefit and rest,In all the universe can be possest.The more we proove it by discovery,The more delight each object to the eyeProcures as if the elements had here,Bin reconciled, and pleased it should appeareLike a faire virgin longing to be spedAnd meete her lover....”

“If Art and Industry should doe as much

As Nature hath for Canaan not such,

Another place, for benefit and rest,

In all the universe can be possest.

The more we proove it by discovery,

The more delight each object to the eye

Procures as if the elements had here,

Bin reconciled, and pleased it should appeare

Like a faire virgin longing to be sped

And meete her lover....”

There were others at the plantation, however, who did not share these poetic raptures. As the summer wore away, furs proved scarce, and the severe New England winter enclosed the silent land, Wollaston began to lose faith in his venture. At the return of spring, he had made his decision; he would hold on to the trading post, leave a few men there to care for it, and sell to planters in Virginia the time still due him from his bondsmen. A spring morning sees the two groups of “servants” bid each other farewell, and Wollaston’s ship pass from view of the trading post behind the wooded isles. And with his ship, Wollaston himself disappears, for there is no evidence that he ever returned to the shores of Boston Bay.

Thomas Morton, left behind in his beloved Canaan with five or six young English exiles, now assumed command of the trading post by the old Indian field; there was joy in Olympus, and the golden reign began.

“There is a time for reaping and a time for sowing,” and for Thomas Morton a time for drinking the wine of life’s good pleasure. It is clear that the poet vagabond decided to enjoy life and, like Ecclesiastes, “prove his heart with mirth.” He had come to his years of philosophy, his path of life had led him to a glorious land, and a world of new adventures and impressions had cleansed from memory a past of tumult and bitterness. Master Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden was now his very own, and there was no enemy to be seen but winter and rough weather. This ripened desire to have joy of the good green earth took a characteristic and pleasant form,—the London advocate began to imagine himself as a genial host bidding his guests be merry, and sip their ale under the greenwood tree. This idea of himself presently took such a hold of the poet that he began to refer to himself as “Mine Host of Merry-Mount.”

For “Merry-Mount” it was; the name “Mount Wollaston” had gone by the board. Morton had christened the knoll at the head of the field “Ma-re Mount,” from the Latin noun meaning the sea, andhe took an enormous pleasure in this ridiculous pun.

The golden reign on the Great Bay of the Massachusees! There was never a scarcity of food at the great log house on the knoll, for Morton was a keen sportsman, and soon taught his companions how to follow game. The country abounded in “turkies, which at divers times came in great flocks,” in venison and wild pigeons; the swift shadows of trout moved in every pool. “It was a noted custom at my House,” wrote my host, “to have every man’s duck upon a trencher.” There was wine to be had, probably purchased from trading vessels or distilled from the pagan New England wild grape, “goodRosa Solis,” the Rose of the Sun, a blessed name for an old wine with the day’s glory in the grape. “Mine Host” even began the old sport of falconry. “At my first arrival in these parts,” said he, “I practiced to take a lanneret, which I reclaimed, trained, and made flying in a fortnight, the same being a passenger at Michaelmas.” An odd fragment of history, this young New England hawk sent over seas to fly some English field!

Rarest touch of all, none need remain sad at the Merry-Mount. At the field “there was a water,by mee discovered, most excellent for the cure of melancholly.”

Trade flourished. The Elizabethan spirit, for all its poetic quality, was practical enough, and Morton was no middle-aged carousing ass, or befuddled idler. He found the furs he wanted because he sought them out, and because he had a country-born instinct for the ways of the natural world, an English sportsman’s training, and a genial humanity wide enough to include the Indians as members of the human race.

Unhappy Indians of the Great Bay of the Massachusees! Some terrible and unknown plague had descended upon them in the winter of 1616-17, and almost destroyed them from off the earth. They were a broken people, wandering about the lands of the ancestors like the ghosts of their race. In April, 1623, on very slight provocation, Standish had “massacred” seven of their men in cold blood; the word is that used by Charles Francis Adams. As Cotton Mather observed with charity eighty years later, “the woods were almost cleared of these pernicious creatures to make room for a better growth.”

Such were the forlorn, quiet, and broken peoplewho found an understanding friend in the poet host of Merry-Mount. Like any good scholar of his day, he thought them possibly the relics of the scattered Trojans! “I am bold to conclude,” begins Mine Host, “that the original of the natives of New England may well be conjectured to be from the scattered Trojans after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.” He would not sell them drink, for he pitied them, and, moreover, he was no man to want a drunken savage shattering the pleasant notes of an old English pipe with a primitive strain. He told them that wine was among the English “a sachem’s drink.” He could not discern the religious-mindedness others had noted in the redskins. “For my part,” declared Mine Host, “I am more willing to beleeve that the Elephants (which are reported to be the most intelligible of all beasts) doe worship the moon.” “Poor, silly lambes,” he called the dispossessed and unfortunate creatures when they came to lament over their old benefactor sitting ignominiously in the Puritan stocks.

Presently rumours arrive from Plymouth; the brethren look with anger at the Mount. Morton’s five young exiled Englishmen are in their eyes,“a drunken and deboste crew”; Morton himself is the “lord of Misrule” maintaining a “school of atheism.” This last is patently a gibe at Morton’s religious affiliations. A stout churchman by temperament and conviction, Morton still held to the typical Elizabethan attitude that matters of religion were best decided by the great and the learned of the realm. In the good old Merry England days, for instance, Parliament had on several occasions re-defined the Deity and nobody had been a penny the worse.

Anger at Plymouth, where men are forbidden to rejoice at the ancient and beloved festival of Christmas, anger at Plymouth because there is merriment in the land as well as fear and stern repression, anger at Plymouth because the diligence and business shrewdness of the lawyer from Merry England has cut into their trade in furs. The shoe pinches, the shoe spiritual and the shoe worldly. Clouds begins to gather on the bright waters of the woodland bay.

The intense New England autumn comes with the first swift frost, the long winter follows, snow lies deep on the great field, and beyond the field, ice flats cover the bay to open water of the bitterest,coldest green. “The aire doth begett good stomacks,” said Mine Host of Merry-Mount. In the log house on the knoll, so many worlds apart in spirit from the log house by shallow Plymouth Bay, fires leap merrily, ducks turn on the spits, pannikins of wine grow warm on the embers’ edge; Morton sits with his hand over the arm of his chair, and strokes the head of his “dogge.” The Forest of Arden it is, and winter no such dread enemy after all.

Then, with its strange passion and violence, arrives the New England spring. The country gentleman from England will show the “precise separatists” how in Merry England of Church and King, is freely kept an honest holiday. The first of May is approaching; he will go to the wood and find a tree worthy to be the first Maypole in New England! Such a one shall brew a barrel of ale, and such one shall roll out the latest barrel of “goodRosa Solis” to the new born splendour of the sun!

The first of May in the year 1627, a fresh New England morning with the sky still cool and silvery blue, and the trees thrusting out little, cautious leaf tips “the size of a mouse’s ear.” Music in thegreenwood, merry music with an honest tune, the old, sweet, human music one might hear in Master William Shakespeare’s comedies in London over the sea. As the light ripens over the tawny eastern marsh now interwoven with the faint emerald green of the new growth, and his good majesty the sun climbs into the bright New England air, “Mine Host” steps from his house of logs to proclaim an English holiday! Heigho, be jolly, under the greenwood tree, for icicles shall no more hang by the wall; it is the first of May!

The New England robins pipe, and cock their heads to one side as Mine Host reads his proclamation, and their piping dies in a great shout as the merry advocate completes the mock solemnity. Guests have already arrived, more are coming across the bay in their little boats, some are hastening to the Merry-Mount along the brambly woodland trails. The ever hungry crew from Wessagusset is at hand, stray planters arrived within the year, and perhaps the captain of a trading ship and his chorusing, sunburnt tars. One hears the music, the wholesome, natural gaiety, the knock of pewter mugs on wooden table tops, and men singing. To these exiles, the festival meant thefirst touch of home they had in the wilderness. That tall, soldier-like lad of Morton’s company, Tom Gibbons, will “get religion,” and end his days as a pillar of the Puritan state; little does he foresee such a change as he waves his pewter mug about! A health to Master Thomas Morton of the Merry-Mount, and a fig for all who doubt that laughter is the truest distinguishing mark twixt man and beast! “Mine Host” was well prepared, he had brewed a huge barrel of “excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other good cheare for all comers of the day.”

Higher climbs the spring tide sun, lower sinks the good liquor in “barrell and botel”; it is time to sweep together up the knoll to the Maypole of New England!

The pole lay upon the ground, on the height of a knoll commanding the field and the sea. It was a noble pine mast, some eighty feet high, wreathed about with flowers and garlands of the New England spring, and somewhere near the top of it, a fine pair of garlanded antlers served as a rustic crown. Amid a thousand, noisy, contradictory counsels the pole is raised, the gods alone know how, and now comes a young lad of Morton’s companyto sing the song the merry advocate has composed in honor of the day.

“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes!Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s ioyes;Io to Hymen, now the day is comeAbout the merry Maypole take a Roome.Make greene garlons; bring bottles outAnd fill sweet nectar freely about.Uncover thy head and feare no harme,For hers good liquor to keepe it warme.Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!Nectar is a thing assign’dBy the Deities owne mindeTo cure the hart opprest with greif,And of good liquors is the chiefe.Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!Give to the mellancolly manA cup or two of’t now and than;This physic soone revive his bloudAnd make him be of a merrier moode.Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,No Irish stuff nor Scotch o’er worne,Lasses in beaver coats come awayYe shall be welcome to us night and day.”

“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes!Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s ioyes;Io to Hymen, now the day is comeAbout the merry Maypole take a Roome.

“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes!

Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s ioyes;

Io to Hymen, now the day is come

About the merry Maypole take a Roome.

Make greene garlons; bring bottles outAnd fill sweet nectar freely about.Uncover thy head and feare no harme,For hers good liquor to keepe it warme.

Make greene garlons; bring bottles out

And fill sweet nectar freely about.

Uncover thy head and feare no harme,

For hers good liquor to keepe it warme.

Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!

Nectar is a thing assign’dBy the Deities owne mindeTo cure the hart opprest with greif,And of good liquors is the chiefe.

Nectar is a thing assign’d

By the Deities owne minde

To cure the hart opprest with greif,

And of good liquors is the chiefe.

Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!

Give to the mellancolly manA cup or two of’t now and than;This physic soone revive his bloudAnd make him be of a merrier moode.

Give to the mellancolly man

A cup or two of’t now and than;

This physic soone revive his bloud

And make him be of a merrier moode.

Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!

Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,No Irish stuff nor Scotch o’er worne,Lasses in beaver coats come awayYe shall be welcome to us night and day.”

Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,

No Irish stuff nor Scotch o’er worne,

Lasses in beaver coats come away

Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.”

There is a stir in the greenwood at the close of the song, and through the bushes come trooping the last of the Massachusees. Morton had not forgotten his Indian neighbors. Tall, naked, coppery warriors, and Indian lasses in beaverskin coats have arrived to share in the merriment of Merry-Mount. English planter and Indian brave join hands, Morton seizes the brown fingers of two tawny princesses; all join hands, and round and about the pole dance the fantastic company mid the wild uproar of a drunkenly beaten drum, shouts, the thunderous roar of old-fashioned muskets, and the faint silvery piping of an English melody. Is there a stranger picture in all American history than this revel at the Merry-Mount, this glimpse of tawny bodies, beaver coats, English sailors in great Dutch breeches, and Morton, in his London best?

Nailed to the Maypole itself was a festival poem which “being Enigmattically composed pusselled the Separatists most pittifully to expound it.”

At nightfall there must have been many a befuddled head, and on the following morn, a sizeable crew at the spring so efficacious against the “melancholly.” But serious business was in theair, for the scandalised brethren of Plymouth had resolved on action, and Miles Standish was soon to descend on the disturber of Israel. The merry advocate knew where the wind lay. “The setting up of this Maypole,” he wrote in later years, “was a lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists who lived at New Plimmouth. They termed it an Idoll, yea, the Calfe of Horeb, and stood at defiance with the place naming it Mount Dagon, threatning to make it a woeful mount and not a merry-mount.”

It was Morton’s custom to go to Wessagusset once in a while, as he says, “to have the benefit of company,” and there Standish found and secured him. That he did not secure the poet well enough is apparent from the fact that Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn escaped that night from his captors, and made his way through a wild thunderstorm to his beloved Merry-Mount.

There was a tremendous to-do on finding that the “Lord of Misrule” had “flowne.” In “Mine Host’s” own words....

“The word which was given with an alarme, was,—o he’s gon!—he’s gon!—What shell wee doe, he’s gon!—the rest (halfe asleepe) start up in a maze,and, like rames, ran their heads one at another at full butt in the darke. Theire grand leader, Captaine Shrimpe, took on most furiosly to see the empty nest and the bird gon. The rest were eager to have torne theire haire from theire heads; but it was so short that it would give them no hold.”

Standish, however, returned to the Merry-Mount for his prisoner. Some kind of judicial legerdemain took place at Plymouth, and Morton was sent to England as prisoner. The specific charge against him was the sale of firearms to the Indians. The arrest was illegal, the whole process and the imprisonment an outrageous injustice, and there is not a scrap of real evidence to show that there was a word of truth in the specific charge. On Morton’s arrival in England, the English authorities recognised the true state of affairs, and instantly released the prisoner.

It had been wisely observed that Puritanism is not so much a form of religion as an attitude to life, and that there are Puritan sects in Islam as well as in eastern and western Christianity. A meeting of the mind which comes into the world already “Puritan,” and the mind which is liberal by temperament has always meant a struggle, and thefirst named has never troubled to make a declaration of war, but has offered instant battle to his soul’s antagonist. Once victorious, the repressive type has shown no mercy to victims of its aggression. The story of the merry man of the Merry-Mount is the tale of such a challenge and such a defeat. His May day revel was no orgy of “beastlie practices” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians,” nor did his verses “tend to lasciviousness”; it was simply an English country revel such as he must have often witnessed in his youth. And in historic justice to Morton, it ought to be remembered that the good fathers of Plymouth, ministering angels as they were beside the repressers at Boston, exemplified the “Puritan” attitude in every moment of their lives, that they had been difficult to deal with in England, and that they had on several occasions severely tried the tempers of their exceedingly tolerant hosts at Leyden. Theirs is a large documentation, and the facts are clear. Morton, moreover, suffered because he was a stray communicant of the Church of England. In his case Puritan antagonism for such as held a contrary attitude to life mingled with theodium theologicumto beget what began as injustice and ended as cruel persecution.

So ends the Maypole scene of the comedy. There was a sequel, for Morton returned. The beauty of the New England wilderness had stirred the heart of this vagabond country gentleman, and moreover, he had property and an investment to protect. During his stay in England, the Puritans under Endecott and Winthrop began the settlement of “the Great Bay of the Massachusees.” What happened to the merry-maker when he fell into such hands is a tale for philosophers.

The Puritan settlement at Boston having been accomplished, the domain of Merry-Mount became part of the Puritan jurisdiction, and one of Endecott’s first acts was to go to the Mount, cut down the Maypole, and admonish the forlorn little band “to look ther should be better walking.” The surviving members of Morton’s company had not been attracting attention in any way, and Endecott’s visit was simply an outlet to the man’s hunger to punish. He was presently, for a very minor offence, to cut off the ears of an unfortunate home-sickEnglishman, a member of the Church of England, who had been so browbeaten by “the saints” that he was half a madman. One of the saints in England ventured to send a warning to the New England brethren that there were already “diverse complaintes against the severity of your government, especially Mr. Indicutts, and that he shall be sent for over, about cutting off the Lunatick man’s ears.”

This thin-lipped man, with the icy and merciless eyes,—his portrait may be seen on the walls of the Massachusetts Historical Society,—was presently to judge the “Lord of Misrule.” For Thomas Morton was once more in his “Canaan.” While in London, he had been of service to Isaac Allerton, an agent of Plymouth Colony, and Allerton had outraged Plymouth by bringing back the disturber. There is still something mysterious about this return with Allerton; it may be that Morton arranged it for the sake of its irony.

From Plymouth, Morton went boldly to his property at the Merry-Mount, and with great courage ventured to brave the Puritan tyranny. At a general court in Salem, he very rightly refused to sign some hodgepodge of the Mosaic law andEnglish custom which the saints intended as a kind of constitution, making his assent conditional on the addition of the words,—“So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the laws of the Kingdom of England.”

The refusal marked him for destruction. Now comes his arrest and trial on the most trivial of charges; he had, so the saints protested, “taken away a canoe from some Indians.” A delightful touch of Puritan love for the redskin. “Charges,” wrote Mr. Charles Francis Adams, who was no partisan of Morton’s, “which amount to absolutely nothing.” What chance had this English gentleman, who knew himself to be a subject of King Charles and whose soul was still a subject of Elizabeth, in this court composed of seventeenth century Englishmen labouring under the extraordinary delusion that they were primitive Jews of the Arabian desert? Once more the man of Cliffords was condemned, set in the stocks, his property confiscated, and he was sent to England penniless and half-starved for lack of money to buy food.

Nothing can excuse this brutal, inhuman, and lawless condemnation. Now comes a typical Puritan touch of vindictiveness. His persecutors waitedtill the vessel carrying Morton to England came in sight of Merry-Mount, and then set the house at the Mount afire, so that their victim might see the destruction of his property. “That the habitation of the wicked appear no more in Israel” wrote Winthrop sententiously. Was there ever anything more heartless?

Poor “Mine Host” of the festal Maypole! “The smoake that did ascend,” said he, “appeared to be the very sacrifice of Kain. Mine Host (that a farre of abourd a ship did there behold this woeful spectacle) knew not what he should doe in this extremity but beare and forbeare as Epectetus says: it was bootless to exclaime.... The stumpes and postes in their black livery will mourne.” And he cried, “Cruell Schismaticks!”

A campaign of slander now followed the violence, and it was whispered about that the Lord of Misrule had been sent for on “a foule suspition of murther.” There is no trace of any warrant, there is no trace of crime committed by Morton; the one actual fact is that the English authorities again delivered the prisoner. The source of the libel has recently been uncovered; it was the pretty thought of Morton’s delightful stepson! As Morton continuedto live in England quite unmolested, though with a vindictive enemy at his heels, it may be safely said that the whole slanderous attack was a pure fabrication. Tested in England, the scene of the supposed high crimes and misdemeanours, the slanderous charges evaporate into unlovely wisps of Puritan malice and the imagination of a blackguard being sued by his sister for withholding her marriage portion.

Years pass, the last of Elizabeth’s Merry England melts away, Oberon and Titania forsake the moonlit glade, and a sullen and apprehensive England rises against its Stuart king. An old man in his seventies watches the tumult, his eyes full of memories. Far away from the storm, over the wide Atlantic, lies new Canaan where the sun itself is likeRosa Solis, where the tawny braves walk the trails of the greenwood, the sea birds feed by the marsh, and the plover rises piping from the grass. His Forest of Arden! And Merry-Mount is there where he played Mine Host, raised the antlered Maypole, and proclaimed an English holiday. He will return there again with his “dogge” and fowling piece; he is old now, and even the Puritan magistrate will be content to let him spend his oldage roaming the fields. Little he knew the Puritan mind!

In the summer of 1643, he lands at Plymouth; one party is in favor of handing him over at once to the Boston magistrates; Governor Bradford, however, himself along in years, will suffer him to spend the winter in the Plymouth jurisdiction. The next spring, in compliance with this condition, the old man leaves Plymouth, and travels about; he goes to Rhode Island and to Maine. As he goes, Endecott watches him like a hawk. There comes some unlucky slip, a moment’s entrance, perhaps, into the Massachusetts jurisdiction; the warrant is already at hand, and the old Lord of Misrule is once more in the hands of his old persecutor. Again he was brought to trial before Winthrop and Endecott. On trial for what? For having, in England, “made a complaint against us at the council board.” How a criminal offence could be manufactured out of an English subject’s proper appeal to the head of the state did not worry Winthrop or his fellow casuists. They were both the law and the judges of the law. Some of the “evidence” had been collected by Winthrop’s pretty trick of opening his opponents’ letters.

Owing to Morton’s being “old and crazy,” wrote Winthrop, “we thought not fit to inflict corporal punishment on him but thought better to fine him.” What a smug air of self-approval there is in this phrase! It has not been hidden from impartial history, however, the other side of the story. Winthrop and Endecott actually kept the broken old man in prison a year, and caused him to pass through the bitterness of a New England winter without a fire, without bedding, and with fetters on his limbs.

Regaining his liberty only after a piteous plea, he made his way to the little royalist colony at Agamenticus in Maine. Let us hope there were some good souls about to welcome and understand the poet of Merry-Mount.

Two years at Agamenticus, the hill seen afar over the sea as a high blue dome; two years among friendly folk, and then Morton of Merry-Mount wanders from earth to the Elysian fields where Good Queen Bess still reigns, and Shakespeare and Ben Jonson dwell, and no man strives to shape into some petty human scheme the mighty purposes of the Lords of Life.

InCyrano de Bergerac, De Guiche and Cyranodiscuss Don Quixote’s famous battle with the wind mills. “Beware of such a battle,” says De Guiche; “you will be hurled into the mire.” And Cyrano replies—“Or upwards to the stars.”

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