The Project Gutenberg eBook, The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes, by Thomas Morton and Charles Francis Adams

Transcriber's Note

A table of contents detailing the chapters of the original book is located [at the end of the text].

This book is a 19th century edition of a 17th century original, along with extensive commentary. The 19th century edition used different page numbering. To facilitate internal references to specific pages, the original 17th century page numbers have been incorporated into the text enclosed by curly braces, e.g. {123}. References to these numbers in the text have been kept as printed, e.g. *123.

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Publications of the Prince Society.

THE NEW ENGLISH CANAAN.

THE
Publications of the Prince Society.
Established May 25th, 1858.

THE NEW
ENGLISH CANAAN.

Boston:
PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY,
By John Wilson and Son.
1883.

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY COPIES.

THE
NEW ENGLISH CANAAN
OF
THOMAS MORTON.

WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER AND NOTES
BY
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Jr.

Boston:
PUBLISHED BY THE PRINCE SOCIETY.
1883.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1883, by
The Prince Society,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Editor:
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Jr.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

Before undertaking the present work I had no experience as an editor. It is unnecessary for me to say, therefore, that, were I now to undertake it, I should pursue a somewhat different course from that which I have pursued. The New English Canaan is, in many respects, a singular book. One of its most singular features is the extent of ground it covers. Not only is it full of obscure references to incidents in early New England history, but it deals directly with the aborigines, the trees, animals, fish, birds and geology of the region; besides having constant incidental allusions to literature,—both classic and of the author’s time,—to geography, and to then current events. No one person can possess the knowledge necessary to thoroughly cover so large a field. To edit properly he must have recourse to specialists.

It was only as the labor of investigation increased on my hands that I realized what a wealth of scientific and special knowledge was to be reached, in the neighborhood of Boston, by any one engaged in such multifarious inquiry. Were I again to enter upon it I should confine my own labors chiefly to correspondence; for on every point which comes up there is some one now in this vicinity, if he can only be found out, who has made a study of it, and has more information than the most laborious and skilful of editors can acquire.

In this edition of the New Canaan I have not laid so many of these specialists as I now wish, under requisition; and yet the list is a tolerably extensive one. In every case, also, the assistance asked for has been rendered as of course, in the true scientific spirit. My correspondence has included Messrs. Deane, Winsor and Ellis on events in early New England history; Professor Whitney on geographical allusions; Professors Lane and Greenough, Dr. Everett and Mr. T. W. Higginson, on references to the Greek and Latin classics, or quotations from them; and the Rev. Mr. Norton on Scriptural allusions. Mr. J. C. Gray has hunted up for me legal precedents five centuries old, and Mr. Lindsay Swift has explained archaic expressions, to the meaning of which I could get no clew. On the subject of trees and herbs I called on Professors Gray and Sargent; in regard to birds, Mr. William Brewster was indefatigable; Mr. Allen, though in very poor health, took the chapter on animals; Professor Shaler disposed of the geology; Messrs. Agassiz and Lyman instructed me as to fish, and Professor Putnam as to shell-heaps. I met some allusions to early French and other explorers, and naturally had recourse to Messrs. Parkman and Slafter; while in regard to Indian words and names, I have been in constant correspondence with the one authority, Mr. J. Hammond Trumbull, who has recognized to the fullest extent the public obligation which a mastery of a special subject imposes on him who masters it.

In closing a pleasant editorial task, my chief regret, therefore, is that the notes in this volume contain so much matter of my own. They should have been even more eclectic than they are, and each from the highest possible authority on the subject to which it relates.

C. F. A., Jr.
Quincy, Mass., April 4, 1883.

MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT.

In the second book of his history of Plymouth Plantation, Governor Bradford, while dealing with the events of the year 1628 though writing at a still later period, says:—

“Aboute some three or four years before this time, ther came over one Captaine Wolastone (a man of pretie parts), and with him three or four more of some eminencie, who brought with them a great many servants, with provisions and other implaments for to begine a plantation; and pitched themselves in a place within the Massachusets, which they called, after their Captains name, Mount-Wollaston. Amongst whom was one Mr. Morton, who, it should seeme, had some small adventure (of his owne or other mens) amongst them.”[1]

There is no other known record of Wollaston than that contained in this passage of Bradford.[2] His given name even is not mentioned. It may be surmised with tolerable certainty that he was one of the numerous traders, generally from Bristol or the West of England, who frequented the fishing grounds and the adjacent American coast during the early years of the seventeenth century. Nothing is actually known of him, however, until in 1625 he appeared in Massachusetts Bay, as Boston Harbor was then called, at the head of the expedition which Bradford mentions.

His purpose and that of his companions was to establish a plantation and trading-post in the country of the Massachusetts tribe of Indians. It was the third attempt of the kind which had been made since the settlement at Plymouth, a little more than four years before. The first of these attempts had been that of Thomas Weston at Wessagusset, or Weymouth, in the summer of 1622. This had resulted in a complete failure, the story of which is told by Bradford and Winslow, and forms one of the more striking pages in the annals of early New England. The second attempt, and that which next preceded Wollaston’s, had closely followed the first, being made in the summer of 1623, under the immediate direction of the Council for New England. At the head of it was Captain Robert Gorges, a younger son of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Weston’s expedition was a mere trading venture, having little connection with anything which went before or which came after. That of Gorges, however, was something more. As will presently be seen, it had a distinct political and religious significance.

Robert Gorges and his party arrived in Boston Bay in 1623, during what is now the latter part of September. They established themselves in the buildings which had been occupied by Weston’s people during the previous winter, and which had been deserted by them a few days less than six months before. The site of those buildings cannot be definitely fixed. It is supposed to have been on Phillips Creek, a small tidal inlet of the Weymouth fore-river, a short distance above the Quincy-Point bridge. The grant made to Robert Gorges by the Council for New England, and upon which he probably intended to place his party, was on the other side of the bay, covering ten miles of sea-front and stretching thirty miles into the interior. It was subsequently pronounced void by the lawyers on the ground of being “loose and uncertain,” but as nearly as can now be fixed it covered the shore between Nahant and the mouth of the Charles, and the region back of that as far west as Concord and Sudbury, including Lynn and the most thickly inhabited portions of the present county of Middlesex.

Reaching New England, however, late in the season, Gorges’s first anxiety was to secure shelter for his party against the impending winter, for the frosts had already begun. Fortunately the few savages thereabouts had been warned by Governor Bradford not to injure the Wessagusset buildings, and thus they afforded a welcome shelter to the newcomers. These were people of a very different class from those who had preceded them. Among them were men of education, and some of them were married and had brought their wives. Their settlement proved a permanent one. Robert Gorges, it is true, the next spring returned to England disgusted and discouraged, taking back with him a portion of his followers. Others of them went on to Virginia in search of a milder climate and a more fertile soil. A few, however, remained at Wessagusset,[3] and are repeatedly referred to by Morton in the New Canaan[4] as his neighbors at that place.

When, therefore, Wollaston sailed into the bay in the early summer of 1625, its shores were not wholly unoccupied. His party consisted of himself and some three or four partners, with thirty or more servants, as they were called, or men who had sold their time for a period of years to an employer, and who stood in the relation to him of apprentice to master. Rasdall, according to Bradford, was the name of one of the partners, and Fitcher would seem to have been that of another. Thomas Morton, the author of the New English Canaan, was a third.

Not much more is known of Morton’s life prior to his coming to America than of Wollaston’s. He had certainly an education of that sort which was imparted in the schools of the Elizabethan period, for he had a smattering knowledge of the more familiar Latin authors at least, and was fond of classic allusion. Governor Dudley, in his letter to the Countess of Lincoln, says that while in England he was an attorney in “the west countries.”[5] He further intimates that he had there been implicated in some foul misdemeanor, on account of which warrants were out against him. Nathaniel Morton in his Memorial[6] says that the crime thus referred to was the killing of a partner concerned with him, Thomas Morton, in his first New England venture. Thomas Wiggin, however, writing in 1632 to Sir John Cooke, one of King Charles’s secretaries for foreign affairs and a member of the Privy Council, states, upon the authority of Morton’s “wife’s sonne and others,” that he had fled to New England “upon a foule suspition of murther.”[7] While, therefore, it would seem that grave charges were in general circulation against Morton, connecting him with some deed of violence, it is necessary to bear in mind that considerable allowance must be made before any accusation against him can be accepted on the word of either the Massachusetts or the Plymouth authorities, or those in sympathy with them. Yet Morton was a reckless man, and he lived in a time when no great degree of sanctity attached to human life; so that in itself there is nothing very improbable in this charge. It is possible that before coming to America he may have put some one out of the way. Nevertheless, as will presently be seen, though he was subsequently arrested and in jail in England, the accusation never took any formal shape. That he was at some time married would appear from the letter of Wiggin already referred to, and the allusions in the New Canaan show that he had been a man passionately fond of field sports, and a good deal of a traveller as well. He speaks, for instance, of having been “bred in so genious a way” that in England he had the common use of hawks in fowling; and, in another place, he alludes to his having been so near the equator that “I have had the sun for my zenith.”[8] On the titlepage of his book he describes himself as “of Cliffords Inne gent.,” which of course he would not have ventured to do had he not really been what he there claimed to be; for at the time the New Canaan was published he was living in London and apparently one of the attorneys of the Council for New England.[9] Bradford, speaking from memory, fell into an error, therefore, when he described him as a “kind of petie-fogger of Furnefells Inne.”[10] That in 1625 he was a man of some means is evident from the fact that he owned an interest in the Wollaston venture; though here again Bradford takes pains to say that the share he represented (“of his owne or other mens”) was small, and that he himself had so little respect amongst the rest that he was slighted by even the meanest servants.

In all probability this was not Morton’s first visit to Massachusetts Bay. Indeed, he was comparatively familiar with it, having already passed one season on its shores. His own statement, at the beginning of the first chapter of the second book of the Canaan, seems to be conclusive on this point. He there says: “In the month of June, Anno Salutis 1622, it was my chance to arrive in the parts of New England with thirty servants, and provision of all sorts fit for a plantation; and, while our houses were building, I did endeavor to take a survey of the country.”[11] There was but one ship which arrived in New England in June, 1622, and that was the Charity;[12] and the Charity brought out Weston’s party, which settled at Wessagusset, answering in every respect to Morton’s description of the party he came with. Andrew Weston, a younger brother of the chief promoter of the enterprise, had then come in charge of it, and is described as having been “a heady yong man and violente.”[13] After leaving Weston’s company at Plymouth, the Charity went on to Virginia, but returned from there early in October, going it would seem directly to Boston Bay and Wessagusset.[14] One part of the colonists had then been there three months, and it was during those three months that Morton apparently took the survey of the country to which he refers. As the Wessagusset plantation was now left under the charge of Richard Greene, it would seem that young Weston went back to England in the Charity, and the inference is that Morton, who had come out as his companion, went back with him.

In any event, the impression produced on Morton by this first visit to New England was a strong and favorable one. It looked to him a land of plenty, a veritable New Canaan. Accordingly, he gave vent to his enthusiasm in the warm language of the first chapter of his second book.[15] With the subsequent fate of Weston’s party he seems to have had no connection. He must at the time have heard of it, and was doubtless aware of the evil reputation that company left behind. This would perfectly account for the fact that he never mentions his having himself had anything to do with it. Yet it may be surmised that he returned to England possessed with the idea of connecting himself with some enterprise, either Weston’s or another, organized to make a settlement on the shores of Boston Bay and there to open a trade in furs. He had then had no experience of a New England winter; though, for that matter, when he afterwards had repeated experiences of it, they in no way changed his views of the country. To the last, apparently, he thought of it as he first saw it during the summer and early autumn of 1622, when it was a green fresh wilderness, nearly devoid of inhabitants and literally alive with game.

News of the utter failure of Weston’s enterprise must have reached London in the early summer of 1623. Whether Morton was in any way personally affected thereby does not appear, though from his allusions to Weston’s treatment by Robert Gorges at Plymouth, during the winter of 1623-4, it is not at all improbable that he was.[16] During the following year (1624) he is not heard of; but early in 1625 he had evidently succeeded in effecting some sort of a combination which resulted in the Wollaston expedition.

The partners in this enterprise would seem to have been the merest adventurers. So far as can be ascertained, they did not even trouble themselves to take out a patent for the land on which they proposed to settle,[17] in this respect showing themselves even more careless than Weston.[18] With the exception of Morton, they apparently had no practical knowledge of the country, and their design clearly was to establish themselves wherever they might think good, and to trade in such way as they saw fit.

When the party reached its destination in Massachusetts Bay, they found Wessagusset still occupied by such as were left of Robert Gorges’s company, who had then been there nearly two years. They had necessarily, therefore, to establish themselves elsewhere. A couple of miles or so north of Wessagusset, on the other side of the Monatoquit, and within the limits of what is now the town of Quincy, was a place called by the Indians Passonagessit. The two localities were separated from each other not only by the river, which here widens out into a tidal estuary, but by a broad basin which filled and emptied with every tide, while around it were extensive salt marshes intersected by many creeks. The upland, too, was interspersed with tangled swamps lying between gravel ridges. At Passonagessit the new-comers established themselves, and the place is still known as Mount Wollaston.

In almost all respects Passonagessit was for their purpose a better locality than Wessagusset. They had come there to trade. However it may have been with the others, in Morton’s calculations at least the plantation must have been a mere incident to the more profitable dealing in peltry. A prominent position on the shore, in plain view of the entrance to the bay, would be with him an important consideration. This was found at Passonagessit. It was a spacious upland rising gently from the beach and, a quarter of a mile or so from it, swelling into a low hill.[19] It was not connected with the interior by any navigable stream, but Indians coming from thence would easily find their way to it; and, while a portion of the company could always be there ready to trade, others of them might make excursions to all points on the neighboring coast where furs were to be had. Looking seaward, on the left of the hill was a considerable tidal creek; in front of it, across a clear expanse of water a couple of miles or so in width, lay the islands of the harbor in apparently connected succession. Though the anchoring grounds among these islands afforded perfect places of refuge for vessels, Passonagessit itself, as the settlers there must soon have realized, labored, as a trading-point, under one serious disadvantage. There was no deep water near it. Except when the tide was at least half full, the shore could be approached only in boats. On the other hand, so far as planting was concerned, the conditions were favorable. The soil, though light, was very good; and the spot, lying as it did close to “the Massachusetts fields,” had some years before been cleared of trees by the Sachem Chickatawbut, who had made his home there.[20] He had, however, abandoned it at the time when the great pestilence swept away his tribe, and tradition still points out a small savin-covered hummock, near Squantum, on the south side of the Neponset, as his subsequent dwelling-place. Morton says that Chickatawbut’s mother was buried at Passonagessit, and that the Plymouth people, on one of their visits, incurred his enmity by despoiling her grave of its bear skins.[21] So far as the natives were concerned, however, any settlers on the shores of Boston Bay, after the year 1623, had little cause for disquietude. They were a thoroughly crushed and broken-spirited race. The pestilence had left only a few hundred of the whole Massachusetts tribe, and in 1631 Chickatawbut had but some fifty or sixty followers.[22] It was a dying race; and what little courage the pestilence had left them was effectually and forever crushed out by Miles Standish, when at Wessagusset, in April, 1623, he put to death seven of the strongest and boldest of their few remaining men.

Having selected a site, Wollaston and his party built their house nearly in the centre of the summit of the hill, on a gentle westerly slope. It commanded towards the north and east an unbroken view of the bay and all the entrances to it; while on the opposite or landward side, some four or five miles away, rose the heavily-wooded Blue Hills. Across the bay to the north lay Shawmut, beyond the intervening peninsulas of Squantum and Mattapan. Wessagusset was to the south, across the marshes and creeks, and hidden from view by forest and uplands.

Mount Wollaston.[23]

During their first season, the summer of 1625, Wollaston’s party must have been fully occupied in the work of building their houses and laying out their plantation. The winter followed. A single experience of a winter on that shore seems to have sufficed for Captain Wollaston, as it had before sufficed for Captain Gorges. He apparently came to the conclusion that there was little profit and no satisfaction for him in that region. Accordingly, during the early months of 1626, he determined to go elsewhere. The only account of what now ensued is that contained in Bradford; for Morton nowhere makes a single allusion to Wollaston or any of his associates, nor does he give any account of the origin, composition or purposes of the Wollaston enterprise. His silence on all these points is, indeed, one of the singular features in the New Canaan. Such references as he does make are always to Weston and Weston’s attempt;[24] and he seems to take pains to confound that attempt with Wollaston’s. Once only he mentions the number of the party with which he landed,[25] and the fact that it was subsequently dissolved;[26] but how it came to be dissolved he does not explain. The inference from this is unavoidable. Morton was free enough in talking of what he did and saw at Passonagessit, of his revels there, of how he was arrested, and persecuted out of the country. That he says not a word of Wollaston or his other partners must be due to the fact that the subject was one about which he did not care to commit himself. Nevertheless Bradford could not but have known the facts, for not only at a later day was Morton himself for long periods of time at Plymouth, but when the events of which he speaks occurred Bradford must have been informed of them by the Wessagusset people, as well as by Fitcher. As we only know what Bradford tells us, it can best be given in his own words:—

“Having continued there some time, and not finding things to answer their expectations, nor profit to arise as they looked for, Captain Wollaston takes a great part of the servants and transports them to Virginia, where he puts them off at good rates, selling their time to other men; and writes back to one Mr. Rasdall, one of his chief partners and accounted their merchant, to bring another part of them to Virginia likewise; intending to put them off there, as he had done the rest. And he, with the consent of the said Rasdall, appointed one Fitcher to be his Lieutenant, and govern the remains of the plantation till he, or Rasdall, returned to take further order thereabout. But this Morton, abovesaid, having more craft than honesty, in the others’ absence watches an opportunity, (commons being but hard amongst them,) and got some strong drink and other junkets, and made them a feast; and after they were merry, he began to tell them he would give them good counsel. ‘You see,’ saith he, ‘that many of your fellows are carried to Virginia; and if you stay till this Rasdall returns, you will also be carried away and sold for slaves with the rest. Therefore, I would advise you to thrust out this Lieutenant Fitcher; and I, having a part in the plantation, will receive you as my partners and consociates. So may you be free from service; and we will converse, trade, plant and live together as equals, and support and protect one another:’ or to like effect. This counsel was easily received, so they took opportunity and thrust Lieutenant Fitcher out a-doors, and would suffer him to come no more amongst them; but forced him to seek bread to eat, and other relief, from his neighbors, till he could get passage for England.”[27]

Wollaston’s process of depletion to Virginia had reduced the number of servants at Passonagessit from thirty or thirty-five, as Morton variously states it,[28] to six at most.[29] It was as the head of these that Morton established himself in control at Merry-Mount, as he called the place,[30] sometime, it would seem, in the summer of 1626. He had now two distinct objects in view: one was enjoyment, the other was profit; and apparently he was quite reckless as to the methods he pursued in securing either the one or the other. If he was troubled by his former partners appearing to assert their rights, as he probably was, no mention is made of it. There were no courts to appeal to in America, and those of Europe were far away; nor would it have been easy or inexpensive to enforce their process in New England. Accordingly nothing more is heard of Wollaston or Rasdall, though Bradford does say that Morton was “vehemently suspected for the murder of a man that had adventured moneys with him when he first came.”[31] There is a vague tradition, referred to John Adams, that Wollaston was subsequently lost at sea;[32] but as a full century must have elapsed between the occurrence of the event and the birth of John Adams, this tradition is quite as unreliable as traditions usually are.

Passionately fond of field sports, Morton found ample opportunity for the indulgence of his tastes in New England. He loved to ramble through the woods with his dog and gun, or sail in his boat on the bay. The Indians, too, were his allies, and naturally enough; for not only did he offer them an open and easy-going market for their furs, but he was companionable with them. They shared in his revels. He denies that he was in the habit of selling them spirits,[33] but where spirits were as freely used as Morton’s account shows they were at Merry-Mount, the Indians undoubtedly had their share. Nor were his relations confined to the Indian men. The period of Elizabeth and James I. was one of probably as much sexual incontinency as any in English history. Some of the earlier writers on the New England Indians have spoken of the modesty of the women,—Wood, in his Prospect, for instance, and Josselyn, in the second of his Two Voyages.[34] Morton, however, is significantly silent on this point, and the idea of female chastity in the Indian mind, in the rare cases where it existed at all, seems to have been of the vaguest possible description.[35] Morton was not a man likely to be fastidious, and his reference to the “lasses in beaver coats”[36] is suggestive. Merry-Mount was unquestionably, so far as temperance and morality were concerned, by no means a commendable place.[37]

Morton’s inclination to boisterous revelry culminated at last in that proceeding which scandalized the Plymouth elders and has passed into history. In the spring of 1627 he erected the May-pole of Merry-Mount. To erect these poles seems at that time to have been a regular English observance, which even the fishermen on the coast did not neglect. When, for instance, the forerunners of Weston’s colony at Wessagusset reached the Damariscove Islands, in the spring of 1622, the first thing they saw was a May-pole, which the men belonging to the ships there had newly set up, “and weare very mery.”[38] There is no room for question that in England, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, May-day festivities were associated with a great deal of license. They were so associated in the minds of Governor Bradford and his fellows. Christmas was at least a Christian festivity. Not so May-day. That was distinctly Pagan in its origin. It represented all there was left of the Saturnalia and the worship of the Roman courtesan. May-day and May-day festivities, accordingly, were things to be altogether reformed. They were by no means the innocent, grateful welcoming of spring which modern admirers of the so-called good old times—which, in point of fact, were very gross and brutal times—are wont to picture to themselves. “I have heard it credibly reported,” wrote Stubbes in his Anatomy of Abuses, “(and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie, credite and reputation, that of fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woode over night [a-Maying], there have scarcely the thirde parte of them returned home againe undefiled.”[39] All this it is necessary to now bear in mind, lest what Bradford wrote down in his history of Morton’s doings should seem grotesque. He was speaking of what represented in his memory a period of uncleanness, a sort of carnival of the sexes.

Morton’s own account of the festivities at Merry-Mount on the May-day of 1627, which came on what would now be the 11th of the month, will be found in the fourteenth chapter of the third book of the Canaan.[40] It does not need to be repeated here. Bradford’s account was very different:

“They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practises. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses of the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likwise (to shew his poetrie,) composed sundry rimes and verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, and others to the detraction and scandall of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll May-polle.”[41]

Morton’s verses can be found in their proper place in the New Canaan, but the principal charge now to be made against them is their incomprehensibility. Judged even by the standard of the present day, much more by that of the day when they were written, they are not open to criticism because of their “lasciviousnes.” They are decent enough, though very bad and very dull. As to the “detraction and scandall of some persons,” alleged against them,—if indeed they contained anything of the sort,—it was so very carefully concealed that no one could easily have understood it then, and Morton’s own efforts at explanation fail to make it intelligible now.

The festivities around the May-pole were, however, but Morton’s amusements. Had he confined himself to these he might, so far as the people at Plymouth at least were concerned, to the end of his life have lived on the shores of Boston Bay, and erected a new pole with each recurring spring. The only resistance he would have had to overcome would have been a remonstrance now and then, hardly less comical than it was earnest. The business methods he pursued were a more serious matter. He had come to New England to make money, as well as to enjoy the license of a frontier life. He was fully alive to the profits of the peltry trade, and in carrying on that trade he was restrained by no scruples. The furs of course came from the interior, brought by Indians. In his dealings with the Indians Morton adopted a policy natural enough for one of his reckless nature, but which imperilled the existence of every European on the coast. The two things the savages most coveted were spirits and guns,—fire-water and fire-arms. Beads and knives and hatchets and colored cloth served very well to truck with at first. But these very soon lost their attraction. Guns and rum never did. For these the Indians would at any time give whatever they possessed. The trade in fire-arms had already attained some proportions when, in 1622, it was strictly forbidden by a proclamation of King James, issued at the instance of the Council for New England. The companion trade in spirits, less dangerous to the whites but more destructive to the savages, was looked upon as scandalous, but it was not prohibited. Morton cared equally little for either law or morals. He had come to New England for furs, and he meant to get them.

“Hearing what gain the French and fishermen made by trading of pieces, powder and shot to the Indians, he, as the head of this consortship, began the practice of the same in these parts. And first he taught them how to use them, to charge and discharge, and what proportion of powder to give the piece, according to the size and bigness of the same; and what shot to use for fowl and what for deer. And having thus instructed them, he employed some of them to hunt and fowl for him, so as they became far more active in that employment than any of the English, by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body; being also quick sighted, and by continual exercise well knowing the haunts of all sorts of game. So as when they saw the execution that a piece would do, and the benefit that might come by the same, they became mad, as it were, after them, and would not stick to give any price they could attain to for them; accounting their bows and arrows but bawbles in comparison of them.”[42]

This was Bradford’s story, nor does Morton deny it. That he would have denied it if he could is apparent. The practices complained of were forbidden by a royal proclamation, issued at the instance of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. In his speech in defence of the great patent, before the House of Commons in Committee of the Whole, in 1621, Gorges had emphatically dwelt on the sale of arms and ammunition to the savages as an abuse then practised, which threatened the extinction of the New England settlements.[43] Fifteen years later, when he wrote the New Canaan, Morton was a dependent of Gorges. The fact that he had dealt in fire-arms, in contemptuous defiance of the proclamation, was openly charged against him. He did deny that he had sold the savages spirits. These, he said, were the life of trade; the Indians would “pawn their wits” for them, but these he would never let them have. In the matter of fire-arms, however, he preserved a discreet and significant silence. He made no more allusion to them than he did to Wollaston or his partners at Merry-Mount.

In the whole record of the early Plymouth settlement, from the first skirmish with the Cape Cod savages, in December, 1620, to the Wessagusset killing, there is no mention of a gun being seen in an Indian’s hands. On the contrary, the savages stood in mortal terror of fire-arms. But now at last it seemed as if Morton was about not only to put guns in their hands, but to instruct them in their use.

“This Morton,” says Bradford, “having thus taught them the use of pieces, he sold them all he could spare; and he and his consorts determined to send for many out of England, and had by some of the ships sent for above a score. The which being known, and his neighbors meeting the Indians in the woods armed with guns in this sort, it was a terror unto them, who lived straglingly, and were of no strength in any place. And other places (though more remote) saw this mischief would quickly spread over all, if not prevented. Besides, they saw they should keep no servants, for Morton would entertain any, how vile soever, and all the scum of the country, or any discontents, would flock to him from all places, if this nest was not broken; and they should stand in more fear of their lives and goods (in short time) from this wicked and debauched crew than from the savages themselves.”[44]

Thus, in the only branches of trade the country then afforded, Morton was not only pressing all the other settlers hard, but he was pressing them in an unfair way. If the savages could exchange their furs for guns, they would not exchange them for anything else. Those not prepared to give guns might withdraw from the market. The business, too, conducted in this way, was a most profitable one. Morton says that in the course of five years one of his servants was thought to have accumulated, in the trade in beaver skins, no less than a thousand pounds;[45] and a thousand pounds in 1635 was more than the equivalent of ten thousand now. This statement was undoubtedly an exaggeration; yet it is evident that at even ten shillings a pound in England, which Morton gives as the current price, though Bradford says he never knew it less than fourteen, beaver skins, which cost little or nothing in America, yielded a large profit. As Morton expressed it, his plantation “beganne to come forward.”[46] When, in 1625, the Plymouth people found their way up into Maine,[47] and first opened a trade with the savages there, Morton was not slow in following them. In 1628 they established a permanent station on the Kennebec,[48] yet apparently as early at least as 1627, if not in 1626, Morton had forestalled them there, and hindered them of a season’s furs.[49]

The injury done to the other settlers in a trading point of view, however, serious as it unquestionably was, became insignificant in comparison with the consequences which must result to them from the presence on the coast of such a resort as Merry-Mount. The region was vast, and in it there was no pretence of any government. It was the yearly rendezvous of a rough and lawless class of men, only one step removed from freebooters, who cared for nothing except immediate gain. Once let such a gathering-place as that of which Morton was now head become fixed and known, and soon it would develop into a nest of pirates. Of this there could be no doubt; the Plymouth people had good cause for the alarm which Bradford expressed. It mattered not whether Morton realized the consequences of what he was doing, or failed to realize them; the result would be the same.

It gradually, therefore, became apparent to all those dwelling along the coast, from the borders of Maine to Cape Cod, that either the growing nuisance at Merry-Mount must be abated, or they would have to leave the country. The course to be pursued in regard to it was, however, not equally clear. The number of the settlements along the coast had considerably increased since Wollaston’s arrival.[50] The Hiltons and David Thomson had established themselves at Dover Neck and Piscataqua as early as 1623; and sometime in 1625 apparently, Thomson, bringing with him his young wife and a servant or two, had moved down into Boston Bay, and established himself, only a mile or two away from Mount Wollaston, on the island which still bears his name. He had died a little while after, and in 1628 his widow was living there alone, with one child and some servants. In 1625 or 1626 the Wessagusset settlement had divided. Those of Gorges’s following who remained there had never been wholly satisfied. It was no place for trade. Accordingly Blackstone, Maverick and Walford, the two last being married and taking their wives with them, had moved across the bay, and established themselves respectively at Shawmut or Boston, at Noddle’s Island or East Boston, and at Mishawum or Charlestown. Jeffreys, Bursley and some others had remained at Wessagusset, and were Morton’s neighbors at that place, whom he says he was in the custom of visiting from time to time, “to have the benefit of company.”[51] At Hull, already known by that name,[52] there were the Grays and a few other settlers. These had been joined by Lyford and Oldham and their friends, when the latter were expelled from Plymouth in the spring of 1625; but the next year, finding the place probably an uninviting one, Lyford had crossed over to Cape Ann, and thence a year later passed on to Virginia. Oldham still remained at Nantasket.

Such were those neighbors of Morton, the chiefs of the straggling plantations, referred to by Bradford as being of “no strength in any place.” Together they may possibly have numbered from fifty to an hundred souls. The Plymouth settlement was, comparatively speaking, organized and numerous, consisting as it did of some two hundred persons, dwelling in about forty houses, which were protected by a stockade of nearly half a mile in length. Nevertheless even there, by the summer of 1627, the alarm at the increase of fire-arms in the hands of the savages began to be very great. They had spread “both north and south all the land over,”[53] and it was computed that the savages now possessed at least sixty pieces. One trader alone, it was reported, had sold them a score of guns and an hundred weight of ammunition. Bradford thus takes up the story:—

“So sundry of the chiefs of the straggling plantations, meeting together, agreed by mutual consent, to solicit those of Plymouth, (who were then of more strength than them all,) to join with them to prevent the further growth of this mischief, and suppress Morton and his consorts before they grew to further head and strength. Those that joined in this action, (and after contributed to the charge of sending him to England,) were from Piscataqua, Naumkeag, Winnisimmet, Wessagusset, Nantasket, and other places where any English were seated. Those of Plymouth being thus sought to by their messengers and letters, and weighing both their reasons and the common danger, were willing to afford them their help, though themselves had least cause of fear or hurt. So, to be short, they first resolved jointly to write to him, and, in a friendly and neighborly way, to admonish him to forbear these courses; and sent a messenger with their letters to bring his answer. But he was so high as he scorned all advice, and asked—Who had to do with him?—he had and would trade pieces with the Indians in despite of all: with many other scurrilous terms full of disdain.

“They sent to him a second time, and bade him be better advised, and more temperate in his terms, for the country could not bear the injury he did; it was against their common safety, and against the King’s proclamation. He answered in high terms, as before; and that the King’s proclamation was no law: demanding, what penalty was upon it? It was answered, more than he could bear, his Majesty’s displeasure. But insolently he persisted, and said the King was dead, and his displeasure with him; and many the like things; and threatened, withal, that if any came to molest him, let them look to themselves; for he would prepare for them.”[54]

However it may have been with the position he took as a matter of public policy, Morton at least showed himself in this dispute better versed in the law of England than those who admonished him. On the first of the two points made by him he was clearly right. King James’s proclamation was not law. This had been definitely decided more than fifteen years before, when in 1610, in a case referred to all the judges, Lord Coke, in reporting their decision, had stated on his own authority that “the King cannot create any offence, by his prohibition or proclamation, which was not an offence before, for that was to change the law, and to make an offence, which was not; for ubi non est lex, ibi non est transgressio; ergo, that which cannot be punished without proclamation cannot be punished with it.”[55]

In regard to the second point made by Morton, that the King’s proclamation died with him, the same distinction between statutes and proclamations, that the former were of perpetual obligation until repealed and that the latter lost their force on the demise of the crown,—this distinction was, a century and a half later, stated by Hume[56] to have existed in James’s time. Lord Chief Justice Campbell has, however, exclaimed against the statement as a display of ignorant “audacity,” and declares that he was unable to find in the authorities a trace of any such doctrine.[57] On this point, therefore, the law of Thomas Morton was probably as bad as that of David Hume. Nevertheless the passage in Bradford affords a curious bit of evidence that some such distinction as that drawn by Hume, though it may not have got into the books, did exist in both the legal and the public mind of the first half of the seventeenth century.

Whether Morton’s law on the subject of proclamations was or was not found mattered little however. It was not then to be debated, as the question with the settlers was one of self-preservation. The Plymouth magistrates had gone too far to stop. If they even hesitated, now, there was an end to all order in New England. Morton would not be slow to realize that he had faced them down, and his insolence would in future know no bounds.

“So they mutually resolved to proceed, and obtained of the Governor of Plymouth to send Captain Standish, and some other aid with him, to take Morton by force. The which accordingly was done; but they found him to stand stiffly in his defence, having made fast his doors, armed his consorts, set divers dishes of powder and bullets ready on the table; and, if they had not been over armed with drink, more hurt might have been done. They summoned him to yield, but he kept his house, and they could get nothing but scoffs and scorns from him; but at length, fearing they would do some violence to the house, he and some of his crew came out, but not to yield, but to shoot. But they were so steeled with drink as their pieces were too heavy for them; himself, with a carbine (overcharged and almost half filled with powder and shot, as was after found) had thought to have shot Captain Standish; but he stept to him, and put by his piece and took him. Neither was there any hurt done to any of either side, save that one was so drunk that he ran his own nose upon the point of a sword that one held before him as he entered the house; but he lost but a little of his hot blood.”[58]

Morton’s own account of “this outragious riot,” as he calls it, is contained in the fifteenth chapter of the third book of the New Canaan.[59] It differs considerably from Bradford’s, but not in essentials. He says that the occurrence took place in June; and as Bradford’s letters of explanation, sent with the prisoner to England, are dated the 9th of June,[60] it must have been quite early in the month. He further says that he was captured in the first place at Wessagusset, “where by accident they found him;” but escaping thence during the night, through the carelessness of those set on guard over him, he made his way in the midst of a heavy thunder-storm to Mount Wollaston, going up the Monatoquit until he could cross it. The whole distance from point to point was, for a person familiar with the country, perhaps eight miles. Getting home early the next morning he made his preparations for resistance in the way described by Bradford. Of the whole party at Merry-Mount more than half, four apparently, were then absent in the interior getting furs. This fact, indeed, was probably well known to his neighbors, who had planned the arrest accordingly. Standish, having eight men with him, followed Morton round to Mount Wollaston, probably by water, the morning succeeding his escape; and what ensued seems to have been sufficiently well described by Bradford. One at least of the Merry-Mount garrison got extremely tipsy before the attacking party appeared, and Morton, seeing that resistance was hopeless, surrendered, after in vain trying to make some terms for himself.

Having been arrested he was at once carried to Plymouth, and a council was held there to decide upon the disposition to be made of him. According to his own account certain of the magistrates, among whom he specially names Standish, advocated putting him to death at once, and so ending the matter. They were not in favor of sending him to England. Such a course as this was, however, wholly out of keeping with the character of the Plymouth colony, and it is tolerably safe to say that it was never really proposed. Morton imagined it; but he also circumstantially asserts that when milder councils prevailed, and it was decided to send him to England, Standish was so enraged that he threatened to shoot him with his own hand, as he was put into the boat.[61]

Either because they did not care to keep him at Plymouth until he could be sent away, or because an outward-bound fishing-vessel was more likely at that season to be found at the fishing-stations, Morton was almost immediately sent to the Isles of Shoals. He remained there a month; and of his experiences during that time he gives a wholly unintelligible account in the New Canaan.[62] At last a chance offered of sending him out in a fishing-vessel bound to old Plymouth, England. He went under charge of John Oldham, who was chosen to represent the associated planters in this matter, and who carried two letters, in the nature of credentials, prepared by Governor Bradford, the one addressed to the Council for New England and the other to Sir Ferdinando Gorges personally.[63] In these letters Bradford set forth in detail the nature of the offences charged against Morton, and asked that he might be brought “to his answer before those whom it may concern.” These letters were signed by the chiefs of the several plantations, at whose common charge the expenses of Oldham’s mission, as well as Standish’s arrest, were defrayed, and towards this charge they contributed as follows, though Bradford says the total cost was much more:—

Oldham and Morton reached Plymouth during the later summer or early autumn of 1628. They must, therefore, have passed the outward-bound expedition of Endicott, the forerunners of the great Puritan migration of 1630-7, in mid-ocean, as on the 6th of September the latter reached Naumkeag. The grant of the Massachusetts Company, which Endicott represented, had been regularly obtained from the Council for New England, and bore date the 19th of March, 1628. It covered the sea-front within the space of three English miles to the northward of the Merrimack and to the southward of the Charles, “or of any and every part of either of these streams;” while it extended “from the Atlantick and Western Sea and Ocean on the East Parte, to the South Sea on the West Parte.” It also included everything lying within the space of three miles to the southward of the southernmost part of Massachusetts, by which was meant Boston Bay.[65] It was clear, therefore, that Mount Wollaston was included in this grant.

Morton’s establishment was thus brought within Endicott’s government. Its existence and character must already have been well known in England, and it is not at all improbable that its suppression had been there decided upon. Whether this was so or not, however, Endicott certainly learned, as soon as he landed at Naumkeag, of the action which had been taken three months before. It commended itself to him; though he doubtless regretted that more condign punishment had not been administered to Morton and his crew on the spot, and did not delay to take such steps as were still in his power, to make good what in this respect had been lacking. As Bradford says, “visiting those parts [he] caused that May-polle to be cutt downe, and rebuked them for their profannes, and admonished them to looke ther should be better walking; so they now, or others, changed the name of their place againe, and called it Mounte-Dagon.”[66]

Morton and Oldham, meanwhile, were in England. As Oldham bore letters to Gorges and landed at Plymouth, of which place the latter then was and for many years had been the royal governor, there can be no doubt that Morton was at once brought before him. As respects New England Gorges’s curiosity was insatiable. Any one who came from there, whether a savage or a sea-captain, was eagerly questioned by him; and his collection of charts, memoirs, letters, journals and memorials, relating to the discovery of those parts, is said to have been unequalled.[67] Oldham and Morton had lived there for years. They knew all that was then known about the country and its resources. They both of them had unlimited faith in its possibilities, and talked about an hundred per cent profit within the year, as if it were a thing easily compassed.[68] Talk of this kind Gorges liked to hear. It suited his temperament; and it would seem not improbable that Morton soon found this out, and bore himself accordingly.

Meanwhile it was not possible for the Council for New England and the Massachusetts Company to long move in harmony. The former was an association of courtiers, and the latter one of Puritans. The Council planned to create in the New World a score or two of great feudal domains for English noblemen; the Company proposed to itself a commonwealth there. Accordingly difficulties between the two at once began to crop out. The original grant to the Company of March 19, 1628, had been made by the Council, with the assent of Gorges. The tract already conceded to Robert Gorges, in 1622, was included in it; but Sir Ferdinando insisted that the subsequent and larger grant was made with a distinct saving of all rights vested under the prior one.[69] This the Company was not prepared to admit; and, as the business of the Council was habitually done in a careless slipshod way, the record was by no means clear. A question of title, involving some three hundred square miles of territory in the heart of the Company’s grant, was therefore raised at once.

Captain Robert Gorges meanwhile had died, and the title to his grant had passed to his brother John. It would seem that Oldham, who was a pushing man, had come out to England with some scheme of his own for obtaining a patent from the Council, and organizing a strong trading company to operate under it. The result was that John Gorges now deeded to him a portion of the Robert Gorges grant, being the whole region lying between the Charles and the Saugus rivers, for a distance of five miles from the coast on the former and three miles on the latter. This deed may and probably did bear a date, January 10, 1629, similar to that of another deed of a yet larger tract out of the same grant, which John Gorges executed to Sir William Brereton. The lands thus conveyed were distinctly within the limits covered by the grant to the Massachusetts Company, and a serious question of title was raised. The course now pursued by the Company could not but have been singularly offensive to Gorges. They outgeneralled him in his own field of action. They too had friends at court. Accordingly they went directly to the throne. A royal confirmation of their grant from the Council was solicited and obtained. On the 4th of March, 1629, King Charles’s charter of the Massachusetts Company passed the seals.

It now became a race, for the actual possession of the disputed territory, between the representatives of the Company on the one side and the Gorges grantees on the other. The former, under advice of counsel, denied the validity of the Robert Gorges grant of 1622. It was, they claimed, void in law, being “loose and uncertain.”[70] They instructed Endicott to hurry a party forward to effect an actual occupation. This he at once did; and the settlement of Charlestown, in the summer of 1629, was the result. Meanwhile Oldham, having in vain tried to coax or browbeat the Company into an arrangement satisfactory to himself, was endeavoring to fit out an expedition of his own.[71] He had not the means at his disposal; and, convinced of this at last, he gave up the contest.

At an early stage in these proceedings he would seem to have wholly lost sight of so much of the business he had in hand as related to Thomas Morton. Bradford’s expression, in referring to what took place, is that Morton “foold” Oldham.[72] Morton himself, however, says[73] that Oldham did the best he could, and tried to set the officers of the law at work, but was advised that Morton had committed no crime of which the English courts could take cognizance. He had at most only disregarded a proclamation. All this seems very probable. Nevertheless, for violating a proclamation, he could at that time have been proceeded against in the Star Chamber. It is true that in their decision in 1610, already referred to,[74] the twelve judges had said, “Lastly, if the offence be not punishable in the Star Chamber, the prohibition of it by proclamation cannot make it punishable there.”[75] This, however, was the language of the bench in the days of James, when Coke was Chief Justice. In 1629 the current of opinion was running strongly in the opposite direction. Sir Nicholas Hyde, as Chief Justice, was then “setting law and decency at defiance” in support of prerogative,[76] and a few years later Sir John Finch was to announce “that while he was Keeper no man should be so saucy as to dispute these orders” of the Lords of the Council.[77] Law or no law, therefore, Morton could easily have been held to a severe account in the Star Chamber, had Gorges been disposed to press matters against him there. He clearly was not so disposed. The inference, therefore, is that Morton had succeeded in thoroughly ingratiating himself with Gorges; and Oldham, as he was now a grantee of Gorges’s son, did not see his account in pressing matters. Accordingly Bradford’s letters and complaints were quietly ignored; and his “lord of misrule,” and head of New England’s first “schoole of Athisme,”[78] escaped without, so far as could be discovered, even a rebuke for his misdeeds.

Nor was this all. Isaac Allerton was at that time in London, as the agent of the Plymouth colony. The most important business he had in hand was to procure a new patent for the Plymouth people, covering by correct bounds a grant on the Kennebec, with which region they were now opening a promising trade. They also wanted to secure, if possible, a royal charter for themselves like that which had just been issued to the Massachusetts Company. In the matter of the patent, Allerton had to deal with the Council for New England; the granting of the charter lay at Whitehall. Altogether it was a troublesome and vexatious business, and the agent soon found that he could make no headway except through favor. The influence of Gorges became necessary. In the light of subsequent events it would seem altogether probable that Morton now made himself useful. At any rate, when Allerton returned to New England, in 1629, with the patent but without a charter, he astonished and scandalized the Plymouth community by bringing Morton back with him. They apparently landed sometime in August,[79] and we have two accounts of Morton’s reception at Plymouth; one his own, and the other Governor Bradford’s. Both are characteristic. Morton says that

“Being ship’d againe for the parts of New Canaan, [he] was put in at Plimmouth in the very faces of them, to their terrible amazement to see him at liberty; and [they] told him hee had not yet fully answered the matter they could object against him. Hee onely made this modest reply, that he did perceave they were willfull people, that would never be answered: and he derided them for their practises and losse of laboure.”[80]

Bradford, looking at the transaction from the other point of view, says:—

“Mr. Allerton gave them great and just ofence in bringing over this year, for base gaine, that unworthy man, and instrumente of mischeefe, Morton, who was sent home but the year before for his misdemenors. He not only brought him over, but to the towne, (as it were to nose them,) and lodged him at his owne house, and for a while used him as a scribe to doe his bussines.”[81]

In view of Morton’s escape from all punishment in England, and his return a little later to Mount Wollaston, Bradford speaks of the trouble and charge of his arrest as having been incurred “to little effect.”[82] This, however, was not so. On the contrary, it is not often that an act of government repression produces effects equally decisive. The nuisance was abated and the danger dispelled; the fact that there was a power on the coast, ready to assert itself in the work of maintaining order, was established and had to be recognized; and, finally, a wholly unscrupulous competitor was driven out of trade. These results were well worth all that Morton’s arrest cost, and much more.

It does not appear how long Morton now remained at Plymouth. It could not, however, have been more than a few weeks before Allerton, who himself went back to England the same season, was, as Bradford puts it, “caused to pack him away.” He then returned to Mount Wollaston, where he seems to have found a remnant of his old company,—apparently the more modest of them and such as had looked to their better walking. Hardly, however, had he well gotten back when he was in trouble with Endicott. The first difficulty arose out of the jealousy which existed between the “old planters,” as they were called, and those who belonged to the Massachusetts Company. The old planters were the very men who had associated themselves, eighteen months before, to bring about the suppression of the establishment at Mount Wollaston. Now they also were beginning to feel the pressure of authority, and they did not like it. In their helpless anger they even spoke of themselves as “slaves” of the new Company.[83] They could no longer plant what they chose or trade with whom they pleased.

On these points Endicott had explicit instructions. They were contained in the letters of Cradock of April 17 and May 28, 1629, which are to be found in Young’s Chronicles of Massachusetts, and contain the policy of the company, set forth in clear vigorous English. In pursuance of those instructions, Endicott seems to have summoned all the old planters dwelling within the limits of the patent to meet in a General Court at Salem, sometime in the latter part of 1629. There he doubtless advised them as to the policy which the Company intended to pursue; and Morton says that he then tendered all present for signature certain articles which he and the Rev. Samuel Skelton had drawn up together. The essence of those articles was that in all causes, ecclesiastical as well as political, the tenor of God’s word should be followed.[84] The alternative was banishment.

Morton claims that he alone of those present refused to put his hand to this paper, insisting that a proviso should first be added in these words, “So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the laws of the Kingdom of England.” These are almost the exact words of King Charles’s charter;[85] and it would seem as though Morton, in proposing them, sought an opportunity to display his legal acumen. Whether his suggestion was adopted, and the articles modified accordingly, does not appear. It probably was, though the change was not one which Endicott would have looked upon with favor. If he assented to it he certainly did so grimly. The matter of regulating the trade in beaver skins was next brought up. This was intended to be a Company monopoly, to meet the charge of providing churches and forts.[86] It was accordingly proposed that a sort of general partnership for the term of one year should be effected to carry it on. Morton says that on this matter also he stood out, and it seems altogether probable that he did. It is safe to say that he was there to make whatever trouble he could. On the other hand it was not possible for Endicott to mistake his instructions. They were as plain as words could make them. He was to see to it that “none be partakers of [the Company’s] privileges and profits, but such as be peaceable men, and of honest life and conversation, and desirous to live amongst us, and conform themselves to good order and government.” And further, if any factious spirit developed itself he was enjoined “to suppress a mischief before it take too great a head ... which, if it may be done by a temperate course, we much desire it, though with some inconvenience, so as our government and privileges be not brought in contempt.... But if necessity require a more severe course, when fair means will not prevail, we pray you to deal as in your discretions you shall think fittest.” Such instructions as these, in Endicott’s hands to execute, boded ill for Morton.

Matters soon came to a crisis. Morton paid no regard to the Company’s trade regulations. The presumption is that he was emboldened to take the course he now did by the belief that he would find support in England. He unquestionably was informed as to all the details of the trouble between the Massachusetts Company and the Council for New England, and knew that Oldham, whom he by the way speaks of as “a mad Jack in his mood,”[87] held a grant from John Gorges, and was straining every nerve to come out and take adverse possession of the territory covered by it. He probably hoped, day by day, to see Oldham appear at the head of a Gorges expedition. There is reason to suppose that he was himself at this time an agent of Gorges,—that, indeed, he had come back to New England as such, and was playing a part very much like that of a spy. He was certainly in such correspondence with Sir Ferdinando as the means of communication permitted, and the confidant of his plans.[88]

When, therefore, he offered all the opposition to Endicott which he dared, and thwarted him so far as he could, he was not acting for himself alone. He represented, in a degree at least, what in England was a powerful combination. Accordingly, with an over-confidence in the result born of his sanguine faith in the power and influence of his patron, he now seems to have gone back to the less objectionable of his old courses. He did not renew the trade in fire-arms and ammunition, for he probably had none to spare, and experience had taught him how dangerous it was. He did, however, deal with the savages as he saw fit, and on his own account, openly expressing his contempt for Endicott’s authority, and doing all he could to excite the jealousy and discontent of the “old planters.”[89] His own profits at this time were, he says, six and seven fold.

This state of things could not continue. Accordingly, as the year drew to a close, Endicott made an effort to arrest him. Morton, however, was now on his guard. Getting wind of what was intended, he concealed his ammunition and most necessary goods in the forest; and, when the messengers, sent across the bay to seize him, landed on the beach at the foot of Mount Wollaston, he was nowhere to be found. He says that they ransacked his house, and took from it all the provender they could find; but when they were gone he replenished his supplies with the aid of his gun, and “did but deride Captain Littleworth, that made his servants snap shorte in a country so much abounding with plenty of foode for an industrious man.” This happened about Christmas, 1629.[90]

Could Endicott now have laid hands upon him there can be little room for doubt that Morton would have been summarily dealt with; but for the present the deputy-governor’s attention was otherwise occupied. This was that winter of 1629-30, the famine and sickness of which came so near to bringing the Salem settlement to a premature end. During that struggle for existence the magistrate had no time to attend to Morton’s case. But he was not the man to forget it.

With the following summer the great migration, which was to fix the character of New England, began. Instead of a vessel fitted out for Oldham under the patronage of Gorges, the Mary & John, chartered by the Massachusetts Company and having on board 140 passengers from the West of England, anchored off Hull on the 30th of May. A fortnight later Governor Winthrop reached Salem, and on the 17th of June he also came into Boston Harbor; and Morton, from Mount Wollaston, must have watched his vessel with anxious eyes as, in full view from his house, it made its way up the channel to the mouth of the Mystic. He must also have realized that its appearance in those waters boded him no good.

In a few days more the whole fleet, numbering twelve sail in all, was at anchor off Charlestown, and the work of discharging passengers was going actively on. Of these there were nearly a thousand;[91] and now the busy and fatal summer experience of 1630 was fairly entered upon.

For a few weeks longer Morton continued to live undisturbed at Mount Wollaston. The confusion and bustle of landing, and afterwards the terror and sense of bereavement which followed hard on pestilence, protected him. It was not until the 23d of August, or the present 2d of September, that the magistrates held any formal session. They then met at the great house at Charlestown,[92] as it would seem, Winthrop, Dudley, Saltonstall, Pynchon, Bradstreet and others being present. After some more important business had been disposed of, “It was ordered, that Morton, of Mount Woolison, should presently be sent for by processe.”[93] Of the circumstances of his arrest under the warrant thus issued Morton has given no account. Apparently he felt it was useless to try to evade the messengers, and resistance was wholly out of the question. At the next session of the magistrates, held two weeks later, on what would now be the 17th of September, he was formally arraigned. In addition to those already named as being at the earlier meeting, Endicott was now present. He had probably come down from Salem to give his personal attention to Morton’s case. It must from the outset have been apparent to the prisoner that the tribunal before which he stood was one from which he had nothing to hope. The proceedings were in fact summary. It would seem, from his own account of them,[94] that he endeavored to humble himself, and, that failing, he made a sort of plea to the jurisdiction of the Court. Neither submission nor plea produced any effect. On the contrary he was apparently cut short in his defence and his protest by impatient exclamations, and even bidden to hold his peace and hearken to his sentence. It appears in the records as follows:—

“It is ordered by this present Court, that Thomas Morton, of Mount Walliston, shall presently be sett into the bilbowes, and after sent prisoner into England, by the shipp called the Gifte, nowe returning thither; that all his goods shalbe seazed upon to defray the charge of his transportation, payment of his debts, and to give satisfaction to the Indians for a cannoe hee unjustly tooke away from them; and that his howse, after the goods are taken out, shalbe burnt downe to the ground in the sight of the Indians, for their satisfaction, for many wrongs hee hath done them from tyme to tyme.”[95]

Unfortunately, Winthrop’s admonitory remarks in imposing this sentence have not been preserved. There is, however, in the New Canaan, an expression which apparently formed a part of them.[96] It is that in which it is assigned as a reason for the destruction of the house at Mount Wollaston, that “the habitation of the wicked should no more appear in Israel.” In compliance with the terms of this sentence, Morton was set in the stocks; and while there, he tells us, the savages came and looked at him, and wondered what it all meant. He was not, however, sent back to England in the Gift, as the master of that vessel declined to carry him; for what reason does not appear. It was not in fact until nearly four months after his arrest that a passage was secured for him in the Handmaid. Even then, Maverick afterwards stated that Morton, obdurate to the last, refused to go on board the vessel, upon the ground that he had no call to go there, and so had to be hoisted over her side by a tackle.[97] His house also was burned down; but the execution of this part of his sentence, he asserts,—and his assertion is confirmed by Maverick,—was vindictively delayed until he was on his way into banishment, when it was executed rather in his sight, it would seem, than in that of the savages. Of the voyage to England there is an account in the New Canaan that is rather more rambling and incoherent than is usual even with Morton.[98]

The Handmaid appears to have been unseaworthy, and insufficiently supplied. She had a long and tempestuous passage, in the course of which Morton came very near starving, no provision having been made for his subsistence except a very inadequate one out of his own supplies.

The second arrest of Morton was equally defensible with the first. According to his own account he had systematically made himself a thorn in Endicott’s side. He had refused to enter into any covenants, whether for trade or government, and he had openly derided the magistrate and eluded his messengers. This could not be permitted. He dwelt within the limits of the Massachusetts charter, and the Company was right when it instructed Endicott that all living there “must live under government and a like law.” It was necessary, therefore, that Morton should either give in his adhesion, or that he should be compelled to take himself off. This, however, was not the ground which the magistrates took. Nothing was said in the sentence of any disregard of authority or disobedience to regulation. No reference was made to any illicit dealings with the Indians, or to the trade in fire-arms. Offences of this kind would have justified the extreme severity of a sentence which went to the length of ignominious physical punishment, complete confiscation of property and banishment; leaving only whipping, mutilation or death uninflicted. No such offences were alleged. Those which were alleged, on the contrary, were of the most trivial character. They were manifestly trumped up for the occasion. The accused had unjustly taken away a canoe from some Indians; he had fired a charge of shot among a troop of them who would not ferry him across a river, wounding one and injuring the garments of another; he was “a proud, insolent man” against whom a “multitude of complaints were received, for injuries done by him both to the English and the Indians.”[99] Those specified, it may be presumed, were examples of the rest. They amount to nothing at all, and were afterwards very fitly characterized by Maverick as mere pretences. Apparently conscious of this, Dudley, the deputy-governor, in referring to the matter a few months later in his letter to the Countess of Lincoln, says that Morton was sent to England “for that my Lord Chief Justice there so required, that he might punish him capitally for fouler misdemeanors there perpetrated.” Bradford also, in referring to the matter, states that Morton was “vehemently suspected” of a murder, and that “a warrant was sent from the Lord Chief Justice to apprehend him.”[100]

There can be no doubt that there was a warrant from the King’s Bench against Morton in Winthrop’s hands,[101] but in all probability it was nothing more nor less than a sort of English lettre de cachet. Morton’s record in New England was perfectly well known in London at the time Winthrop was making his preparations to cross. His relations with Oldham and Gorges must often have been discussed at the assistants’ meetings, and they were not ignorant of the fact that he had gone back to Plymouth with Allerton. They must have suspected that he went back as an agent or emissary of Gorges, and they may have known that he so went back. In any event, they did not propose to have him live within the limits of their patent. He was an undesirable character. The warrant, therefore, was probably obtained in advance, on some vague report or suspicion of a criminal act, to be at hand and ready for use when needed.[102] It could not legally run into New England, any more than it could into Scotland or Ireland.[103] Then, and at no later time, would Winthrop have recognized it in any other case; and, even in this case, no reference is made to it in the colony records. Had it been so referred to, it might have been cited as a precedent.

Moreover such a requisition, though it might have warranted the return of Morton to England, certainly did not warrant the confiscation of all his property and the burning of his house in advance of trial and conviction there. In point of fact the requisition was a mere pretext and cover. The Massachusetts magistrates, so far as Morton was concerned, had made up their minds before he stood at their bar. He was not only a “libertine,” as they termed it, but he was suspected of being a spy. His presence at Mount Wollaston they did not consider desirable, and so they proposed to purge the country of him; and if not in one way, then in another. His case is not singular in Massachusetts annals; it is merely the first of its kind. It established a precedent much too often followed thereafter. Morton was one of those who, as it was expressed in a tract of the time printed in London, “must have elbow-roome, and cannot abide to be so pinioned with the strict government in the Commonwealth, or discipline in the church. Now why should such live there? As Ireland will not brooke venomous beasts, so will not that land [New England] vile persons and loose livers.”[104]

Many times, in the years which followed, the country was purged of other of these “vile persons and loose livers,” in much the same way that it was now purged of Morton. It may, however, well be questioned whether it ever derived benefit from the process. Certainly Morton’s case was as strong as any case well could be. There was absolutely nothing to be said in his favor. He was a lawless, reckless, immoral adventurer. And yet, as the result will show, in sending Morton back to England, the victim of high-handed justice, the Massachusetts magistrates committed a serious blunder. They had much better have left him alone under the harrow of their authority. At Mount Wollaston he was at worst but a nuisance. They drove him away from there and sent him back to London; and at Whitehall he became a real danger. This part of history is now to be told.

Bradford says, and he is generally correct in his statements, that when at last Morton reached England “he lay a good while in Exeter jail.”[105] There is no allusion to anything of the sort in the New Canaan; and it would not seem that he could have been very long a prisoner, as the next assizes and jail-delivery must have set him free. There could have been nothing on which to make him stand a trial. Accordingly the following year he was at liberty and busily concerned in Gorges’s intrigues for the overthrow of the Massachusetts charter.

The house in which Gorges lived—as formerly it had been the point of gathering of all who had visited the American coast, or could add anything to the stock of information concerning it—was now the headquarters for those who had any complaint to make or charges to prefer against the magistracy of Massachusetts. Acting in concert with Captain John Mason, the patentee of New Hampshire, he was exerting himself to the utmost to secure a revocation of King Charles’s charter. The attack was made on the 19th of December, 1632, and it was a formidable one. It assumed the shape of a petition to the Privy Council, asking the Lords to inquire into the methods through which the royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay had been procured, and into the abuses which had been practised under it. Besides many injuries inflicted on individuals in their property and persons, the Company was also charged with seditious and rebellious designs, subversive alike of church and of state. The various allegations were based on the affidavits of three witnesses,—Thomas Morton, Philip Ratcliff and Sir Christopher Gardiner. Behind these was the active and energetic influence of Gorges and Mason.[106]

It is not necessary in this connection to go into any detailed statement of the wrongs complained of by Ratcliff and Gardiner. They were of the same nature, though even more pronounced than those of Morton. The country had in fact been purged of all three of these individuals. The original document in which they set forth their cases, and made accusation against the magistrates, has unfortunately been lost. In referring to it afterwards Winthrop said that it contained “some truths misrepeated.”[107] Apart from severe judgments on alleged wrong-doers, including whipping, branding, mutilating, banishment and confiscation of property, the burden of the accusation lay in the disposition to throw off allegiance to the mother country, which was distinctly charged against the colony.

A harsh coloring was doubtless given in the petition to whatever could be alleged. So far as casting off their allegiance to the mother country was concerned, nothing can be more certain than that neither the leaders nor the common people of New England entertained at that time any thought of it; but it is quite equally certain that the leaders at least were deeply dissatisfied with the course public affairs were then taking in England. They were Puritans, and this was the period of the Star Chamber and the High Commission. No parliament had been called since 1629, and it was then publicly announced at Court that no more parliaments were to be called. There is no reason to suppose that the early settlers of Massachusetts were a peculiarly reticent race. On the contrary it is well known that they were much given to delivering themselves and bearing evidence on all occasions; and in doing so they unquestionably railed and declaimed quite freely against those then prominent in the council-chamber and among the bishops. That there was a latent spirit in New England ripe for rebellion was also, probably, asserted in the lost document. However Winthrop might deny it, and deny it honestly, this also was true; and subsequent events, both in Massachusetts and in England, showed it to be so. In the light of their sympathies and sufferings, Morton and Gardiner probably realized the drift of what they had heard said and seen done in New England a good deal better than Winthrop.

The result of the Morton-Gardiner petition was the appointment of a committee of twelve Lords of the Council, to whom the whole matter was referred for investigation and report. The committee was empowered to send for persons and papers and a long and apparently warm hearing ensued. The friends of the Company found it necessary to at once bestir themselves. Cradock, Saltonstall and Humfrey filed a written answer to the complaint, and subsequently, at the hearing, they received efficient aid from Emanuel Downing, Winthrop’s brother-in-law, and Thomas Wiggin, who lived at Piscataqua, but now most opportunely chanced to be in London.

At the Court of Charles I. everything was matter of influence or purchase. The founders of Massachusetts were men just abreast of their time, and not in advance of it. There is good ground on which to suspect that they did not hesitate to have recourse to the means then and there necessary to the attainment of their ends. It has never been explained, for instance, how the charter of 1629 was originally secured.[108] When Allerton, at the same time, tried to obtain a similar charter for the Plymouth colony, he found that he had to buy his way at every step, and Bradford complained bitterly of the “deale of money veainly and lavishly cast away.”[109] That the original patentees of Massachusetts bribed some courtier near the King, and through him bought their charter, is wholly probable. Every one bribed, and almost every one about the King took bribes. That the patentees had powerful influence at Court is certain; exactly where it lay is not apparent. The Earl of Warwick interested himself actively in their behalf. It was he who secured for them their patent from the Council for New England. But Warwick, though a powerful nobleman, was “a man in no grace at Court;” on the contrary, he was one of those “whom his Majesty had no esteem of, or ever purposed to trust.”[110] Winthrop says that in the Morton-Gardiner hearing his brother-in-law, Emanuel Downing, was especially serviceable.[111] Downing was a lawyer of the Inner Temple.[112] There is reason to suppose that he had access to influential persons,—possibly Lord Dorchester may have been amongst them.[113] However this may be, whether by means of influence or bribery, the hearing before the Committee of the Privy Council was made to result disastrously for the complainants. Gorges took nothing by his motion. In due time the Committee reported against any interference with the Company at that time. Such grounds of complaint as did not admit of explanation they laid to the “faults or fancies of particular men,” and these, they declared, were “in due time to be inquired into.” King Charles himself also had evidently been labored with through the proper channels, and not without effect. Not only did he give his approval to the report of the Committee, but he went out of his way to further threaten with condign punishment those “who did abuse his governor and the plantation.”

Gorges’s carefully prepared attack had thus ended in complete failure. The danger, however, had been great, nor was its importance underestimated in Massachusetts. This clearly appears in Winthrop’s subsequent action; for when, four months later, in May, 1633, information of the final action of the Council reached him, he wrote a letter of grave jubilation to Governor Bradford, giving him the glad news, and inviting him to join “in a day of thanksgiving to our mercifull God, who, as he hath humbled us by his late correction, so he hath lifted us up, by an abundante rejoysing in our deliverance out of so desperate a danger.”[114]

Though badly defeated, and for the time being no doubt discouraged, Gorges and Morton were not disposed to desist from their efforts. As the latter expressed it, they had been too eager, and had “effected the business but superficially.”[115] They had also committed the serious mistake of underestimating the strength and influence of their antagonists. If Gorges, however, was at home anywhere, he was at home just where he had now received his crushing defeat,—in the antechambers of the palace. All his life he had been working through Court influences. Through them, after the Essex insurrection, he had saved his neck from the block. If Court influence would have availed to secure it, in 1623 he would have pre-empted the whole territory about Boston Bay as the private domain of himself and his descendants. At Whitehall he was an enemy not lightly to be disregarded; and this Winthrop and his colleagues soon had cause to realize.

Thwarted by strong influences in one direction, Gorges went to work to secure stronger influences in another direction. He knew the ground, and his plan of operations was well conceived. To follow it out in detail is not possible. Here and there a fact appears; the rest is inference and surmise. The King was the objective point. Of him it is not necessary here to speak at length, for his character is too well understood. Dignified in his bearing, and in personal character purer than his times,—a devout, well-intentioned man,—Charles was a shallow, narrow-minded bigot, with a diseased belief in that divinity which doth hedge a king. He would have made an ideal, average English country gentleman. After the manner of small, obstinate men, he believed intensely in a few things. One was his own royal supremacy and his responsibility, not to his people but to his kingship. He was nothing of a statesman, and as a politician he was his own worst enemy. His idea of government was the Spanish one: the king had a prime-minister, and that prime-minister was the king’s other and second self. In Charles’s case Buckingham was at first prime-minister; and, when Buckingham was assassinated, he was in due time succeeded by Laud. Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, had not died until August 4, 1633, and a few days later Laud was appointed to succeed him. He thus became primate almost exactly eight months after the first attack on the charter. It was through him that Gorges now went to work to influence the King and to control the course of events in New England. His method can be explained in four words: Laud hated a Puritan.

At first the secret connection of Gorges and Morton with the events which now ensued is matter of pure surmise. There is no direct evidence of it in the records or narratives. At a later period it becomes more apparent. As a matter of surmise, however, based on the subsequent development of events, it seems probable that in February, 1634, the attention of the Archbishop, and through him that of the Privy Council, was called to the large emigration then going on to New England of “persons known to be ill-affected and discontented, as well with the civil as ecclesiastical government.”[116] As Gorges himself expressed it, “numbers of people of all sorts flocked thither in heaps.”[117] Several vessels, already loaded with passengers and stores, were then lying in the Thames. An Order in Council was forthwith issued staying these vessels, and calling upon Cradock to produce the Company’s charter. So far as the vessels were concerned it soon appeared that the Company was still not without friends in the Council; and, “for reasons best known to their Lordships,” they were permitted to sail.[118] Doubtless this detention, as the subsequent more rigid restraint, was “grounded upon the several complaints that came out of those parts of the divers sects and schisms that were amongst them, all contemning the public government of the ecclesiastical state.” Ratcliff was now looked upon as a lunatic,[119] and Gardiner had disappeared. Morton alone remained; and it is safe to surmise that he was the fountain-head of these complaints, as Gorges was the channel which conveyed them to Laud. As respects the charter, Cradock made reply to the order for its production that it was not in his hands,—that Winthrop, four years before, had taken it to New England. He was directed to send for it at once. Here the matter rested, and to all appearances Gorges had met with one more check. The release of the vessels was ordered on the last day of February, 1634.

A new move on the chess-board was now made by some one. Who that some-one was is again matter of surmise. Hitherto the few matters which from time to time came up, relating to the colonies, had been considered in the full Privy Council. There the Massachusetts Company had shown itself a power. Special tribunals, however, were at this juncture greatly in vogue at Whitehall. The Council of the North, the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, were in full operation. To them all political work was consigned, and in the two last Laud was supreme. Up to this time, however, the need of any special tribunal to look after the affairs of the colonies had not made itself felt. The historians of New England have philosophized a great deal over the considerations of state which, during the reign of Charles, dictated the royal policy towards New England;[120] but it is more than doubtful whether considerations of state had anything to do with that policy. The remoteness and insignificance of early New England, so far as the English Court was concerned, is a thing not easy now to realize. It may be taken for certain that King and Primate rarely gave a thought to it, much less matured a definite or rational policy. Their minds were full of more important matters. They were intent on questions of tonnage and poundage, on monopolies, and all possible ways and means of raising money; they were thinking of the war with Spain, of Wentworth’s Irish policy, of the English opposition, and the Scotch church system. So far as New England was concerned they were mere puppets to be jerked to and fro by the strings of Court influence,—now granting a charter at the instance of one man, and then restraining vessels at the instance of another,—defending “our governor” one day, and threatening to have his ears cropped the next.

In certain quarters it seems now, however, to have been decided that this condition of affairs was to continue no longer. A special tribunal should be created, to take charge of all colonial matters. This move seems to have grown out of the Order in Council of February 21, and to have been directed almost exclusively to the management of affairs in New England, whence complaint mainly came. Accordingly, on the 10th of April, a commission passed the great seal establishing a board with almost unlimited power of regulating plantations. Laud was at the head of it. There would seem to be every reason to assume that this tribunal was created at the suggestion of Laud, and in consequence of the undecided course pursued by the Council as a whole, two months before, in the matter of the detained vessels. A further inference, from what went before and what followed, is that Laud’s action was stimulated and shaped by Gorges. He was the active promoter of complaints and scandals from New England. In other words, the organization of this colonial board, through Laud’s influence and with Laud supreme in it, was Gorges’s first move in the next and most formidable attack on the charter of the Massachusetts Bay.

The plan now matured by Gorges was a large one. He had no idea of being balked of the prize which it had been the dream and the effort of his life to secure. He meant yet to grasp a government for himself, and an inheritance for his children, in New England. So far as the settlement of that country was concerned, what he for thirty years had been vainly ruining himself to bring about was now accomplishing itself; but it was accomplishing itself not only without his aid, but in a way which gravely threatened his interests. The people who were swarming to New England refused to recognize his title, and abused and expelled his agents. It was clear that the Council for New England was not equal to dealing with such a crisis. It was necessary to proceed through some other agency. The following scheme was, therefore, step by step devised.

The territory held under the great patent of the Council for New England extended from Maine to New Jersey. This whole region was, by the action of the Council, to be divided in severalty among its remaining members, and the patent was then to be surrendered to the King, who thereupon was to confirm the division just made.[121] The Council being thus gotten out of the way, the King was to assume the direct government of the whole territory, and was to appoint a governor-general for it. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was to be that governor-general.[122] He would thus go out to his province clothed with full royal authority; and the issue would then be, not between the settlers of Massachusetts, acting under the King’s charter, and that “carcass in a manner breathless,” the Council for New England, but between a small body of disobedient subjects and the King’s own representative. The scheme was a well-devised one. It was nothing more nor less than the colonial or New England branch of Strafford’s “Thorough.” It was a part, though a small part, of a great system.

The first step in carrying out the programme was to secure the appointment of the Commission of April 10. The influence of the Archbishop being assured, there was no difficulty in this. The board was composed of twelve members of the Privy Council. Laud himself was at the head of it, and with him were the Archbishop of York, the Earls of Portland, Manchester, Arundel and Dorset, Lord Cottington, Sir Thomas Edmunds, Sir Henry Vane, and Secretaries Cooke and Windebank. Any five or more of these Commissioners were to constitute a quorum, and their powers were of the largest description. They could revoke all charters previously granted, remove governors and appoint others in the places of those removed, and even break up settlements if they deemed it best so to do. They could inflict punishment upon all offenders, either by imprisonment, “or by loss of life or member.” It was in fact a commission of “right divine.” It embodied the whole royal policy of King Charles, as formulated by Wentworth and enforced by Laud. The new Commission was not slow in proceeding to its appointed work, and the potency of Gorges’s influence in it was shown by his immediate designation as governor-general.[123] How close Morton then stood to him may be inferred from the following letter, which shows also that he was well informed as to all that was going on.[124] It was written exactly three weeks after the appointment of the Commission, and was addressed to William Jeffreys at Wessagusset:—

My very good Gossip,—If I should commend myself to you, you reply with this proverb,—Propria laus fordet in ore: but to leave impertinent salute, and really to proceed.—You shall hereby understand, that, although, when I was first sent to England to make complaint against Ananias and the brethren, I effected the business but superficially, (through the brevity of time,) I have at this time taken more deliberation and brought the matter to a better pass. And it is thus brought about, that the King hath taken the business into his own hands. The Massachusetts Patent, by order of the council, was brought in view; the privileges there granted well scanned upon, and at the council board in public, and in the presence of Sir Richard Saltonstall and the rest, it was declared, for manifest abuses there discovered, to be void. The King hath reassumed the whole business into his own hands, appointed a committee of the board, and given order for a general governor of the whole territory to be sent over. The commission is passed the privy seal, I did see it, and the same was 1 mo. Maii sent to the Lord Keeper to have it pass the great seal for confirmation; and I now stay to return with the governor, by whom all complainants shall have relief:[125] So that now Jonas being set ashore may safely cry, repent you cruel separatists, repent, there are as yet but forty days. If Jove vouchsafe to thunder, the charter and kingdom of the separatists will fall asunder. Repent you cruel schismatics, repent.[126] These things have happened, and I shall see, (notwithstanding their boasting and false alarms in the Massachusetts, with feigned cause of thanksgiving,) their merciless cruelty rewarded, according to the merit of the fact, with condign punishment for coming into these parts, like Sampson’s foxes with fire-brands at their tails.[127] The King and Council are really possessed of their preposterous loyalty and irregular proceedings, and are incensed against them: and although they be so opposite to the catholic axioms, yet they will be compelled to perform them, or at leastwise, suffer them to be put in practice to their sorrow. In matter of restitution and satisfaction, more than mystically, it must be performed visibly, and in such sort as may be subject to the senses in a very lively image. My Lord Canterbury having, with my Lord Privy Seal, caused all Mr. Cradock’s letters to be viewed, and his apology in particular for the brethren here, protested against him and Mr. Humfrey, that they were a couple of imposterous knaves; so that, for all their great friends, they departed the council chamber in our view with a pair of cold shoulders. I have staid long, yet have not lost my labor, although the brethren have found their hopes frustrated; so that it follows by consequence, I shall see my desire upon mine enemies: and if John Grant had not betaken him to flight, I had taught him to sing clamavi in the Fleet before this time, and if he return before I depart, he will pay dear for his presumption. For here he finds me a second Perseus: I have uncased Medusa’s head, and struck the brethren into astonishment. They find, and will yet more to their shame, that they abuse the word and are to blame to presume so much,—that they are but a word and a blow to them that are without. Of these particulars I thought good, by so convenient a messenger, to give you notice, lest you should think I had died in obscurity, as the brethren vainly intended I should, and basely practised, abusing justice by their sinister practices, as by the whole body of the committee, una voce, it was concluded to be done, to the dishonor of his majesty. And as for Ratcliffe, he was comforted by their lordships with the cropping of Mr. Winthrop’s ears: which shows what opinion is held amongst them of King Winthrop with all his inventions and his Amsterdam fantastical ordinances, his preachings, marriages, and other abusive ceremonies, which do exemplify his detestation to the Church of England, and the contempt of his majesty’s authority and wholesome laws, which are and will be established in these parts, invitâ Minervâ. With these I thought fit to salute you, as a friend, by an epistle, because I am bound to love you, as a brother, by the gospel, resting your loving friend.

THOMAS MORTON.[128]

Dated 1 Mo. Maii, 1634.

Morton is always confused and inaccurate in his statements, and this letter afforded no exception to the rule. It is impossible to be quite sure of what particular occasions he refers to in it. He may in the same breath be speaking of different things. Whether, for instance, the hearing to which he alludes, at which the patent “was brought in view,” was the same or another meeting from that in which Cradock’s letters were produced, is not clear. It would seem as though he were speaking of the February hearing before the whole Council, and yet he may be describing a subsequent hearing in April before the Lords Commissioners. He speaks of the “council chamber” and of “the whole body of the Committee,” and then alludes to the presence of Saltonstall, Humfrey and Cradock. Now these persons were before the Council in the hearing of 1632, and they may all of them, as Cradock certainly was, have been before it in February 1634; but Humfrey could hardly have appeared before the Lords Commissioners, as he seems to have sailed for New England early in the month during which they were appointed. The meeting which Morton describes, therefore, was probably that of February 28, 1634; and it would seem to have savored strongly of the Star Chamber and High Commission. Cradock and Humfrey were apparently scolded and abused by Laud in the style for which he was famous, and the admission by the former, that the charter had gone to America, had led to his being called “an imposterous knave,” and sharply told to send for it back at once. The well-known foibles of the Primate had been skilfully played upon by accounts of Winthrop’s “Amsterdam fantastical ordinances, his preachings, marriages, and other abusive ceremonies;” and they had much the effect that a red flag is known to have on a bull. Nothing was now heard of the King’s intention of severely punishing those who abused “his governor;” but, on the contrary, Ratcliffe was “comforted with the cropping of Mr. Winthrop’s ears.” Gorges was governor-general, and with him Morton expected soon to depart.

Cradock’s letter, enclosing the order of the Council for the return of the charter, reached Boston in July. Winthrop was then no longer governor, having been displaced by Dudley at the previous May election. As is well known to all students of New England history, the famous parchment, still in the office of the secretary of the Puritan Commonwealth, was not sent back.[129] It is unnecessary, however, to here repeat the story of the struggle over it. Presently Governor Edward Winslow of Plymouth was despatched to England, as the joint agent of the two colonies, to look after their endangered interests. He reached London in the autumn of 1634, bringing with him an evasive reply to the demand contained in Cradock’s letter.

Winslow sailed in the middle or latter part of July, and a few days later, on the 4th of August,[130] Jeffreys came over from Wessagusset to Boston, bringing to Winthrop the letter which he had shortly before received from Morton. It was the first intimation the magistrates had of the Commission and of the appointment of a governor-general. Winthrop communicated the news to Dudley and the other members of the Council, and to some of the ministers; and, doubtless, for a time they all nursed an anxious hope that the exaggerations in the letter were even greater than they really were. The General Court met on the 25th of August. While it was still in session, vessels arrived bringing tidings which dispelled all doubt, and confirmed everything material that Morton had said. He whom the magistrates had so ignominiously punished, and so contemptuously driven away, was evidently in a position to know what those in authority intended. It began to be evident that the Massachusetts magistrates had underestimated an opponent.

A full copy of the Order in Council establishing the board of Lords Commissioners of Plantations, was now received, and the colonists were further advised, through their private letters, that ships were being furnished, and soldiers gotten ready for embarkation in them. It was given out that these troops and vessels were intended for Virginia, whither a new governor was about to be sent; but Winthrop wrote that in Massachusetts the preparation was “suspected to be against us, to compel us by force to receive a new governor, and the discipline of the church of England, and the laws of the commissioners.[131]”

The answer which best expressed the spirit of the colony, in reply to Laud’s threats, was now found, not in the missive which Winslow had in charge, but in the act of Morton’s old oppressor, Endicott, when a few weeks later at Salem he cut the red cross from the standard. It was an act, however, which seemed to indicate that there was more truth than Winthrop was disposed to admit in Gardiner and Morton’s charge that “the ministers and people did continually rail against the state, church and bishops.”[132] Six months of great alarm and strenuous preparation now ensued. Steps were taken to get together arms and ammunition, and defences were ordered at Dorchester and Charlestown, as well as at Castle Island. The magistrates were even empowered to impress laborers for the work. In January the ministers were summoned to Bolton, and the question formally submitted to them: “What ought we to do if a general governor should be sent out of England?” The reply was that “we ought not to accept him, but defend our lawful possessions if we are able.” In April a rumor of strange vessels hovering off Cape Ann threw the whole province into a tumult. It was supposed that Governor-general Gorges, with Morton in his train, was at the harbor’s mouth. It proved to be a false alarm, and after that the excitement seems gradually to have subsided.

This was in the spring of 1635. Meanwhile Winslow had reached England sometime early in the previous autumn. Though he had not brought the charter with him, its production does not seem to have been again immediately called for. He probably held out confident assurances that it would be sent over in the next vessel, as soon as the General Court met; but it is also probable that, in view of the course which had now been decided upon, an examination of it was no longer deemed necessary. The ensuing spring, that of 1635, had been fixed upon by Gorges and Mason as the time for decisive action. The charter was then to be vacated, and Gorges was to go out to New England with a force sufficient to compel obedience. All this, however, implied considerable preparation. Shipping had to be provided in the first place. A large vessel was accordingly put upon the stocks. Rumor said, also, that the new governor-general was to take out with him a force of no less than one thousand soldiers.[133] Whether this was true or not, there can be little doubt that all through the winter of 1634-5 active preparations were on foot in England intended against the Massachusetts colony.

Besides watching these proceedings Winslow had other business in London which required his appearance before the Lords Commissioners. He had presented to them a petition on behalf of the two colonies for authority to resist certain Dutch and French encroachments. This proceeding Winthrop had not thought well advised,[134] as he very shrewdly argued that it implied an absence of authority without such special authorization, and might thus be drawn into a precedent. Winslow, however, had none the less submitted the petition, and several hearings were given upon it. Fully advised as to everything that was going on before the Lords Commissioners, Gorges did not favor this move. It authorized military or diplomatic action, the conduct of which by right belonged to him as governor-general of the region within which the action was to be taken. He accordingly went to work to circumvent Winslow. What ensued throws a great deal of light on Morton’s standing at the time, and the use that was made of him; and it also explains the significance of certain things in the New Canaan.

Laud, it will be remembered, was the head and moving spirit of the Lords Commissioners. His word was final in the Board. Upon him Gorges depended to work all his results; which included not only his own appointment as governor-general, with full power and authority as such, but also the necessary supply of men and money to enable him to establish his supremacy. To secure these ends it was necessary to play continually on the Primate’s dislike of the Puritans, and his intense zeal in behalf of all Church forms and ceremonies, including the use of the Book of Common Prayer. The whole political and historical significance of the New Canaan lies in this fact. It was a pamphlet designed to work a given effect in a particular quarter, and came very near being productive of lasting results. Dedicated in form to the Lords Commissioners, it was charged with attacks on the Separatists, and statements of the contempt shown by them to the Book of Common Prayer. Finally it contained one chapter on the church practices in New England, which was clearly designed for the special enlightenment of the Archbishop.[135] In this chapter it is set down as the first and fundamental tenet of the New England church “that it is the magistrate’s office absolutely, and not the minister’s, to join the people in lawful matrimony;” next, that to make use of a ring in marriage is a relic of popery; and then again “that the Book of Common Prayer is an idol; and all that use it idolaters.” It now remains to show how cunningly, when it came to questions of state, Laud was worked upon by these statements, and what a puppet he became in the hands of Gorges and Morton.

Winslow’s suit had prospered. He had submitted to the Lords Commissioners a plan for accomplishing the end desired without any charge being imposed on the royal exchequer, and he was on the point of receiving, as he supposed, a favorable decision. Suddenly the secret strings were pulled. Bradford best tells the story of what ensued.

“When Mr. Winslow should have had his suit granted, (as indeed upon the point it was,) and should have been confirmed, the Archbishop put a stop upon it, and Mr. Winslow, thinking to get it freed, went to the Board again. But the Bishop, Sir Ferdinando and Captain Mason had, as it seems, procured Morton to complain. To whose complaints Mr. Winslow made answer to the good satisfaction of the Board, who checked Morton, and rebuked him sharply, and also blamed Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Mason for countenancing him. But the Bishop had a further end and use of his presence, for he now began to question Mr. Winslow of many things, as of teaching in the church publicly, of which Morton accused him and gave evidence that he had seen and heard him do it; to which Mr. Winslow answered that sometimes (wanting a minister) he did exercise his gift to help the edification of his brethren, when they wanted better means, which was not often. Then about marriage, the which he also confessed, that, having been called to place of magistracy, he had sometimes married some. And further told their lordships that marriage was a civil thing, and he found nowhere in the word of God that it was tied to ministry. Again they were necessitated so to do, having for a long time together at first no minister; besides, it was no new thing, for he had been so married himself in Holland, by the magistrates in their Stadt-House. But in the end, to be short, for these things the Bishop, by vehement importunity, got the Board at last to consent to his commitment. So he was committed to the Fleet, and lay there seventeen weeks, or thereabout, before he could get to be released. And this was the end of this petition and this business; only the others’ design was also frustrated hereby, with other things concurring, which was no small blessing to people here.”[136]

For the time being, however, “the others’ design,” as Bradford describes Gorges’s scheme, so far from being frustrated, moved on most prosperously. All the friends and agents of the colony were now driven from the field. Cradock, Saltonstall and Humfrey had departed the council-chamber with “a pair of cold shoulders.” Winslow was a prisoner. Morton had demonstrated that his boast in the letter to Jeffreys, that he would make his opponents “sing clamavi in the Fleet,” was not an idle one. He had not exaggerated his power. Gorges’s course was now clear, and his plan developed rapidly. At a meeting of those still members of the Council for New England, held at Lord Gorges’s house on the 3d of February, 1635, the next step was taken. The redivision of the seacoast was agreed upon. It was now divided into eight parcels, instead of twenty as at the original abortive division of 1623; and these parcels were assigned to eight several persons, among whom were the Duke of Lenox, the Marquis of Hamilton, and the Earls of Arundel, Carlisle and Sterling. Arundel alone of these was one of the Lords Commissioners. Gorges received Maine as his portion; and Mason got New Hampshire and Cape Ann. Massachusetts, south of Salem, was assigned to Lord Gorges.

The division thus agreed on was to take effect simultaneously with the formal surrender by the Council of its great patent. Ten weeks later, on the 18th of April, at another meeting at Lord Gorges’s house, a paper was read and entered upon the records, in which the reasons for surrendering the patent were set forth. At a subsequent meeting on the 26th a petition to the King was approved, in which it was prayed that separate patents might be issued securing to the associates in severalty the domains they had assigned to each other. A declaration from the King was also then read, in which the royal intention of appointing Sir Ferdinando Gorges governor-general of New England was formally announced. Speaking by the mouth of the King, the Primate did not propose “to suffer such numbers of people to run to ruin, and to religious intents to languish, for want of timely remedy and sovereign assistance.” Curiously enough, also, this typically Laudian sentiment was enunciated at Whitehall the very day, the 26th of April, 1635, upon which, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Marblehead fishermen had brought in word of strange vessels hovering mysteriously upon the coast, causing the Governor and assistants to hurry to Boston and an alarm to be spread through all the towns.[137]

Before proceeding to eject the present occupants of the New England soil, or to force them to some compromise as an alternative thereto, it remained for the grantees of the now defunct Council to perfect their new titles. Proceedings to this end were not delayed. The division had been agreed upon on the 3d of February, and on the 26th of April the new patents had been petitioned for. Ten days later Thomas Morton was “entertained to be solicitor for confirmation of the said deeds under the great seal, as also to prosecute suit at law for the repealing of the patent belonging to the Massachusetts Company. And is to have for fee twenty shillings a term, and such further reward as those who are interested in the affairs of New England shall think him fit to deserve, upon the judgment given in the cause.” A month later, on the 7th of June, 1635, the formal surrender of its patent by the Council took place.[138]

Morton, however, was not destined to land at Boston in the train of Governor-general Gorges. The effort of 1634-5 was a mere repetition, on a larger and more impressive scale, of the effort of 1623. The latter had resulted in the abortive Robert Gorges expedition, and the former now set all the courts at Westminster in solemn action. Neither of them, however, came to anything. They both failed, also, from the same cause,—want of money. The machinery in each case was imposing, and there was a great deal of it. Seen from New England it must have appeared simply overpowering. The King, the Primate, the Lords Commissioners, the Attorney General, the Court of King’s Bench, the Great Seal, and a governor-general representing the Duke of Lenox, the Marquis of Hamilton and the Earls of Arundel, Carlisle and Sterling, royal proprietors, were all at work together to bring about the destruction of an infant colony. When, however, it came to accomplishing anything in a practical way, it grew apparent by degrees that behind all this tremendous display of machinery there was nothing but Sir Ferdinando Gorges,—an active-minded, adventurous soldier, skilled in Court ways, persistent and full of resource, but with small means of his own, and no faculty of obtaining means from others. When it became therefore a question of real action, calling for the sinews of war, the movement flopped dead in 1635, just as it had stopped in 1623. In 1635 it is true, Gorges had the assistance of Captain John Mason, who was an energetic man with means at his command, and it was through him that a ship was to be provided.[139] The building of this ship, however, without doubt strained to the utmost the resources of all concerned; and when, in launching, it suffered a mishap, again probably from insufficient means, they could not make the damage good. The royal exchequer was then as empty as Gorges’s own purse. The King was living on benevolences, and on fines levied upon the great nobles for encroachments on the royal forests. The writs to collect ship-money were issued in this very year. The next year public offices were sold. Under these circumstances no assistance could for the present be looked for from Charles or Laud. As for the noble associates, among whom the New England coast had just been parcelled out, while perfectly willing to accept great domains in America, they would venture nothing more to take actual possession of them in 1635 than they had ventured in 1623. Nothing at all was to be obtained from that quarter. Speaking of Gorges and Mason, and the failure of their plans at this time, Winthrop wrote, “The Lord frustrated their design.” This was the pious way of putting it. In point of fact, however, the real safety of Massachusetts now depended on more homely and every-day considerations. Gorges and Mason could not raise the money absolutely necessary to carry their design out.

Nevertheless, though this delay was disappointing, there was no occasion for despair. Things moved slowly; that was all. Gorges represented the New England part of that royal system which was to stand or fall as a whole. In the spring and summer of 1635 it looked very much as if it was destined to stand. There was then no thought of a parliament at Court, or expectation of one among the patriots. The crown lawyers were hunting up precedents which would enable the King to levy taxes to suit himself. Wentworth had brought Ireland into a state of perfect subjection. Laud was supreme in England. The prospects for “Thorough” were never so good. If “Thorough” prevailed in England it would in Massachusetts. There could be no doubt of that. Meanwhile, though lack of ready means had put it out of Gorges’s power to go to New England at once, there was no break or delay in legal proceedings. In June, 1635, the attorney-general filed in the King’s Bench a writ of quo warranto against the Massachusetts Bay Company. This was the work which Thomas Morton had a month before been “entertained to prosecute,” and the promptness of the attorney-general would seem to indicate that on Morton’s part at least there was no failure in activity. The plan was to set the charter aside, not because of any abuse of the powers lawfully conferred in it, but on the ground that it was void ab initio. Every title to land held under it would thus be vitiated. In answer to the summons some of the original associates came in and pleaded, while others made default. Cradock made default. In his case, therefore, judgment was given at the Michaelmas, or September term, 1635, and the charter was declared void, all the franchises conveyed in it being resumed by the King.[140] This portion of the legal work in hand, therefore, that more particularly entrusted to Morton, seems to have been promptly and efficiently done. As respects the patents for the domains granted under the last partition, things do not seem to have moved so rapidly, for towards the close of November a meeting of the associates of the now dissolved Council was held at the house of Lord Sterling, and a vote passed that steps should be taken to get patents to the individual patentees passed the seals as soon as possible. Morton was in fact reminded of his duties.

A heavy blow was however impending over Gorges. He himself was now an elderly man, verging close upon seventy years.[141] He could not have been as active and as energetic as he once had been, and even his sanguine disposition must have felt the usual depressing influence of hope long deferred. Mason had of late been the mainstay of his enterprise. Only a year before, that resolute man had sent out a large expedition, numbering some seventy men, to Piscataqua, and he was contemplating extensive explorations towards Lake Champlain. Morton eulogized him as a “very good Commonwealth’s man, a true foster-father and lover of virtue,”[142] and Winthrop referred to him as “the chief mover in all the attempts against us.”[143] In December, 1635, Mason died,[144] and not improbably it was the anticipation of his death which led to that meeting of the Council at which the speedy issuing of the individual patents was urged. However this may be, the loss of Mason seems to have been fatal to Gorges’s hopes; it was the lopping off of the right arm of his undertakings. From that time forward there was obviously no source from which he could hope to get the money necessary to enable him to effect anything, except the royal treasury. Of this, for two or three years yet, until the Scotch troubles destroyed the last chance of the success of the ship-money scheme, there seemed a very good prospect. Gorges, however, could not afford to wait. His remaining time was short. Accordingly, after Mason’s death, little is heard of him or of the Lords Commissioners.

During the next seven years, consequently, the traces of Morton are few. There is a passing glimpse obtained of him in March, 1636, through a letter from Cradock to Winthrop,[145] from which it appears he was then in London and actively scheming against the Massachusetts Company. He would seem at this time to have been in the pay of one George Cleaves, a man of some importance and subsequently quite prominent in the early history of Maine. Cleaves apparently had proposed some scheme to Cradock touching the Massachusetts Company, and Morton came to see him about it. Thereupon Cradock says, “I having no desire to speak with Morton alone put him off a turn or two on the exchange, till I found Mr. Pierce,” etc. Further on in the same letter he speaks of his “greyffe and disdayne” at the abuse heaped on the Company, and of the “heavey burdens, there lode on me by T. M.;” and adds, “God forgive him that is the cause of it.”

Early in 1637, and in consequence probably of the quo warranto proceedings, a commission of some sort would appear to have been granted to certain persons in New England for the government of that country.[146] How or under what circumstances this was obtained is nowhere told. There is a mystery about it. Gorges afterwards assured Winthrop that he knew nothing of it,[147] and only a copy ever reached America, the original, Winthrop says, being “staid at the seal for want of paying the fees.” He further says that Cleaves procured this commission, as also a sort of patent, or, as he calls it, “a protection under the privy signet for searching out the great lake of Iracoyce.” From all this it would appear that the whole thing was some impotent and inconsequential move on the part of Morton; for not only does Winthrop say that the document was “staid at the seal,” but Cradock wrote that the matter in reference to which Morton wanted to see him, on behalf of Cleaves, related to paying the charge “in taking out somewhat under the seale.” Gorges speaks of Morton as being at that time Cleaves’s agent; and in the New Canaan, which either had just been published or was then in the press, there is a glowing account of the “great lake Erocoise,” and its boundless wealth of beaver,[148] to which apparently the imaginative author had directed Cleaves’s attention sufficiently to induce him to take out the “protection” which Winthrop alludes to.

The year 1637 was the turning-period in the fortunes of King Charles and of Archbishop Laud, and consequently of Gorges and Morton. Up to that time everything had gone sufficiently well, if not in Massachusetts, at least in England, Ireland, and even Scotland. Now, however, the system began to break down; giving way first, as would naturally enough be the case, at its weakest point. This was in Scotland, where the attempt to force Episcopacy on the people resulted in the famous “stony Sabbath” on the 23d of July. The New Canaan was probably going through the press during the deceitful period of profound calm which preceded that eventful day. Though now published, there is strong internal evidence that the book was written in 1634. Not only does this appear from the extract from its last page in the letter to Jeffreys, already referred to,[149] but in another place[150] there is reference to the expedition of Henry Josselyn for the more complete discovery of Lake Champlain, which is mentioned as then in preparation. Henry Josselyn left England about the time Morton was writing to Jeffreys, or a little earlier, and reached Piscataqua in June, 1634.[151] Mason, on the other hand, is mentioned as then living, and as having fitted out the expedition of Josselyn. Mason, however, it has already been seen, died in December, 1635. Written consequently after May, 1634, the New Canaan, it would seem, received no revision later than 1635. It represented Morton’s feelings during the time when he was most confident of an early and triumphant return to New England. It was published just when the affairs of Charles and Laud were at their full flood, and before the tide had begun to ebb.

No mention is found of the New Canaan at the time of its publication. It is not known, indeed, that a single copy was sent out to New England. Though it must have caused no little comment and scandal among the friends and correspondents of the colonists, there is no allusion to it in their published letters or in the documents of the time, and in 1644 Winthrop apparently had never seen it. Bradford energetically refers to it as “an infamouse and scurillous booke against many godly and cheefe men of the cuntrie; full of lyes and slanders, and fraight with profane callumnies against their names and persons, and the ways of God.”[152] A copy of it may, therefore, have been brought over to Plymouth by one of the agents of the colony, and there passed from hand to hand. It does not appear, however, that at the time it attracted any general or considerable notice in America; while in England, of course, it would have interested only a small class of persons.

There is one significant reference which would seem to indicate that the publication of the New Canaan was not agreeable to Gorges. However much he might attack the charter of the Massachusetts Company, Sir Ferdinando always showed himself anxious to keep on friendly terms with the leading men of the colony. In the Briefe Narration he takes pains to speak of “the patience and wisdom of Mr. Winthrop, Mr. Humphreys, Mr. Dudley, and others their assistants;”[153] and with Winthrop he was in correspondence, even authorizing him and others to act for him in Maine. He deceived no one by this, for Winthrop afterwards described him as “pretending by his letters and speeches to seek our welfare;”[154] but he evidently had always in mind that he was to go out some day to New England as a governor-general, and that it would not do for him to be too openly hostile to those over whom he proposed to rule. He regarded them as his people. When, therefore, he had occasion to write to Winthrop in August, 1637, though he made no reference to the New Canaan, which had probably been published early in the year, he took pains to say that Morton was “wholely casheered from intermedlinge with anie our affaires hereafter.”[155]

It is however open to question whether, in making this statement, Gorges was not practising a little of that king-craft for which his master, James I., had been so famous. In 1637 Morton may have been in disgrace with him; but if so it was a passing disgrace. Four years later, in 1641, Sir Ferdinando, as “Lord of the Province of Maine,” indulged his passion for feudal regulation by granting a municipal charter to the town of Acomenticus, now York. A formidable document of great import, this momentous state paper was signed and delivered by the Lord Paramount, much as an English sovereign might have granted a franchise to his faithful city of London; and accordingly it was countersigned by three witnesses, one of them a member of his own family. First of the three witnesses to sign was Thomas Morton.[156] He evidently was in no disgrace then.

With the exception of this signature to the Acomenticus charter, there is no trace to be found of Morton between August 1637, when Gorges wrote that he had “casheered” him, and the summer of 1643, when he reappeared once more at Plymouth. During the whole of that time things evidently went with him, as they did with Charles and Laud, from bad to worse. Once only had the Lords Commissioners given any signs of life. This was in the spring of 1638, when on the 4th of April the Board met at Whitehall. The record of the meeting states that petitions and complaints from Massachusetts, for want of a settled and orderly government, were growing more frequent. This is very possible, for the Antinomian Controversy was then at its height, and indeed, the very day the Lords Commissioners met, Mrs. Hutchinson, having left Boston in obedience to Governor Winthrop’s mandate a week before, was on her way to join her husband and friends in Rhode Island. Under these circumstances, calling to mind the futile order for the return of the charter, sent to Winthrop in 1634 through Cradock, and taking official notice of the result of the quo warranto proceedings, the Board resolved upon a more decided tone. The clerk in attendance was instructed to send out to Massachusetts a peremptory demand for the immediate surrender of the charter. It was to be sent back to London by the return voyage of the vessel which carried out the missive of the Board; “it being resolved,” so that missive ran, “that in case of any further neglect or contempt by them shewed therein, their Lordships will cause a strict course to be taken against them, and will move his Majesty to reassume into his own hands the whole plantation.”[157]

If, as was probably the case, Morton was the secret mover of this action, it proved to be his last effort. It was completely fruitless also. When the order reached Boston, sometime in the early summer of 1638, it naturally caused no little alarm, for the apprehension of a general governor had not yet disappeared. Indeed, on the 12th of April, “a general fast [had been] kept through all the churches, by advice from the Court, for seeking the Lord to prevent evil that we feared to be intended against us from England by a general governor.”[158] With the missive of the Lords Commissioners, however, came also tidings of “the troubles which arose in Scotland about the Book of Common Prayer and the canons which the King would have forced upon the Scotch churches.”[159] The result was that in August, instead of sending out the charter, Governor Winthrop, at the direction of the General Court, wrote “to excuse our not sending of it; for it was resolved to be best not to send it.”[160]

Archbishop Laud molested the colony no further. Doubtless Morton yet endeavored more than once to stir him up to action, and the next year he received from New England other and bitter complaints of the same character as those which had come to him before. This time it was the Rev. George Burdet—a disreputable clergyman, subsequently a thorn in Gorges’s side as now in that of Winthrop—who wrote to him. The harassed and anxious Primate could, however, only reply that “by reason of the much business now lay upon them, [the Lords Commissioners] could not at present ... redress such disorders as he had informed them of.”[161] Events in England and Scotland were then moving on rapidly as well as steadily to their outcome, and Massachusetts was bidden to take care of itself.

Nothing more is heard of Morton until the summer of 1643. The Civil War was then dragging along in its earlier stages, before Fairfax and Cromwell put their hands to it. It was the summer during which Prince Rupert took Bristol and the first battle of Newbury was fought,—the summer made memorable by the deaths of Hampden and Falkland. Gorges had identified himself with the Royalist side, and now Morton seems to have been fairly starved out of England. When or how he came to Plymouth we do not know; but, on the 11th of September, Edward Winslow, whom he had eight years before “clapte up in the Fleete,”[162] thus wrote to Winthrop:—

“Concerning Morton, our Governor gave way that he should winter here, but begone as soon as winter breaks up. Captain Standish takes great offence thereat, especially that he is so near him as Duxbury, and goeth sometimes a fowling in his ground. He cannot procure the least respect amongst our people, liveth meanly at four shillings per week, and content to drink water, so he may diet at that price. But admit he hath a protection, yet it were worth the while to deal with him till we see it. The truth is I much question his pretended employment; for he hath here only showed the frame of a Common-weale and some old sealed commissions, but no inside known. As for Mr. Rigby if he be so honest, good and hopefull an instrument as report passeth on him, he hath good hap to light on two of the arrantest known knaves that ever trod on New English shore to be his agents east and west, as Cleaves and Morton: but I shall be jealous on him till I know him better, and hope others will take heed how they trust him who investeth such with power who have devoted themselves to the ruin of the country, as Morton hath. And for my part, (who if my heart deceive me not can pass by all the evil instrumentally he brought on me,) would not have this serpent stay amongst us, who out of doubt in time will get strength to him if he be suffered, who promiseth large portions of land about New Haven, Narragansett, &c., to all that will go with him, but hath a promise but of one person who is old, weak and decrepid, a very atheist and fit companion for him. But, indeed, Morton is the odium of our people at present, and if he be suffered, (for we are diversely minded,) it will be just with God, who hath put him in our hands and we will foster such an one, that afterward we shall suffer for it.”[163]

The Rigby referred to in this letter was Mr. Alexander Rigby, an English gentleman of wealth who, besides being a strong Puritan, was a member of the Long Parliament, and at one time held a commission as colonel in the army. Cleaves was the George Cleaves already mentioned as having come out in 1637, with a protection under the privy signet.[164] He had then appeared as an agent of Gorges, but subsequently he had got possession in Maine of the “Plough patent,” so called, under which the title to a large part of the province was claimed adversely to Gorges.[165] This patent Cleaves induced Rigby to buy, and the latter was now endeavoring to get his title recognized, and ultimately succeeded in so doing. Cleaves, as well as Morton, enjoyed the reputation of being “a firebrand of dissension,”[166] and the two had long acted together. As Gorges had joined his fortunes to the Royalist side, Morton clearly had nothing to gain by pretending at Plymouth to be his agent or under his protection. So he seems to have tried to pass himself off as a Commonwealth’s man, commissioned by Rigby to act in his behalf. Winslow was probably quite right in suspecting that this was all a pretence. Rigby’s claim was for territory in Maine. It is not known that he ever had any interests in Rhode Island or Connecticut. There can, in short, be little doubt that Morton was now nothing more than a poor, broken-down, disreputable, old impostor, with some empty envelopes and manufactured credentials in his pocket.

At Plymouth, as would naturally be supposed, Morton made no headway. But the province of Maine was then in an uneasy, troubled condition, and there was reported to be a strong party for the king in the neighborhood of Casco Bay. Thither accordingly Morton seems to have gone in June, 1644.[167] His movements were closely watched, and Endicott was notified that he would go by sea to Gloucester, hoping to get a passage from thence to the eastward. A warrant for his arrest was at once despatched, but apparently he eluded it; nor if he went there, which, indeed, is doubtful, did Morton long remain in Maine. In August he was in Rhode Island, and on the 5th of that month he is thus alluded to in a letter from Coddington to Winthrop:—

“For Morton he was [insinuating] who was for the King at his first coming to Portsmouth, and would report to such as he judged to be of his mind he was glad [to meet with] so many cavaliers; ... and he had lands to dispose of to his followers in each Province, and from Cape Ann to Cape Cod was one.... And that he had wrong in the Bay [to the] value of two hundred pounds, and made bitter complaints thereof. But Morton would let it rest till the Governor came over to right him; and did intimate he knew whose roast his spits and jacks turned.”[168]

Prospering in Rhode Island no more than at Plymouth, Morton is next heard of as a prisoner in Boston. How he came within the clutches of the Massachusetts magistrates is not known; his necessities or his assurance may have carried him to Boston, or he may have been pounced upon by Endicott’s officers as he was furtively passing through the province. In whatever way it came about, he was in custody on the 9th of September, just five weeks from the time of Coddington’s letter to Winthrop, and the latter then made the following entry in his Journal:[169]—

“At the court of assistants Thomas Morton was called forth presently after the lecture, that the country might be satisfied of the justice of our proceeding against him. There was laid to his charge his complaint against us at the council board, which he denied. Then we produced the copy of the bill exhibited by Sir Christopher Gardiner, etc., wherein we were charged with treason, rebellion, etc., wherein he was named as a party or witness. He denied that he had any hand in the information, only was called as a witness. To convince him to be the principal party, it was showed: 1. That Gardiner had no occasion to complain against us, for he was kindly used and dismissed in peace, professing much engagement for the great courtesy he found here. 2. Morton had set forth a book against us, and had threatened us, and had prosecuted a quo warranto against us, which he did not deny. 3. His letter was produced,[170] written soon after to Mr. Jeffreys, his old acquaintance and intimate friend.”

This passage is characteristic both of the man and of the time. The prisoner now arraigned before the magistrates had been set in the stocks, all his property had been confiscated, and his house had been burned down before his eyes. He had been sent back to England, under a warrant, to stand his trial for crimes it was alleged he had committed. In England he had been released from imprisonment in due course of law. Having now returned to Massachusetts, he was brought before the magistrates, “that the country might be satisfied of the justice of our proceeding against him.” As the result of this proceeding, which broke down for want of proof, the alleged offender is again imprisoned, heavily fined, and narrowly escapes a whipping. Under all these circumstances, it becomes interesting to inquire what the exact offence alleged against him was. It was stated by Winthrop. He had made a “complaint against us at the council board.”

“The council board” thus referred to was the royal Privy Council. It represented the king, the supreme power in the state, the source from whence the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company was derived. The complaint, therefore, charged to have been made, was made to the common superior, and it alleged the abuse, by an inferior, of certain powers and privileges which that superior had granted. It would seem to have been no easy task for the magistrates to point out, either to the prisoner or to the country it was proposed to satisfy, any prescriptive law, much less any penal statute, which made a criminal offence out of a petition to the acknowledged supreme power in the state, even though that petition set forth the alleged abuse of charter privileges.

But it is not probable that this view of the matter ever even suggested itself to Winthrop and his associates. It does not seem even to have been urged upon them by the prisoner. On the contrary he appears to have accepted the inevitable, and practically admitted that a complaint to the king was in Massachusetts, as Burdet had some years before asserted, “accounted a perjury and treason in our general courts,”[171] punishable at the discretion of the magistrates. Morton, therefore, denied having made the complaint, and the magistrates were unable to prove it against him. The most singular and unaccountable feature in the proceedings is that the New Canaan was not put in evidence. Apparently there was no copy of it to be had. Could one have been produced, it is scarcely possible that the avowed author of the libellous strictures on Endicott, then himself governor, should have escaped condign punishment of some sort from a bench of Puritan magistrates. But Winthrop merely mentions that he had “set forth a book against us,” and Maverick says that this was denied and could not be proved.[172] Had a copy of the New Canaan then been at hand, either in Boston or at Plymouth, a glance at the titlepage would have proved who “set [it] forth” beyond possibility of denial.

The only entry in the Massachusetts records relating to this proceeding is as follows:—

“For answer to Thomas Morton petition, the magistrates have called him publicly, and have laid divers things to his charge, which he denies; and therefore they think fit that further evidence be sent for into England, and that Mr Downing may have instructions to search out evidence against him, and he to lie in prison in the mean time, unless he find sufficient bail.”[173]

This entry is from the records of the General Court, held in November 1644. Among the unpublished documents in the Massachusetts archives is yet another petition from Morton, bearing no date, but, from the endorsement upon it, evidently submitted to the General Court of May, 1645, six months later, when Dudley was governor. This petition is as follows:—

To the honored Court at Boston assembled:

The humble petition of Thomas Morton, prisoner.

Your petitioner craveth the favour of this honored Court to cast back your eies and behould what your poore petitioner hath suffered in these parts.

First, the petitioner’s house was burnt, and his goodes taken away.

Secondly, his body clapt into Irons, and sent home in a desperat ship, unvittled, as if he had been a man worthy of death, which appeared contrary when he came there.

Now the petitioner craves this further that you would be pleased to consider what is laid against him: (taking it for granted to be true) which is not proved: whether such a poore worme as I had not some cause to crawle out of this condition above mentioned.

Thirdly, the petitioner craves this favoure of you, as to view his actions lately towards New England, whether they have not been serviceable to some gentlemen in the country; but I will not praise my selfe.

Fourthly, the petitioner coming into these parts, which he loveth, on godly gentlemen’s imployments, and your worshipps having a former jelosy of him, and a late untrue intelligence of him, your petitioner has been imprisoned manie Moneths and laid in Irons to the decaying of his Limbs; Let your petitioner finde soe much favoure, as to see that you can passe by former offence, which finding the petitioner hopes he shall stand on his watch to doe you service as God shall enable him.

Upon this document, certainly humble enough in tone, appear the following endorsements:—

The house of Deputies desire the honored magistrates to return them a reason, wherefore the petitioner came not to his triall the last quarter Courte according to graunte (as they conceave) of a former petition presented to the Courte by him.

ROBT. BRIDGES.

The reason why he came not to his tryall was the not cominge of evidence out of England against him which we expect by the next ship.

THO: DUDLEY Gov^r

The house of Deputies have made choyce of Major Gibbons, and Captain Jennison to treate with the honored magistrates about this petition of Morton.

ROBT. BRIDGES.

Singularly enough the Major Gibbons to whom Morton’s petition was thus referred had, in former years, been one of his followers at Merry-Mount. He was a man of ability and energy, the whole of whose singular career, as traced in an interesting note of Palfrey’s, will not bear a too close scrutiny.[174] At the time of Morton’s arrest by Miles Standish, in 1629, Gibbons was probably one of those belonging to the Merry-Mount company who had then “gone up into the inlands to trade with the savages.”[175] During that summer he experienced religion in a quite unexpected way, and now, in 1645, while his old master was rotting in the Boston jail, Gibbons was a prosperous merchant, a deputy to the General Court, and “chief military officer of the train-band of the town.” Higher military honors and severe business vicissitudes were in store for him. It nowhere appears whether under these circumstances Major Gibbons had either the will or the ability to be of service to his former chief, and Winthrop is the only authority for what remains of Morton’s story. It is soon told.

“Having been kept in prison about a year in expectation of further evidence out of England, he was again called before the court, and after some debate what to do with him, he was fined 100 pounds, and set at liberty. He was a charge to the country, for he had nothing, and we thought not fit to inflict corporal punishment upon him, being old and crazy, but thought better to fine him and give him his liberty, as if it had been to procure his fine, but indeed to leave him opportunity to go out of the jurisdiction, as he did soon after, and he went to Acomenticus, and living there poor and despised, he died within two years after.”[176]

Morton himself asserted that the harsh treatment he underwent in prison, while waiting for that evidence from England which was to convict him of some crime, broke down his health and hastened his end. If he was indeed, as Maverick subsequently stated,[177] kept in jail and, as he himself says, in irons, through an entire New England winter, on the prison fare of those days, and without either fire or bedding, this seems wholly probable.

There was about Thomas Morton nothing that was remarkable. On the contrary he was one of a class of men common enough in the days of Elizabeth and the Stuarts to have found their way into the literature of the period, as well as into that more modern romance which undertakes to deal with it. It is the Alsatian Squire and Wildrake type. Morton chanced to get out of place. He was a vulgar Royalist libertine, thrown by accident into the midst of a Puritan community. He was unable or unwilling to accept the situation, or to take himself off; and hence followed his misfortunes and his notoriety. Had he in 1625, or even in 1629, gone to Virginia or to New York, he would have lived in quiet and probably died in poverty, leaving nothing behind to indicate that he had ever been. As it is, he will receive a mention in every history of America.

More recently also certain investigators, who have approached the subject from a Church of England point of view, have shown some disposition to adopt Morton’s cause as their own, and to attribute his persecution, not to his immoral life or illicit trade, but to his devotion to the Book of Common Prayer.[178] It is another article in the long impeachment of the founders of New England, and it has even been alleged that “it still remains for Massachusetts to do justice to Morton, who had his faults, though he was not the man his enemies, and notably Bradford, declared him to be.”[179]

The New English Canaan is the best and only conclusive evidence on this point. In its pages Morton very clearly shows what he was, and the nature of “his faults.” He was a born Bohemian, and as he passed on in life he became an extremely reckless but highly amusing old debauchee and tippler. When he was writing his book, Archbishop Laud was the head of the board of Lords Commissioners. On the action of that board depended all the author’s hopes. In view of this fact, there are, in the New Canaan, few more delightful or characteristic passages than that in which, describing his arrest by Standish, Morton announces that it was “because mine host was a man that endeavored to advance the dignity of the Church of England; which they, on the contrary part, would labor to vilify with uncivil terms; envying against the sacred Book of Common Prayer, and mine host that used it in a laudable manner amongst his family as a practice of piety.”[180]

The part he was endeavoring to play when he wrote this passage was one not very congenial to him, and he makes an awkward piece of work of it. The sudden tone of sanctimony which he infuses into the words quoted, hardly covers up the leer and gusto with which he had just been describing the drunkenness and debauchery of Merry-Mount,—how “the good liquor” had flowed to all comers, while “the lasses in beaver-coats” had been welcome “night and day;” how “he that played Proteus, with the help of Priapus, put their noses out of joint;” and how that “barren doe” became fruitful, who is mysteriously alluded to as a “goodly creature of incontinency” who had “tried a camp royal in other parts.” Though, from the point of view before alluded to, it has been asserted that the Massachusetts magistrates “invented ... insinuations respecting [Morton’s] treatment of [the Indian] women, whom, in reality, he had fought to instruct in the principles of religion,”[181]—though this and other similar assertions have been made with apparent gravity, yet it is impossible to read the third book of the New Canaan, saturated as it is with drunkenness, ribaldry and scoffing, without coming to the conclusion that Don Quixote, Rabelais and the Decameron are far more likely to have been in request at Merry-Mount than the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer.

Not that the New Canaan is in itself an obscene or even a coarse book. On the contrary, judged by the standard of its time, it is singularly the reverse. Indeed it is almost wholly free from either word or allusion which would offend the taste of the present day. Yet the writer of the New Canaan was none the less a scoffer, a man of undevout mind. As to the allegation that his devotion to the Church of England and its ritual was the cause of his arrest by the Plymouth authorities, the answer is obvious and decisive. Blackstone was an Episcopalian, and a devout one, retaining even in his wilderness home the canonical coat which told of his calling.[182] Maverick and Walford were Episcopalians; they lived and died such. The settlers at Wessagusset were Episcopalians. In the dwellings of all these the religious services of the times, customary among Episcopalians, were doubtless observed, for they were all religious men. Yet not one of them was ever in any way molested by the Plymouth people; but, on the contrary, they one and all received aid and encouragement from Plymouth. Episcopalians as they were, they all joined in dealing with Morton as a common enemy and a public danger; and such he unquestionably was. It was not, then, because he made use of the Common Prayer that he was first driven from the Massachusetts Bay; it was because he was a nuisance and a source of danger. That subsequently, and by the Massachusetts authorities, he was dealt with in a way at once high-handed and oppressive, has been sufficiently shown in these pages. Yet it is by no means clear that, under similar circumstances, he would not have been far more severely and summarily dealt with at a later period, when the dangers of a frontier life had brought into use an unwritten code, which evinced even a less regard for life than, in Morton’s case, the Puritans evinced for property.[183]

As a literary performance the New Canaan, it is unnecessary to say, has survived through no merits of its own. While it is, on the whole, a better written book than the Wonder-Working Providence, it is not so well written as Wood’s Prospect; and it cannot compare with what we have from the pens of Smith or Gorges,—much less from those of Winslow, Winthrop and, above all, Bradford. Indeed, it is amazing how a man who knew as much as Morton knew of events and places now full of interest, could have sat down to write about them at all, and then, after writing so much, have told so little. Rarely stating anything quite correctly,—the most careless and slipshod of authors,—he took a positive pleasure in concealing what he meant to say under a cloud of metaphor. Accordingly, when printed, the New Canaan fell still-born from the press, the only contemporaneous trace of it which can be found in English literature being Butler’s often quoted passage in Hudibras, in which the Wessagusset hanging is alluded to.[184] It is even open to question whether this reference was due to Butler’s having read the book. The passage referred to is in the second part of Hudibras, which was not published until 1664, twenty-seven years after the publication of the New Canaan. It is perfectly possible that Butler may have known Morton; for in 1637 the future author of Hudibras was already twenty-five years old, and Morton lingered about London for six or seven years after that. There are indications that he knew Ben Jonson;[185] and, indeed, it is scarcely possible that with his sense of humor and convivial tastes Morton should not often have met the poets and playwrights of the day at the Mermaid. If he and the author of Hudibras ever did chance to meet, they must have proved congenial spirits, for there is much that is Hudibrastic in the New Canaan. Not impossibly, therefore, the idea of a vicarious New England hanging dwelt for years in the brain of Butler, not as the reminiscence of a passage he had read in some forgotten book, but as a vague recollection of an amusing story which he had once heard Morton tell.

It is, indeed, the author’s sense of humor, just alluded to, which gives to the New Canaan its only real distinction among the early works relating to New England. In this respect it stands by itself. In all the rest of those works, one often meets with passages of simplicity, of pathos and of great descriptive power,—never with anything which was both meant to raise a smile, and does it. The writers seemed to have no sense of humor, no perception of the ludicrous. Bradford, for instance, as a passage “rather of mirth than of weight,” describes how he put a stop to the Christmas games at Plymouth in 1621. There is a grim solemnity in his very chuckle. Winthrop gives a long account of the penance of Captain John Underhill, as he stood upon a stool in the church, “without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close to his eyes,” and “blubbering,” confessed his adultery with the cooper’s wife.[186] Yet he evidently recorded it with unbroken gravity. Then, in 1644, he mentions that “two of our ministers’ sons, being students in the college, robbed two dwelling-houses, in the night, of some 15 pounds. Being found out, they were ordered by the governors of the college to be there whipped, which was performed by the president himself—yet they were about twenty years of age.”[187] If Morton had recorded this incident, he could not have helped seeing a ludicrous side to it, and he would have expressed it in some humorous, or at least in some grotesque way. Winthrop saw the serious side of everything, and the serious side only. In this he was like all the rest. Such solemnity, such everlasting consciousness of responsibility to God and man, is grand and perhaps impressive; but it grows wearisome. It is pleasant to have it broken at last, even though that which breaks it is in some respects not to be commended. A touch of ribaldry becomes bearable. Among what are called Americana, therefore, the New Canaan is and will always remain a refreshing book. It is a connecting link. Poor as it may be, it is yet all we have to remind us that in literature, also, Bradford and Winthrop and Cotton were Englishmen of the time of Shakespeare and Jonson and Butler.

It remains only to speak of the bibliography of the New Canaan, which at one time excited some discussion, and of the present edition. Written before the close of 1635, the New Canaan was printed at Amsterdam in 1637. It has been reprinted but once,—by Force, in the second volume of his American Tracts. The present is, therefore, the second reprint, and the first annotated edition. For a number of years it was supposed that copies of the book were in existence with an alternative titlepage, bearing the imprint of Charles Greene, and the date of 1632.[188] This supposition was, however, very carefully examined into by Mr. Winsor in the Harvard University Literary Bulletins (Nos. 9 and 10, 1878-9, pp. 196, 244), and found to be partially, at least, groundless. It was due to the fact that Force made his reprint from a copy of the book in his collection, now in the Library of Congress. That copy lacked a portion or the whole of the titlepage; and the missing parts seem to have been supplied, without mention of the fact being made, from the entry of the book under 1632 in White Kennet’s Bibliothecæ Americanæ Primordia. Apparently the error originated in the following way. The New Canaan was entered for copyright in the Stationers’ Registers in London, November 18, 1633, in behalf of Charles Greene, the printer. There is no reason to suppose that it was then completed, as it may have been entered by its title alone. If it was, however, completed in part in 1633, the internal evidence is conclusive that it was both revised[189] and added to[190] as late as 1634; and, indeed, the Board of Lords Commissioners for regulating Plantations, to which it is formally dedicated, was not created until April 10th of that year. Greene did not print the book; though, as will presently be seen, a certain number of copies may possibly have been struck off for him with titlepages of their own. The entry in the Stationers’ Registers was, however, afterwards discovered, and seems then to have supplied by inference the date of publication, which could not be learned from certain copies, the titlepages to which were defective or wanting. The dates given in Lowndes’s Manual would seem to be simply incorrect.[191] Meanwhile, for reasons probably of economy, though notice of publication had been given in London, the book was actually printed in Holland, and the regular titlepage reads: “Printed at Amsterdam by Jacob Frederick Stam, in the year 1637.” There are copies, however, the titlepages of which read: “Printed for Charles Greene, and are sold in Pauls Churchyard,” no date being given.[192] It is not known that these copies differ in any other respect from those bearing the usual imprint. The conclusion, therefore, would seem to be that, as already stated, a number of copies may have been struck off for Greene with a distinct titlepage. Properly speaking, however, there seems to have been but one edition of the book. With the exception of the Force titlepage, which has been shown to be erroneous, there is no evidence of any copy being in existence bearing an earlier date than the usual one of Amsterdam, 1637.

Copies of the New Canaan are extremely rare. Savage, in his notes to Winthrop (vol. i. p. *34), said that he had then, before 1825, never heard of but one copy, “which was owned by his Excellency John Q. Adams.” It is from that copy that the present edition is printed. Mr. Adams purchased it while in Europe prior to the year 1801. It was that copy also which was temporarily deposited in the Boston Athenæum in 1810, as mentioned in the Monthly Anthology of that date (vol. viii. p. 420), referred to in the Harvard University Library Bulletin, (No. 9, p. 196). The Rev. George Whitney, in his History of Quincy written in 1826, says (p. 11) that another “copy was lately presented to the Adams Library of the town of Quincy by the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris.”[193] In addition to these, some dozen or twenty other copies in all are known to exist in various public and private collections in America and Europe, several of which are enumerated in the Literary Bulletin just referred to.

Very many of the errors both in typography and punctuation, with which the New Canaan abounds, are obviously due to the fact that it was printed in Amsterdam. The original manuscript it would seem was no more legible than the manuscript of that period, as it has come down to us, is usually found to be. At best it was not easy to decipher. The copy of the New Canaan was then put in the hands of a compositor imperfectly, if at all, acquainted with English; and, if the proof-sheets were ever corrected by any one, they certainly were not corrected by the author or by a proof-reader really familiar with his writing, or even with the tongue in which he wrote. Accordingly pen flourishes were mistaken for punctuation marks, and these were inserted without any regard to the context; familiar words appeared in unintelligible shapes;[194] small letters were mistaken for capitals, and capitals for small letters, and one letter was confounded with another. In addition to these numerous mistakes in deciphering and following the manuscript, ordinary typographical errors are not uncommon; though in this respect the New Canaan is less marked by blemishes than under the circumstances would naturally be supposed.

Neither is this explanation of the curiously bad press-work of the New Canaan a mere conjecture. One other composition of Morton’s has come down to us in the letter to Jeffreys, preserved by Winthrop.[195] Let any one compare this letter with a chapter from the New Canaan, and he will see at once that, while both are manifestly productions from the same pen, they have been preserved under wholly different circumstances. Take, for instance, the following identical passages,—the one from the New Canaan and the other from the letter to Jeffreys, and they will sufficiently illustrate this point.

NEW CANAAN.

Book III. Chapter 31.

And now mine Host being merrily disposed, haveing past many perillous adventures in that desperat Whales belly, beganne in a posture like Ionas, and cryed Repent you cruell Seperatists repent, there are as yet but 40. dayes if Iove vouchsafe to thunder, Charter and the Kingdome of the Seperatists will fall a sunder: Repent you cruell Schismaticks repent.

LETTER TO JEFFREYS.

Savage’s Winthrop, vol. II. p. *190.

So that now Jonas being set ashore may safely cry, repent you cruel separatists, repent, there are as yet but forty days. If Jove vouchsafe to thunder, the charter and kingdom of the separatists will fall asunder. Repent you cruel schismatics, repent.

The letter to Jeffreys is curiously characteristic of Morton. It is written in the same inflated, metaphorical, enigmatic style as the New Canaan. It is, however, perfectly intelligible and even energetic. The reason is obvious. It was correctly copied by a man who understood what the writer was saying. Accordingly it is as clear as Winthrop’s own text. The New Canaan would have been equally clear had it been deciphered at the compositor’s form by a man with Winthrop’s familiarity with English.

There is some reason to think that the fancy for exact reproduction in typography has of late years been carried to an extreme. Not only have peculiarities of spelling, capitalization and type, which were really characteristic of the past, been carefully followed, but abbreviations and figures have been reproduced in type, which formerly were confined to manuscripts, and are certainly never found in the better printed books of the same period. It is certainly desirable in reprinting quaint works, which it is not supposed will ever pass into the hands of general readers, to have them appear in the dress of the time to which they belong. Indeed they cannot be modernized in spelling, the use of capitals, or even, altogether, in punctuation, without losing something of their flavor. Yet, this notwithstanding, there is no good reason why gross and manifest blunders, due to the ignorance of compositors and the carelessness of proof-readers, should be jealously perpetuated as if they were sacred things. This assuredly is carrying the spirit of faithful reproduction to fanaticism. It is Chinese.

The rule followed, therefore, in the present edition has been to reproduce the New Canaan as it appeared in the Amsterdam edition of 1637, correcting only the punctuation, and such errors of the press as are manifest and unmistakable. Very few changes have been made in the use of capitals, and those only where it is obvious that a letter of one kind in the copy was mistaken by the compositor for a letter of another kind. An example of this is found at the top of page *14, where “Captaine Davis’ fate,” in the author’s manuscript, is made to appear as “Captain Davis Fate,” in the original text. The compositor evidently mistook the small f, written with the old-fashioned flourish, for an initial capital. The spelling has in no case been changed except where the error, as in the case already cited of “muit” for “mint,” is manifestly due to printers’ blunders. Mistakes of the press, such as “legg” for “logg” (p. *77) and “vies” for “eies” (p. *152), have been made right wherever they could be certainly detected.

No conjectural readings whatever have been inserted in the text. The few passages, not more than four or five in number, in which, owing probably to the failure of the compositor to decipher manuscript, the meaning of the original is not clear, are reproduced exactly. No liberties whatever have been taken with the original edition in these cases, and all guesses which are indulged in as to the author’s meaning, whether by the editor or others, are confined to the notes. In a few places the text is obviously deficient. Words necessary to the meaning are omitted in printing. Wherever these have been conjecturally inserted, the inserted words are in brackets. In a very few cases, words, which could clearly have found their way into the original only through inadvertence, have been omitted. Attention is called in the notes to every such omission.

The effort in the present edition has, in short, been to make it a reproduction of the New Canaan; but the reproduction was to be an intelligent, and not a servile one.

NEW ENGLISH CANAAN
OR
NEW CANAAN.

Containing an Abstract of New England,
Composed in three Bookes.

The first Booke setting forth the originall of the Natives, their Manners and Customes, together with their tractable Nature and Love towards the English.

The second Booke setting forth the naturall Indowments of the Country, and what staple Commodities it yealdeth.

The third Booke setting forth, what people are planted there, their prosperity, what remarkable accidents have happened since the first planting of it, together with their Tenents and practise of their Church.

Written by Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inne gent, upon tenne yeares knowledge and experiment of the Country.

Printed at AMSTERDAM,
By JACOB FREDERICK STAM.
In the Yeare 1637.

To the right honorable, the Lords and others of his Majesties most honorable privy Councell, Commissioners, for the Government of all his Majesties forraigne Provinces.[196]

Right honorable,

The zeale which I beare to the advauncement of the glory of God, the honor of his Majesty, and the good of the weale publike hath incouraged mee to compose this abstract, being the modell of a Rich, hopefull and very beautifull Country worthy the Title of Natures Masterpeece, and may be lost by too much sufferance. It is but a widowes mite, yet [{4}] all that wrong and rapine hath left mee to bring from thence, where I have indevoured my best, bound by my allegeance, to doe his Majesty service. This in all humility I present as an offering, wherewith I prostrate my selfe at your honorable footstoole. If you please to vouchsafe it may receave a blessing from the Luster of your gracious Beames, you shall make your vassaile happy, in that hee yet doth live to shew how ready hee is, and alwayes hath bin, to sacrifice his dearest blood, as becometh a loyall subject, for the honor of his native Country. Being

your humors humble vassaile
Thomas Morton.

The Epistle to the Reader.

GENTLE READER,

I present to the publike view an abstract of New England, which I have undertaken to compose by the incouragment of such genious spirits as have been studious of the inlargment of his Majesties Territories; being not formerly satisfied by the relations of such as, through haste, have taken but a superficiall survey thereof: which thing time hath enabled mee to performe more punctually to the life, and to give a more exact accompt of what hath been required. I have therefore beene willing to doe my indevoure to communicat the knowledge which I have gained and collected together, by mine owne observation in the time of my many yeares residence in those parts, to my loving Country men: For the better information of all such as are desirous to be made partakers of the blessings of God in that fertile Soyle, as well as those [{8}] that, out of Curiosity onely, have bin inquisitive after nouelties. And the rather for that I have observed how divers persons (not so well affected to the weale publike in mine opinion), out of respect to their owne private ends, have laboured to keepe both the practise of the people there, and the Reall worth of that eminent Country concealed from publike knowledge; both which I have abundantly in this discourse layd open: yet if it be well accepted, I shall esteeme my selfe sufficiently rewardded for my undertaking, and rest,

Your Wellwisher.
Thomas Morton.

In laudem Authoris.

T’ Excuse the Author ere the worke be shewne

Is accusation in it selfe alone;

And to commend him might seeme oversight;

So divers are th’ opinions of this age,

So quick and apt, to taxe the moderne stage,

That hard his taske is that must please in all:

Example have wee from great Cæsars fall.

But is the sonne to be dislik’d and blam’d,

Because the mole is of his face asham’d?

The fault is in the beast, not in the sonne;

Give sicke mouthes sweete meates, fy! they relish none.

But to the sound in censure, he commends

His love unto his Country; his true ends,

To modell out a Land of so much worth

As untill now noe traveller setteth[197] forth;

Faire Canaans second selfe, second to none,

Natures rich Magazine till now unknowne.

Then here survay what nature hath in store,

And graunt him love for this. He craves no more.

R. O. Gen.

Sir Christoffer Gardiner, Knight.[198]
In laudem Authoris.

This worke a matchles mirror is, that shewes

The Humors of the seperatiste, and those

So truely personated by thy pen.

I was amaz’d to see’t; herein all men

May plainely see, as in an inter-lude,

Each actor figure; and the scæne well view’d

In Comick,[199] Tragick, and in a pastorall strife,[200]

For tyth of mint[201] and Cummin, shewes their life

Nothing but opposition gainst the right

Of sacred Majestie: men full of spight,

Goodnes abuseing, turning vertue out

Of Dores, to whipping, stocking, and full bent

To plotting mischeife gainst the innocent,

Burning their houses, as if ordained by fate,

In spight of Lawe, to be made ruinate.

This taske is well perform’d, and patience be

Thy present comfort, and thy constancy

Thine honor; and this glasse, where it shall come,

Shall sing thy praises till the day of doome.

Sir C. G.

In laudem Authoris.

Bvt that I rather pitty, I confesse,

The practise of their Church, I could expresse

Myselfe a Satyrist, whose smarting fanges

Should strike it with a palsy, and the panges

Beget a feare to tempt the Majesty

Of those, or mortall Gods. Will they defie

The Thundring Jove? Like children they desire,

Such is their zeale, to sport themselves with fire:

So have I seene an angry Fly presume