IV
“There is a time for reaping and a time for sowing,” and for Thomas Morton a time for drinking the wine of life’s good pleasure. It is clear that the poet vagabond decided to enjoy life and, like Ecclesiastes, “prove his heart with mirth.” He had come to his years of philosophy, his path of life had led him to a glorious land, and a world of new adventures and impressions had cleansed from memory a past of tumult and bitterness. Master Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden was now his very own, and there was no enemy to be seen but winter and rough weather. This ripened desire to have joy of the good green earth took a characteristic and pleasant form,—the London advocate began to imagine himself as a genial host bidding his guests be merry, and sip their ale under the greenwood tree. This idea of himself presently took such a hold of the poet that he began to refer to himself as “Mine Host of Merry-Mount.”
For “Merry-Mount” it was; the name “Mount Wollaston” had gone by the board. Morton had christened the knoll at the head of the field “Ma-re Mount,” from the Latin noun meaning the sea, and he took an enormous pleasure in this ridiculous pun.
The golden reign on the Great Bay of the Massachusees! There was never a scarcity of food at the great log house on the knoll, for Morton was a keen sportsman, and soon taught his companions how to follow game. The country abounded in “turkies, which at divers times came in great flocks,” in venison and wild pigeons; the swift shadows of trout moved in every pool. “It was a noted custom at my House,” wrote my host, “to have every man’s duck upon a trencher.” There was wine to be had, probably purchased from trading vessels or distilled from the pagan New England wild grape, “good Rosa Solis,” the Rose of the Sun, a blessed name for an old wine with the day’s glory in the grape. “Mine Host” even began the old sport of falconry. “At my first arrival in these parts,” said he, “I practiced to take a lanneret, which I reclaimed, trained, and made flying in a fortnight, the same being a passenger at Michaelmas.” An odd fragment of history, this young New England hawk sent over seas to fly some English field!
Rarest touch of all, none need remain sad at the Merry-Mount. At the field “there was a water, by mee discovered, most excellent for the cure of melancholly.”
Trade flourished. The Elizabethan spirit, for all its poetic quality, was practical enough, and Morton was no middle-aged carousing ass, or befuddled idler. He found the furs he wanted because he sought them out, and because he had a country-born instinct for the ways of the natural world, an English sportsman’s training, and a genial humanity wide enough to include the Indians as members of the human race.
Unhappy Indians of the Great Bay of the Massachusees! Some terrible and unknown plague had descended upon them in the winter of 1616-17, and almost destroyed them from off the earth. They were a broken people, wandering about the lands of the ancestors like the ghosts of their race. In April, 1623, on very slight provocation, Standish had “massacred” seven of their men in cold blood; the word is that used by Charles Francis Adams. As Cotton Mather observed with charity eighty years later, “the woods were almost cleared of these pernicious creatures to make room for a better growth.”
Such were the forlorn, quiet, and broken people who found an understanding friend in the poet host of Merry-Mount. Like any good scholar of his day, he thought them possibly the relics of the scattered Trojans! “I am bold to conclude,” begins Mine Host, “that the original of the natives of New England may well be conjectured to be from the scattered Trojans after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.” He would not sell them drink, for he pitied them, and, moreover, he was no man to want a drunken savage shattering the pleasant notes of an old English pipe with a primitive strain. He told them that wine was among the English “a sachem’s drink.” He could not discern the religious-mindedness others had noted in the redskins. “For my part,” declared Mine Host, “I am more willing to beleeve that the Elephants (which are reported to be the most intelligible of all beasts) doe worship the moon.” “Poor, silly lambes,” he called the dispossessed and unfortunate creatures when they came to lament over their old benefactor sitting ignominiously in the Puritan stocks.
Presently rumours arrive from Plymouth; the brethren look with anger at the Mount. Morton’s five young exiled Englishmen are in their eyes, “a drunken and deboste crew”; Morton himself is the “lord of Misrule” maintaining a “school of atheism.” This last is patently a gibe at Morton’s religious affiliations. A stout churchman by temperament and conviction, Morton still held to the typical Elizabethan attitude that matters of religion were best decided by the great and the learned of the realm. In the good old Merry England days, for instance, Parliament had on several occasions re-defined the Deity and nobody had been a penny the worse.
Anger at Plymouth, where men are forbidden to rejoice at the ancient and beloved festival of Christmas, anger at Plymouth because there is merriment in the land as well as fear and stern repression, anger at Plymouth because the diligence and business shrewdness of the lawyer from Merry England has cut into their trade in furs. The shoe pinches, the shoe spiritual and the shoe worldly. Clouds begins to gather on the bright waters of the woodland bay.
The intense New England autumn comes with the first swift frost, the long winter follows, snow lies deep on the great field, and beyond the field, ice flats cover the bay to open water of the bitterest, coldest green. “The aire doth begett good stomacks,” said Mine Host of Merry-Mount. In the log house on the knoll, so many worlds apart in spirit from the log house by shallow Plymouth Bay, fires leap merrily, ducks turn on the spits, pannikins of wine grow warm on the embers’ edge; Morton sits with his hand over the arm of his chair, and strokes the head of his “dogge.” The Forest of Arden it is, and winter no such dread enemy after all.
Then, with its strange passion and violence, arrives the New England spring. The country gentleman from England will show the “precise separatists” how in Merry England of Church and King, is freely kept an honest holiday. The first of May is approaching; he will go to the wood and find a tree worthy to be the first Maypole in New England! Such a one shall brew a barrel of ale, and such one shall roll out the latest barrel of “good Rosa Solis” to the new born splendour of the sun!
The first of May in the year 1627, a fresh New England morning with the sky still cool and silvery blue, and the trees thrusting out little, cautious leaf tips “the size of a mouse’s ear.” Music in the greenwood, merry music with an honest tune, the old, sweet, human music one might hear in Master William Shakespeare’s comedies in London over the sea. As the light ripens over the tawny eastern marsh now interwoven with the faint emerald green of the new growth, and his good majesty the sun climbs into the bright New England air, “Mine Host” steps from his house of logs to proclaim an English holiday! Heigho, be jolly, under the greenwood tree, for icicles shall no more hang by the wall; it is the first of May!
The New England robins pipe, and cock their heads to one side as Mine Host reads his proclamation, and their piping dies in a great shout as the merry advocate completes the mock solemnity. Guests have already arrived, more are coming across the bay in their little boats, some are hastening to the Merry-Mount along the brambly woodland trails. The ever hungry crew from Wessagusset is at hand, stray planters arrived within the year, and perhaps the captain of a trading ship and his chorusing, sunburnt tars. One hears the music, the wholesome, natural gaiety, the knock of pewter mugs on wooden table tops, and men singing. To these exiles, the festival meant the first touch of home they had in the wilderness. That tall, soldier-like lad of Morton’s company, Tom Gibbons, will “get religion,” and end his days as a pillar of the Puritan state; little does he foresee such a change as he waves his pewter mug about! A health to Master Thomas Morton of the Merry-Mount, and a fig for all who doubt that laughter is the truest distinguishing mark twixt man and beast! “Mine Host” was well prepared, he had brewed a huge barrel of “excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other good cheare for all comers of the day.”
Higher climbs the spring tide sun, lower sinks the good liquor in “barrell and botel”; it is time to sweep together up the knoll to the Maypole of New England!
The pole lay upon the ground, on the height of a knoll commanding the field and the sea. It was a noble pine mast, some eighty feet high, wreathed about with flowers and garlands of the New England spring, and somewhere near the top of it, a fine pair of garlanded antlers served as a rustic crown. Amid a thousand, noisy, contradictory counsels the pole is raised, the gods alone know how, and now comes a young lad of Morton’s company to sing the song the merry advocate has composed in honor of the day.
“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes!
Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s ioyes;
Io to Hymen, now the day is come
About the merry Maypole take a Roome.
Make greene garlons; bring bottles out
And fill sweet nectar freely about.
Uncover thy head and feare no harme,
For hers good liquor to keepe it warme.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Nectar is a thing assign’d
By the Deities owne minde
To cure the hart opprest with greif,
And of good liquors is the chiefe.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Give to the mellancolly man
A cup or two of’t now and than;
This physic soone revive his bloud
And make him be of a merrier moode.
Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!
Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne,
No Irish stuff nor Scotch o’er worne,
Lasses in beaver coats come away
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.”
There is a stir in the greenwood at the close of the song, and through the bushes come trooping the last of the Massachusees. Morton had not forgotten his Indian neighbors. Tall, naked, coppery warriors, and Indian lasses in beaverskin coats have arrived to share in the merriment of Merry-Mount. English planter and Indian brave join hands, Morton seizes the brown fingers of two tawny princesses; all join hands, and round and about the pole dance the fantastic company mid the wild uproar of a drunkenly beaten drum, shouts, the thunderous roar of old-fashioned muskets, and the faint silvery piping of an English melody. Is there a stranger picture in all American history than this revel at the Merry-Mount, this glimpse of tawny bodies, beaver coats, English sailors in great Dutch breeches, and Morton, in his London best?
Nailed to the Maypole itself was a festival poem which “being Enigmattically composed pusselled the Separatists most pittifully to expound it.”
At nightfall there must have been many a befuddled head, and on the following morn, a sizeable crew at the spring so efficacious against the “melancholly.” But serious business was in the air, for the scandalised brethren of Plymouth had resolved on action, and Miles Standish was soon to descend on the disturber of Israel. The merry advocate knew where the wind lay. “The setting up of this Maypole,” he wrote in later years, “was a lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists who lived at New Plimmouth. They termed it an Idoll, yea, the Calfe of Horeb, and stood at defiance with the place naming it Mount Dagon, threatning to make it a woeful mount and not a merry-mount.”
It was Morton’s custom to go to Wessagusset once in a while, as he says, “to have the benefit of company,” and there Standish found and secured him. That he did not secure the poet well enough is apparent from the fact that Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn escaped that night from his captors, and made his way through a wild thunderstorm to his beloved Merry-Mount.
There was a tremendous to-do on finding that the “Lord of Misrule” had “flowne.” In “Mine Host’s” own words....
“The word which was given with an alarme, was,—o he’s gon!—he’s gon!—What shell wee doe, he’s gon!—the rest (halfe asleepe) start up in a maze, and, like rames, ran their heads one at another at full butt in the darke. Theire grand leader, Captaine Shrimpe, took on most furiosly to see the empty nest and the bird gon. The rest were eager to have torne theire haire from theire heads; but it was so short that it would give them no hold.”
Standish, however, returned to the Merry-Mount for his prisoner. Some kind of judicial legerdemain took place at Plymouth, and Morton was sent to England as prisoner. The specific charge against him was the sale of firearms to the Indians. The arrest was illegal, the whole process and the imprisonment an outrageous injustice, and there is not a scrap of real evidence to show that there was a word of truth in the specific charge. On Morton’s arrival in England, the English authorities recognised the true state of affairs, and instantly released the prisoner.
It had been wisely observed that Puritanism is not so much a form of religion as an attitude to life, and that there are Puritan sects in Islam as well as in eastern and western Christianity. A meeting of the mind which comes into the world already “Puritan,” and the mind which is liberal by temperament has always meant a struggle, and the first named has never troubled to make a declaration of war, but has offered instant battle to his soul’s antagonist. Once victorious, the repressive type has shown no mercy to victims of its aggression. The story of the merry man of the Merry-Mount is the tale of such a challenge and such a defeat. His May day revel was no orgy of “beastlie practices” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians,” nor did his verses “tend to lasciviousness”; it was simply an English country revel such as he must have often witnessed in his youth. And in historic justice to Morton, it ought to be remembered that the good fathers of Plymouth, ministering angels as they were beside the repressers at Boston, exemplified the “Puritan” attitude in every moment of their lives, that they had been difficult to deal with in England, and that they had on several occasions severely tried the tempers of their exceedingly tolerant hosts at Leyden. Theirs is a large documentation, and the facts are clear. Morton, moreover, suffered because he was a stray communicant of the Church of England. In his case Puritan antagonism for such as held a contrary attitude to life mingled with the odium theologicum to beget what began as injustice and ended as cruel persecution.
So ends the Maypole scene of the comedy. There was a sequel, for Morton returned. The beauty of the New England wilderness had stirred the heart of this vagabond country gentleman, and moreover, he had property and an investment to protect. During his stay in England, the Puritans under Endecott and Winthrop began the settlement of “the Great Bay of the Massachusees.” What happened to the merry-maker when he fell into such hands is a tale for philosophers.