Four: THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT
I
In a little room built of brown logs, and with casement windows open to the sun and the sounds of early summer, the pilgrim elders of Plymouth sat at table discussing a scandal on the coast. The abomination was amongst them, the sighing after strange flesh, yea, the very Calf of Horeb! At a plantation on the sylvan shores of the Great Bay of the Massachusees (for so was Boston Harbor anciently known) there had been held a scandalous carousal, much “quaffing and drinking of wine and strong liquors” and “friskings” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians.”
So Morton of Merry-Mount, the Lord of Misrule, was still at his tricks! This vagabond lawyer from London, this poet whose verses “tended to lasciviousness,” this scholar who hurled Latin puns at the saints of the elect, had gone far enough. “A feast of the Romans goddess Flora” in their unprofaned and sanctified wilderness! Captain Standish shall bring this scoffer to the rod, and his immoral merriment shall be stamped upon and quenched as men quench the embers of a fire. Presently a drum sounds its note of authority in the Plymouth street, and Standish marches away on an expedition which is still echoing down New England history.
It is not difficult to imagine the scene in the log-built room, the sombre elders with their lips drawn thin and judgment in their eyes, the old, angry phrases of punishment and vengeance coined thousands of years before under the desert’s pitiless sky, the narrator of the events leaning forward to tell his unseemly news of the impious merriment, and in the lulls of quiet and shocked meditation, the trills of a New England cricket and the neighbourly talk of birds.
Morton of Merry-Mount, first of American defenders of cakes and ale, song, music and the dance! The tale of how this man from Shakespeare’s London scandalised the righteous of Massachusetts Bay, fought their tyrannous abuse of power, and set them by the ears with a defiant jollification is the first of American comedies. It begins with a prologue in old England, a manor house in a wooded English park, and the lamentations of a lady in distress.
II
Dame Alice Miller, widow of a well-to-do gentleman of Swallowfield in Berkshire, was in trouble and distress of mind,—she was at odds with her own son. This son, co-executor with his mother of his father’s will, was cruel, violent, and ungovernable; he had been summoned to court for throwing a neighbour’s wife out of her pew during a church service; he was now attempting to brutalise his mother into giving him full control of all inherited property. As the poor woman had the interest of five little daughters and a posthumous son to protect from this ruffian, her days were anything but happy ones. Driven to the very last wall, she engaged an attorney to protect her and her minor children. His name was Thomas Morton, and he had been bred to the law in London at Cliffords Inn.
In the year 1617, James I being on the British throne, this advocate, Thomas Morton, was a man a little over forty, of robust body, and of fair height and agreeable presence. He was a man to know something of the properties in the case, for he was himself of the landed gentry; his father had been a soldier of the old queen, and he had been brought up in the country in the style befitting the son of an English country gentleman. With his great boots rising to flaring tops, his Stuart dress, long hair, and hat with a plume, this advocate from London must have had somewhat the air of a Cavalier.
Actually, however, the Stuart dress misdated him, for Master Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn was like his client, Dame Alice, an Elizabethan born and bred.