An Elizabethan, the fact explains both the man and his adventures. The boyhood of this advocate with the plumed hat had been spent in an England which was still the Merry England of Shakespeare’s artisans and Oberon and Titania. Brought up as the son of an English country gentleman, he had known and spoken to Bottom and Peter Quince at the doors of their thatched cottages; he had shared in the field sports, the hunting and the falconry which were the pleasures of rural gentlefolk. From this Shakesperian countryside, the youth had passed to the little, glorious London of Elizabeth.
Outwardly, the London of the old Queen was still largely mediæval. The libraries were ancient and churchly, the taverns vast as the Tabard Inn of Chaucer’s pilgrimage, and the streets through which the bedizened old Queen moved in the pageantry she loved were narrow and puddly. The story of Raleigh’s cloak preserves no empty courtesy. Dwelling as a student of law in this city of the poets and the theatres, the spirit of the great yet vanishing age had possessed the young man from the country; he had its zest of life, its eagerness to find and make use of beauty, its adventurousness of the spirit and the flesh, its honest, earthly good humour, its literary conventions, and even its delightful pedantry. He read Don Quixote, the plays of Ben Jonson, and a quaint world of Latin writers whose names only scholars nowadays remember, and he may well have seen the Man from Stratford in the street.
One imagines the picture, the ancient, oaken room in the red brick manor, the quiet of England, and the drowsy murmur of the trees, the brocaded chairs, the distressed lady, and the lawyer from London gathering the case together with shrewdness and intelligence.
Now follow other conferences, time ripens, the courts are slow and the years are long. The case of Dame Alice Miller and her little children against their ruffianly kinsman becomes a thing of writs and counter writs, processes, summons, visitations and suits and counter suits.
Presently George Miller, the ruffian, hears news which causes him to burst into a rage of foul-mouthed oaths,—his mother has married the London advocate!
As the case had now been dragging on for some five years, the advocate can hardly be accused of artfully hurrying a distressed lady into marriage. Morton and his wife now moved to the manor-house, the case became a matter of “Thomas Morton et Ux” against George Miller, and the hatred which the ruffian had borne to his mother’s protector blazed up into fresh malignity. The point is important, for in this blackguard Morton’s relentless and cruel foes of the Puritan bay were to find an unexpected and valuable ally.
Matters now become more complicated than ever; there is talk of riots and assaults, the year 1623 arrives, and then, ... silence.
What had happened? No certain answer can be made, but everything seems to point to the death of Dame Alice Morton as having occurred in either 1623 or ’24. There were other complications as well. Certain decisions in the case had gone against Morton, and he had been slow to follow their decrees. The attitude is a not unnatural one for a man who has fought a long battle with a scoundrel, and loathes giving the smallest advantage to a vindictive and unchivalrous foe. Morton cannot be held guilty of having committed any serious breach of the law. Indeed in all this rather ugly and unnatural business, Thomas Morton’s conduct as an attorney and as a man of honour appears above reproach. His management of the case had been alert and aggressive, and he had shown a sound knowledge of seventeenth century law.