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.