The Puritan settlement at Boston having been accomplished, the domain of Merry-Mount became part of the Puritan jurisdiction, and one of Endecott’s first acts was to go to the Mount, cut down the Maypole, and admonish the forlorn little band “to look ther should be better walking.” The surviving members of Morton’s company had not been attracting attention in any way, and Endecott’s visit was simply an outlet to the man’s hunger to punish. He was presently, for a very minor offence, to cut off the ears of an unfortunate home-sick Englishman, a member of the Church of England, who had been so browbeaten by “the saints” that he was half a madman. One of the saints in England ventured to send a warning to the New England brethren that there were already “diverse complaintes against the severity of your government, especially Mr. Indicutts, and that he shall be sent for over, about cutting off the Lunatick man’s ears.”
This thin-lipped man, with the icy and merciless eyes,—his portrait may be seen on the walls of the Massachusetts Historical Society,—was presently to judge the “Lord of Misrule.” For Thomas Morton was once more in his “Canaan.” While in London, he had been of service to Isaac Allerton, an agent of Plymouth Colony, and Allerton had outraged Plymouth by bringing back the disturber. There is still something mysterious about this return with Allerton; it may be that Morton arranged it for the sake of its irony.
From Plymouth, Morton went boldly to his property at the Merry-Mount, and with great courage ventured to brave the Puritan tyranny. At a general court in Salem, he very rightly refused to sign some hodgepodge of the Mosaic law and English custom which the saints intended as a kind of constitution, making his assent conditional on the addition of the words,—“So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the laws of the Kingdom of England.”
The refusal marked him for destruction. Now comes his arrest and trial on the most trivial of charges; he had, so the saints protested, “taken away a canoe from some Indians.” A delightful touch of Puritan love for the redskin. “Charges,” wrote Mr. Charles Francis Adams, who was no partisan of Morton’s, “which amount to absolutely nothing.” What chance had this English gentleman, who knew himself to be a subject of King Charles and whose soul was still a subject of Elizabeth, in this court composed of seventeenth century Englishmen labouring under the extraordinary delusion that they were primitive Jews of the Arabian desert? Once more the man of Cliffords was condemned, set in the stocks, his property confiscated, and he was sent to England penniless and half-starved for lack of money to buy food.
Nothing can excuse this brutal, inhuman, and lawless condemnation. Now comes a typical Puritan touch of vindictiveness. His persecutors waited till the vessel carrying Morton to England came in sight of Merry-Mount, and then set the house at the Mount afire, so that their victim might see the destruction of his property. “That the habitation of the wicked appear no more in Israel” wrote Winthrop sententiously. Was there ever anything more heartless?
Poor “Mine Host” of the festal Maypole! “The smoake that did ascend,” said he, “appeared to be the very sacrifice of Kain. Mine Host (that a farre of abourd a ship did there behold this woeful spectacle) knew not what he should doe in this extremity but beare and forbeare as Epectetus says: it was bootless to exclaime.... The stumpes and postes in their black livery will mourne.” And he cried, “Cruell Schismaticks!”
A campaign of slander now followed the violence, and it was whispered about that the Lord of Misrule had been sent for on “a foule suspition of murther.” There is no trace of any warrant, there is no trace of crime committed by Morton; the one actual fact is that the English authorities again delivered the prisoner. The source of the libel has recently been uncovered; it was the pretty thought of Morton’s delightful stepson! As Morton continued to live in England quite unmolested, though with a vindictive enemy at his heels, it may be safely said that the whole slanderous attack was a pure fabrication. Tested in England, the scene of the supposed high crimes and misdemeanours, the slanderous charges evaporate into unlovely wisps of Puritan malice and the imagination of a blackguard being sued by his sister for withholding her marriage portion.
Years pass, the last of Elizabeth’s Merry England melts away, Oberon and Titania forsake the moonlit glade, and a sullen and apprehensive England rises against its Stuart king. An old man in his seventies watches the tumult, his eyes full of memories. Far away from the storm, over the wide Atlantic, lies new Canaan where the sun itself is like Rosa Solis, where the tawny braves walk the trails of the greenwood, the sea birds feed by the marsh, and the plover rises piping from the grass. His Forest of Arden! And Merry-Mount is there where he played Mine Host, raised the antlered Maypole, and proclaimed an English holiday. He will return there again with his “dogge” and fowling piece; he is old now, and even the Puritan magistrate will be content to let him spend his old age roaming the fields. Little he knew the Puritan mind!
In the summer of 1643, he lands at Plymouth; one party is in favor of handing him over at once to the Boston magistrates; Governor Bradford, however, himself along in years, will suffer him to spend the winter in the Plymouth jurisdiction. The next spring, in compliance with this condition, the old man leaves Plymouth, and travels about; he goes to Rhode Island and to Maine. As he goes, Endecott watches him like a hawk. There comes some unlucky slip, a moment’s entrance, perhaps, into the Massachusetts jurisdiction; the warrant is already at hand, and the old Lord of Misrule is once more in the hands of his old persecutor. Again he was brought to trial before Winthrop and Endecott. On trial for what? For having, in England, “made a complaint against us at the council board.” How a criminal offence could be manufactured out of an English subject’s proper appeal to the head of the state did not worry Winthrop or his fellow casuists. They were both the law and the judges of the law. Some of the “evidence” had been collected by Winthrop’s pretty trick of opening his opponents’ letters.