Unfortunately, Winthrop’s admonitory remarks in imposing this sentence have not been preserved. There is, however, in the New Canaan, an expression which apparently formed a part of them.[96] It is that in which it is assigned as a reason for the destruction of the house at Mount Wollaston, that “the habitation of the wicked should no more appear in Israel.” In compliance with the terms of this sentence, Morton was set in the stocks; and while there, he tells us, the savages came and looked at him, and wondered what it all meant. He was not, however, sent back to England in the Gift, as the master of that vessel declined to carry him; for what reason does not appear. It was not in fact until nearly four months after his arrest that a passage was secured for him in the Handmaid. Even then, Maverick afterwards stated that Morton, obdurate to the last, refused to go on board the vessel, upon the ground that he had no call to go there, and so had to be hoisted over her side by a tackle.[97] His house also was burned down; but the execution of this part of his sentence, he asserts,—and his assertion is confirmed by Maverick,—was vindictively delayed until he was on his way into banishment, when it was executed rather in his sight, it would seem, than in that of the savages. Of the voyage to England there is an account in the New Canaan that is rather more rambling and incoherent than is usual even with Morton.[98]
The Handmaid appears to have been unseaworthy, and insufficiently supplied. She had a long and tempestuous passage, in the course of which Morton came very near starving, no provision having been made for his subsistence except a very inadequate one out of his own supplies.
The second arrest of Morton was equally defensible with the first. According to his own account he had systematically made himself a thorn in Endicott’s side. He had refused to enter into any covenants, whether for trade or government, and he had openly derided the magistrate and eluded his messengers. This could not be permitted. He dwelt within the limits of the Massachusetts charter, and the Company was right when it instructed Endicott that all living there “must live under government and a like law.” It was necessary, therefore, that Morton should either give in his adhesion, or that he should be compelled to take himself off. This, however, was not the ground which the magistrates took. Nothing was said in the sentence of any disregard of authority or disobedience to regulation. No reference was made to any illicit dealings with the Indians, or to the trade in fire-arms. Offences of this kind would have justified the extreme severity of a sentence which went to the length of ignominious physical punishment, complete confiscation of property and banishment; leaving only whipping, mutilation or death uninflicted. No such offences were alleged. Those which were alleged, on the contrary, were of the most trivial character. They were manifestly trumped up for the occasion. The accused had unjustly taken away a canoe from some Indians; he had fired a charge of shot among a troop of them who would not ferry him across a river, wounding one and injuring the garments of another; he was “a proud, insolent man” against whom a “multitude of complaints were received, for injuries done by him both to the English and the Indians.”[99] Those specified, it may be presumed, were examples of the rest. They amount to nothing at all, and were afterwards very fitly characterized by Maverick as mere pretences. Apparently conscious of this, Dudley, the deputy-governor, in referring to the matter a few months later in his letter to the Countess of Lincoln, says that Morton was sent to England “for that my Lord Chief Justice there so required, that he might punish him capitally for fouler misdemeanors there perpetrated.” Bradford also, in referring to the matter, states that Morton was “vehemently suspected” of a murder, and that “a warrant was sent from the Lord Chief Justice to apprehend him.”[100]
There can be no doubt that there was a warrant from the King’s Bench against Morton in Winthrop’s hands,[101] but in all probability it was nothing more nor less than a sort of English lettre de cachet. Morton’s record in New England was perfectly well known in London at the time Winthrop was making his preparations to cross. His relations with Oldham and Gorges must often have been discussed at the assistants’ meetings, and they were not ignorant of the fact that he had gone back to Plymouth with Allerton. They must have suspected that he went back as an agent or emissary of Gorges, and they may have known that he so went back. In any event, they did not propose to have him live within the limits of their patent. He was an undesirable character. The warrant, therefore, was probably obtained in advance, on some vague report or suspicion of a criminal act, to be at hand and ready for use when needed.[102] It could not legally run into New England, any more than it could into Scotland or Ireland.[103] Then, and at no later time, would Winthrop have recognized it in any other case; and, even in this case, no reference is made to it in the colony records. Had it been so referred to, it might have been cited as a precedent.
Moreover such a requisition, though it might have warranted the return of Morton to England, certainly did not warrant the confiscation of all his property and the burning of his house in advance of trial and conviction there. In point of fact the requisition was a mere pretext and cover. The Massachusetts magistrates, so far as Morton was concerned, had made up their minds before he stood at their bar. He was not only a “libertine,” as they termed it, but he was suspected of being a spy. His presence at Mount Wollaston they did not consider desirable, and so they proposed to purge the country of him; and if not in one way, then in another. His case is not singular in Massachusetts annals; it is merely the first of its kind. It established a precedent much too often followed thereafter. Morton was one of those who, as it was expressed in a tract of the time printed in London, “must have elbow-roome, and cannot abide to be so pinioned with the strict government in the Commonwealth, or discipline in the church. Now why should such live there? As Ireland will not brooke venomous beasts, so will not that land [New England] vile persons and loose livers.”[104]
Many times, in the years which followed, the country was purged of other of these “vile persons and loose livers,” in much the same way that it was now purged of Morton. It may, however, well be questioned whether it ever derived benefit from the process. Certainly Morton’s case was as strong as any case well could be. There was absolutely nothing to be said in his favor. He was a lawless, reckless, immoral adventurer. And yet, as the result will show, in sending Morton back to England, the victim of high-handed justice, the Massachusetts magistrates committed a serious blunder. They had much better have left him alone under the harrow of their authority. At Mount Wollaston he was at worst but a nuisance. They drove him away from there and sent him back to London; and at Whitehall he became a real danger. This part of history is now to be told.
Bradford says, and he is generally correct in his statements, that when at last Morton reached England “he lay a good while in Exeter jail.”[105] There is no allusion to anything of the sort in the New Canaan; and it would not seem that he could have been very long a prisoner, as the next assizes and jail-delivery must have set him free. There could have been nothing on which to make him stand a trial. Accordingly the following year he was at liberty and busily concerned in Gorges’s intrigues for the overthrow of the Massachusetts charter.
The house in which Gorges lived—as formerly it had been the point of gathering of all who had visited the American coast, or could add anything to the stock of information concerning it—was now the headquarters for those who had any complaint to make or charges to prefer against the magistracy of Massachusetts. Acting in concert with Captain John Mason, the patentee of New Hampshire, he was exerting himself to the utmost to secure a revocation of King Charles’s charter. The attack was made on the 19th of December, 1632, and it was a formidable one. It assumed the shape of a petition to the Privy Council, asking the Lords to inquire into the methods through which the royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay had been procured, and into the abuses which had been practised under it. Besides many injuries inflicted on individuals in their property and persons, the Company was also charged with seditious and rebellious designs, subversive alike of church and of state. The various allegations were based on the affidavits of three witnesses,—Thomas Morton, Philip Ratcliff and Sir Christopher Gardiner. Behind these was the active and energetic influence of Gorges and Mason.[106]
It is not necessary in this connection to go into any detailed statement of the wrongs complained of by Ratcliff and Gardiner. They were of the same nature, though even more pronounced than those of Morton. The country had in fact been purged of all three of these individuals. The original document in which they set forth their cases, and made accusation against the magistrates, has unfortunately been lost. In referring to it afterwards Winthrop said that it contained “some truths misrepeated.”[107] Apart from severe judgments on alleged wrong-doers, including whipping, branding, mutilating, banishment and confiscation of property, the burden of the accusation lay in the disposition to throw off allegiance to the mother country, which was distinctly charged against the colony.
A harsh coloring was doubtless given in the petition to whatever could be alleged. So far as casting off their allegiance to the mother country was concerned, nothing can be more certain than that neither the leaders nor the common people of New England entertained at that time any thought of it; but it is quite equally certain that the leaders at least were deeply dissatisfied with the course public affairs were then taking in England. They were Puritans, and this was the period of the Star Chamber and the High Commission. No parliament had been called since 1629, and it was then publicly announced at Court that no more parliaments were to be called. There is no reason to suppose that the early settlers of Massachusetts were a peculiarly reticent race. On the contrary it is well known that they were much given to delivering themselves and bearing evidence on all occasions; and in doing so they unquestionably railed and declaimed quite freely against those then prominent in the council-chamber and among the bishops. That there was a latent spirit in New England ripe for rebellion was also, probably, asserted in the lost document. However Winthrop might deny it, and deny it honestly, this also was true; and subsequent events, both in Massachusetts and in England, showed it to be so. In the light of their sympathies and sufferings, Morton and Gardiner probably realized the drift of what they had heard said and seen done in New England a good deal better than Winthrop.