The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes

by Thomas Morton

The result of the Morton-Gardiner petition was the appointment of a committee of twelve Lords of the Council, to whom the whole matter was referred for investigation and report. The committee was empowered to send for persons and papers and a long and apparently warm hearing ensued. The friends of the Company found it necessary to at once bestir themselves. Cradock, Saltonstall and Humfrey filed a written answer to the complaint, and subsequently, at the hearing, they received efficient aid from Emanuel Downing, Winthrop’s brother-in-law, and Thomas Wiggin, who lived at Piscataqua, but now most opportunely chanced to be in London.

At the Court of Charles I. everything was matter of influence or purchase. The founders of Massachusetts were men just abreast of their time, and not in advance of it. There is good ground on which to suspect that they did not hesitate to have recourse to the means then and there necessary to the attainment of their ends. It has never been explained, for instance, how the charter of 1629 was originally secured.[108] When Allerton, at the same time, tried to obtain a similar charter for the Plymouth colony, he found that he had to buy his way at every step, and Bradford complained bitterly of the “deale of money veainly and lavishly cast away.”[109] That the original patentees of Massachusetts bribed some courtier near the King, and through him bought their charter, is wholly probable. Every one bribed, and almost every one about the King took bribes. That the patentees had powerful influence at Court is certain; exactly where it lay is not apparent. The Earl of Warwick interested himself actively in their behalf. It was he who secured for them their patent from the Council for New England. But Warwick, though a powerful nobleman, was “a man in no grace at Court;” on the contrary, he was one of those “whom his Majesty had no esteem of, or ever purposed to trust.”[110] Winthrop says that in the Morton-Gardiner hearing his brother-in-law, Emanuel Downing, was especially serviceable.[111] Downing was a lawyer of the Inner Temple.[112] There is reason to suppose that he had access to influential persons,—possibly Lord Dorchester may have been amongst them.[113] However this may be, whether by means of influence or bribery, the hearing before the Committee of the Privy Council was made to result disastrously for the complainants. Gorges took nothing by his motion. In due time the Committee reported against any interference with the Company at that time. Such grounds of complaint as did not admit of explanation they laid to the “faults or fancies of particular men,” and these, they declared, were “in due time to be inquired into.” King Charles himself also had evidently been labored with through the proper channels, and not without effect. Not only did he give his approval to the report of the Committee, but he went out of his way to further threaten with condign punishment those “who did abuse his governor and the plantation.”

Gorges’s carefully prepared attack had thus ended in complete failure. The danger, however, had been great, nor was its importance underestimated in Massachusetts. This clearly appears in Winthrop’s subsequent action; for when, four months later, in May, 1633, information of the final action of the Council reached him, he wrote a letter of grave jubilation to Governor Bradford, giving him the glad news, and inviting him to join “in a day of thanksgiving to our mercifull God, who, as he hath humbled us by his late correction, so he hath lifted us up, by an abundante rejoysing in our deliverance out of so desperate a danger.”[114]

Though badly defeated, and for the time being no doubt discouraged, Gorges and Morton were not disposed to desist from their efforts. As the latter expressed it, they had been too eager, and had “effected the business but superficially.”[115] They had also committed the serious mistake of underestimating the strength and influence of their antagonists. If Gorges, however, was at home anywhere, he was at home just where he had now received his crushing defeat,—in the antechambers of the palace. All his life he had been working through Court influences. Through them, after the Essex insurrection, he had saved his neck from the block. If Court influence would have availed to secure it, in 1623 he would have pre-empted the whole territory about Boston Bay as the private domain of himself and his descendants. At Whitehall he was an enemy not lightly to be disregarded; and this Winthrop and his colleagues soon had cause to realize.

Thwarted by strong influences in one direction, Gorges went to work to secure stronger influences in another direction. He knew the ground, and his plan of operations was well conceived. To follow it out in detail is not possible. Here and there a fact appears; the rest is inference and surmise. The King was the objective point. Of him it is not necessary here to speak at length, for his character is too well understood. Dignified in his bearing, and in personal character purer than his times,—a devout, well-intentioned man,—Charles was a shallow, narrow-minded bigot, with a diseased belief in that divinity which doth hedge a king. He would have made an ideal, average English country gentleman. After the manner of small, obstinate men, he believed intensely in a few things. One was his own royal supremacy and his responsibility, not to his people but to his kingship. He was nothing of a statesman, and as a politician he was his own worst enemy. His idea of government was the Spanish one: the king had a prime-minister, and that prime-minister was the king’s other and second self. In Charles’s case Buckingham was at first prime-minister; and, when Buckingham was assassinated, he was in due time succeeded by Laud. Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, had not died until August 4, 1633, and a few days later Laud was appointed to succeed him. He thus became primate almost exactly eight months after the first attack on the charter. It was through him that Gorges now went to work to influence the King and to control the course of events in New England. His method can be explained in four words: Laud hated a Puritan.

At first the secret connection of Gorges and Morton with the events which now ensued is matter of pure surmise. There is no direct evidence of it in the records or narratives. At a later period it becomes more apparent. As a matter of surmise, however, based on the subsequent development of events, it seems probable that in February, 1634, the attention of the Archbishop, and through him that of the Privy Council, was called to the large emigration then going on to New England of “persons known to be ill-affected and discontented, as well with the civil as ecclesiastical government.”[116] As Gorges himself expressed it, “numbers of people of all sorts flocked thither in heaps.”[117] Several vessels, already loaded with passengers and stores, were then lying in the Thames. An Order in Council was forthwith issued staying these vessels, and calling upon Cradock to produce the Company’s charter. So far as the vessels were concerned it soon appeared that the Company was still not without friends in the Council; and, “for reasons best known to their Lordships,” they were permitted to sail.[118] Doubtless this detention, as the subsequent more rigid restraint, was “grounded upon the several complaints that came out of those parts of the divers sects and schisms that were amongst them, all contemning the public government of the ecclesiastical state.” Ratcliff was now looked upon as a lunatic,[119] and Gardiner had disappeared. Morton alone remained; and it is safe to surmise that he was the fountain-head of these complaints, as Gorges was the channel which conveyed them to Laud. As respects the charter, Cradock made reply to the order for its production that it was not in his hands,—that Winthrop, four years before, had taken it to New England. He was directed to send for it at once. Here the matter rested, and to all appearances Gorges had met with one more check. The release of the vessels was ordered on the last day of February, 1634.

A new move on the chess-board was now made by some one. Who that some-one was is again matter of surmise. Hitherto the few matters which from time to time came up, relating to the colonies, had been considered in the full Privy Council. There the Massachusetts Company had shown itself a power. Special tribunals, however, were at this juncture greatly in vogue at Whitehall. The Council of the North, the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, were in full operation. To them all political work was consigned, and in the two last Laud was supreme. Up to this time, however, the need of any special tribunal to look after the affairs of the colonies had not made itself felt. The historians of New England have philosophized a great deal over the considerations of state which, during the reign of Charles, dictated the royal policy towards New England;[120] but it is more than doubtful whether considerations of state had anything to do with that policy. The remoteness and insignificance of early New England, so far as the English Court was concerned, is a thing not easy now to realize. It may be taken for certain that King and Primate rarely gave a thought to it, much less matured a definite or rational policy. Their minds were full of more important matters. They were intent on questions of tonnage and poundage, on monopolies, and all possible ways and means of raising money; they were thinking of the war with Spain, of Wentworth’s Irish policy, of the English opposition, and the Scotch church system. So far as New England was concerned they were mere puppets to be jerked to and fro by the strings of Court influence,—now granting a charter at the instance of one man, and then restraining vessels at the instance of another,—defending “our governor” one day, and threatening to have his ears cropped the next.

In certain quarters it seems now, however, to have been decided that this condition of affairs was to continue no longer. A special tribunal should be created, to take charge of all colonial matters. This move seems to have grown out of the Order in Council of February 21, and to have been directed almost exclusively to the management of affairs in New England, whence complaint mainly came. Accordingly, on the 10th of April, a commission passed the great seal establishing a board with almost unlimited power of regulating plantations. Laud was at the head of it. There would seem to be every reason to assume that this tribunal was created at the suggestion of Laud, and in consequence of the undecided course pursued by the Council as a whole, two months before, in the matter of the detained vessels. A further inference, from what went before and what followed, is that Laud’s action was stimulated and shaped by Gorges. He was the active promoter of complaints and scandals from New England. In other words, the organization of this colonial board, through Laud’s influence and with Laud supreme in it, was Gorges’s first move in the next and most formidable attack on the charter of the Massachusetts Bay.