Morton’s own account of “this outragious riot,” as he calls it, is contained in the fifteenth chapter of the third book of the New Canaan.[59] It differs considerably from Bradford’s, but not in essentials. He says that the occurrence took place in June; and as Bradford’s letters of explanation, sent with the prisoner to England, are dated the 9th of June,[60] it must have been quite early in the month. He further says that he was captured in the first place at Wessagusset, “where by accident they found him;” but escaping thence during the night, through the carelessness of those set on guard over him, he made his way in the midst of a heavy thunder-storm to Mount Wollaston, going up the Monatoquit until he could cross it. The whole distance from point to point was, for a person familiar with the country, perhaps eight miles. Getting home early the next morning he made his preparations for resistance in the way described by Bradford. Of the whole party at Merry-Mount more than half, four apparently, were then absent in the interior getting furs. This fact, indeed, was probably well known to his neighbors, who had planned the arrest accordingly. Standish, having eight men with him, followed Morton round to Mount Wollaston, probably by water, the morning succeeding his escape; and what ensued seems to have been sufficiently well described by Bradford. One at least of the Merry-Mount garrison got extremely tipsy before the attacking party appeared, and Morton, seeing that resistance was hopeless, surrendered, after in vain trying to make some terms for himself.

Having been arrested he was at once carried to Plymouth, and a council was held there to decide upon the disposition to be made of him. According to his own account certain of the magistrates, among whom he specially names Standish, advocated putting him to death at once, and so ending the matter. They were not in favor of sending him to England. Such a course as this was, however, wholly out of keeping with the character of the Plymouth colony, and it is tolerably safe to say that it was never really proposed. Morton imagined it; but he also circumstantially asserts that when milder councils prevailed, and it was decided to send him to England, Standish was so enraged that he threatened to shoot him with his own hand, as he was put into the boat.[61]

Either because they did not care to keep him at Plymouth until he could be sent away, or because an outward-bound fishing-vessel was more likely at that season to be found at the fishing-stations, Morton was almost immediately sent to the Isles of Shoals. He remained there a month; and of his experiences during that time he gives a wholly unintelligible account in the New Canaan.[62] At last a chance offered of sending him out in a fishing-vessel bound to old Plymouth, England. He went under charge of John Oldham, who was chosen to represent the associated planters in this matter, and who carried two letters, in the nature of credentials, prepared by Governor Bradford, the one addressed to the Council for New England and the other to Sir Ferdinando Gorges personally.[63] In these letters Bradford set forth in detail the nature of the offences charged against Morton, and asked that he might be brought “to his answer before those whom it may concern.” These letters were signed by the chiefs of the several plantations, at whose common charge the expenses of Oldham’s mission, as well as Standish’s arrest, were defrayed, and towards this charge they contributed as follows, though Bradford says the total cost was much more:—

Oldham and Morton reached Plymouth during the later summer or early autumn of 1628. They must, therefore, have passed the outward-bound expedition of Endicott, the forerunners of the great Puritan migration of 1630-7, in mid-ocean, as on the 6th of September the latter reached Naumkeag. The grant of the Massachusetts Company, which Endicott represented, had been regularly obtained from the Council for New England, and bore date the 19th of March, 1628. It covered the sea-front within the space of three English miles to the northward of the Merrimack and to the southward of the Charles, “or of any and every part of either of these streams;” while it extended “from the Atlantick and Western Sea and Ocean on the East Parte, to the South Sea on the West Parte.” It also included everything lying within the space of three miles to the southward of the southernmost part of Massachusetts, by which was meant Boston Bay.[65] It was clear, therefore, that Mount Wollaston was included in this grant.

Morton’s establishment was thus brought within Endicott’s government. Its existence and character must already have been well known in England, and it is not at all improbable that its suppression had been there decided upon. Whether this was so or not, however, Endicott certainly learned, as soon as he landed at Naumkeag, of the action which had been taken three months before. It commended itself to him; though he doubtless regretted that more condign punishment had not been administered to Morton and his crew on the spot, and did not delay to take such steps as were still in his power, to make good what in this respect had been lacking. As Bradford says, “visiting those parts [he] caused that May-polle to be cutt downe, and rebuked them for their profannes, and admonished them to looke ther should be better walking; so they now, or others, changed the name of their place againe, and called it Mounte-Dagon.”[66]

Morton and Oldham, meanwhile, were in England. As Oldham bore letters to Gorges and landed at Plymouth, of which place the latter then was and for many years had been the royal governor, there can be no doubt that Morton was at once brought before him. As respects New England Gorges’s curiosity was insatiable. Any one who came from there, whether a savage or a sea-captain, was eagerly questioned by him; and his collection of charts, memoirs, letters, journals and memorials, relating to the discovery of those parts, is said to have been unequalled.[67] Oldham and Morton had lived there for years. They knew all that was then known about the country and its resources. They both of them had unlimited faith in its possibilities, and talked about an hundred per cent profit within the year, as if it were a thing easily compassed.[68] Talk of this kind Gorges liked to hear. It suited his temperament; and it would seem not improbable that Morton soon found this out, and bore himself accordingly.

Meanwhile it was not possible for the Council for New England and the Massachusetts Company to long move in harmony. The former was an association of courtiers, and the latter one of Puritans. The Council planned to create in the New World a score or two of great feudal domains for English noblemen; the Company proposed to itself a commonwealth there. Accordingly difficulties between the two at once began to crop out. The original grant to the Company of March 19, 1628, had been made by the Council, with the assent of Gorges. The tract already conceded to Robert Gorges, in 1622, was included in it; but Sir Ferdinando insisted that the subsequent and larger grant was made with a distinct saving of all rights vested under the prior one.[69] This the Company was not prepared to admit; and, as the business of the Council was habitually done in a careless slipshod way, the record was by no means clear. A question of title, involving some three hundred square miles of territory in the heart of the Company’s grant, was therefore raised at once.

Captain Robert Gorges meanwhile had died, and the title to his grant had passed to his brother John. It would seem that Oldham, who was a pushing man, had come out to England with some scheme of his own for obtaining a patent from the Council, and organizing a strong trading company to operate under it. The result was that John Gorges now deeded to him a portion of the Robert Gorges grant, being the whole region lying between the Charles and the Saugus rivers, for a distance of five miles from the coast on the former and three miles on the latter. This deed may and probably did bear a date, January 10, 1629, similar to that of another deed of a yet larger tract out of the same grant, which John Gorges executed to Sir William Brereton. The lands thus conveyed were distinctly within the limits covered by the grant to the Massachusetts Company, and a serious question of title was raised. The course now pursued by the Company could not but have been singularly offensive to Gorges. They outgeneralled him in his own field of action. They too had friends at court. Accordingly they went directly to the throne. A royal confirmation of their grant from the Council was solicited and obtained. On the 4th of March, 1629, King Charles’s charter of the Massachusetts Company passed the seals.

It now became a race, for the actual possession of the disputed territory, between the representatives of the Company on the one side and the Gorges grantees on the other. The former, under advice of counsel, denied the validity of the Robert Gorges grant of 1622. It was, they claimed, void in law, being “loose and uncertain.”[70] They instructed Endicott to hurry a party forward to effect an actual occupation. This he at once did; and the settlement of Charlestown, in the summer of 1629, was the result. Meanwhile Oldham, having in vain tried to coax or browbeat the Company into an arrangement satisfactory to himself, was endeavoring to fit out an expedition of his own.[71] He had not the means at his disposal; and, convinced of this at last, he gave up the contest.

At an early stage in these proceedings he would seem to have wholly lost sight of so much of the business he had in hand as related to Thomas Morton. Bradford’s expression, in referring to what took place, is that Morton “foold” Oldham.[72] Morton himself, however, says[73] that Oldham did the best he could, and tried to set the officers of the law at work, but was advised that Morton had committed no crime of which the English courts could take cognizance. He had at most only disregarded a proclamation. All this seems very probable. Nevertheless, for violating a proclamation, he could at that time have been proceeded against in the Star Chamber. It is true that in their decision in 1610, already referred to,[74] the twelve judges had said, “Lastly, if the offence be not punishable in the Star Chamber, the prohibition of it by proclamation cannot make it punishable there.”[75] This, however, was the language of the bench in the days of James, when Coke was Chief Justice. In 1629 the current of opinion was running strongly in the opposite direction. Sir Nicholas Hyde, as Chief Justice, was then “setting law and decency at defiance” in support of prerogative,[76] and a few years later Sir John Finch was to announce “that while he was Keeper no man should be so saucy as to dispute these orders” of the Lords of the Council.[77] Law or no law, therefore, Morton could easily have been held to a severe account in the Star Chamber, had Gorges been disposed to press matters against him there. He clearly was not so disposed. The inference, therefore, is that Morton had succeeded in thoroughly ingratiating himself with Gorges; and Oldham, as he was now a grantee of Gorges’s son, did not see his account in pressing matters. Accordingly Bradford’s letters and complaints were quietly ignored; and his “lord of misrule,” and head of New England’s first “schoole of Athisme,”[78] escaped without, so far as could be discovered, even a rebuke for his misdeeds.

Nor was this all. Isaac Allerton was at that time in London, as the agent of the Plymouth colony. The most important business he had in hand was to procure a new patent for the Plymouth people, covering by correct bounds a grant on the Kennebec, with which region they were now opening a promising trade. They also wanted to secure, if possible, a royal charter for themselves like that which had just been issued to the Massachusetts Company. In the matter of the patent, Allerton had to deal with the Council for New England; the granting of the charter lay at Whitehall. Altogether it was a troublesome and vexatious business, and the agent soon found that he could make no headway except through favor. The influence of Gorges became necessary. In the light of subsequent events it would seem altogether probable that Morton now made himself useful. At any rate, when Allerton returned to New England, in 1629, with the patent but without a charter, he astonished and scandalized the Plymouth community by bringing Morton back with him. They apparently landed sometime in August,[79] and we have two accounts of Morton’s reception at Plymouth; one his own, and the other Governor Bradford’s. Both are characteristic. Morton says that

Bradford, looking at the transaction from the other point of view, says:—

In view of Morton’s escape from all punishment in England, and his return a little later to Mount Wollaston, Bradford speaks of the trouble and charge of his arrest as having been incurred “to little effect.”[82] This, however, was not so. On the contrary, it is not often that an act of government repression produces effects equally decisive. The nuisance was abated and the danger dispelled; the fact that there was a power on the coast, ready to assert itself in the work of maintaining order, was established and had to be recognized; and, finally, a wholly unscrupulous competitor was driven out of trade. These results were well worth all that Morton’s arrest cost, and much more.

It does not appear how long Morton now remained at Plymouth. It could not, however, have been more than a few weeks before Allerton, who himself went back to England the same season, was, as Bradford puts it, “caused to pack him away.” He then returned to Mount Wollaston, where he seems to have found a remnant of his old company,—apparently the more modest of them and such as had looked to their better walking. Hardly, however, had he well gotten back when he was in trouble with Endicott. The first difficulty arose out of the jealousy which existed between the “old planters,” as they were called, and those who belonged to the Massachusetts Company. The old planters were the very men who had associated themselves, eighteen months before, to bring about the suppression of the establishment at Mount Wollaston. Now they also were beginning to feel the pressure of authority, and they did not like it. In their helpless anger they even spoke of themselves as “slaves” of the new Company.[83] They could no longer plant what they chose or trade with whom they pleased.

On these points Endicott had explicit instructions. They were contained in the letters of Cradock of April 17 and May 28, 1629, which are to be found in Young’s Chronicles of Massachusetts, and contain the policy of the company, set forth in clear vigorous English. In pursuance of those instructions, Endicott seems to have summoned all the old planters dwelling within the limits of the patent to meet in a General Court at Salem, sometime in the latter part of 1629. There he doubtless advised them as to the policy which the Company intended to pursue; and Morton says that he then tendered all present for signature certain articles which he and the Rev. Samuel Skelton had drawn up together. The essence of those articles was that in all causes, ecclesiastical as well as political, the tenor of God’s word should be followed.[84] The alternative was banishment.

Morton claims that he alone of those present refused to put his hand to this paper, insisting that a proviso should first be added in these words, “So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the laws of the Kingdom of England.” These are almost the exact words of King Charles’s charter;[85] and it would seem as though Morton, in proposing them, sought an opportunity to display his legal acumen. Whether his suggestion was adopted, and the articles modified accordingly, does not appear. It probably was, though the change was not one which Endicott would have looked upon with favor. If he assented to it he certainly did so grimly. The matter of regulating the trade in beaver skins was next brought up. This was intended to be a Company monopoly, to meet the charge of providing churches and forts.[86] It was accordingly proposed that a sort of general partnership for the term of one year should be effected to carry it on. Morton says that on this matter also he stood out, and it seems altogether probable that he did. It is safe to say that he was there to make whatever trouble he could. On the other hand it was not possible for Endicott to mistake his instructions. They were as plain as words could make them. He was to see to it that “none be partakers of [the Company’s] privileges and profits, but such as be peaceable men, and of honest life and conversation, and desirous to live amongst us, and conform themselves to good order and government.” And further, if any factious spirit developed itself he was enjoined “to suppress a mischief before it take too great a head ... which, if it may be done by a temperate course, we much desire it, though with some inconvenience, so as our government and privileges be not brought in contempt.... But if necessity require a more severe course, when fair means will not prevail, we pray you to deal as in your discretions you shall think fittest.” Such instructions as these, in Endicott’s hands to execute, boded ill for Morton.

Matters soon came to a crisis. Morton paid no regard to the Company’s trade regulations. The presumption is that he was emboldened to take the course he now did by the belief that he would find support in England. He unquestionably was informed as to all the details of the trouble between the Massachusetts Company and the Council for New England, and knew that Oldham, whom he by the way speaks of as “a mad Jack in his mood,”[87] held a grant from John Gorges, and was straining every nerve to come out and take adverse possession of the territory covered by it. He probably hoped, day by day, to see Oldham appear at the head of a Gorges expedition. There is reason to suppose that he was himself at this time an agent of Gorges,—that, indeed, he had come back to New England as such, and was playing a part very much like that of a spy. He was certainly in such correspondence with Sir Ferdinando as the means of communication permitted, and the confidant of his plans.[88]

When, therefore, he offered all the opposition to Endicott which he dared, and thwarted him so far as he could, he was not acting for himself alone. He represented, in a degree at least, what in England was a powerful combination. Accordingly, with an over-confidence in the result born of his sanguine faith in the power and influence of his patron, he now seems to have gone back to the less objectionable of his old courses. He did not renew the trade in fire-arms and ammunition, for he probably had none to spare, and experience had taught him how dangerous it was. He did, however, deal with the savages as he saw fit, and on his own account, openly expressing his contempt for Endicott’s authority, and doing all he could to excite the jealousy and discontent of the “old planters.”[89] His own profits at this time were, he says, six and seven fold.

This state of things could not continue. Accordingly, as the year drew to a close, Endicott made an effort to arrest him. Morton, however, was now on his guard. Getting wind of what was intended, he concealed his ammunition and most necessary goods in the forest; and, when the messengers, sent across the bay to seize him, landed on the beach at the foot of Mount Wollaston, he was nowhere to be found. He says that they ransacked his house, and took from it all the provender they could find; but when they were gone he replenished his supplies with the aid of his gun, and “did but deride Captain Littleworth, that made his servants snap shorte in a country so much abounding with plenty of foode for an industrious man.” This happened about Christmas, 1629.[90]

Could Endicott now have laid hands upon him there can be little room for doubt that Morton would have been summarily dealt with; but for the present the deputy-governor’s attention was otherwise occupied. This was that winter of 1629-30, the famine and sickness of which came so near to bringing the Salem settlement to a premature end. During that struggle for existence the magistrate had no time to attend to Morton’s case. But he was not the man to forget it.

With the following summer the great migration, which was to fix the character of New England, began. Instead of a vessel fitted out for Oldham under the patronage of Gorges, the Mary & John, chartered by the Massachusetts Company and having on board 140 passengers from the West of England, anchored off Hull on the 30th of May. A fortnight later Governor Winthrop reached Salem, and on the 17th of June he also came into Boston Harbor; and Morton, from Mount Wollaston, must have watched his vessel with anxious eyes as, in full view from his house, it made its way up the channel to the mouth of the Mystic. He must also have realized that its appearance in those waters boded him no good.

In a few days more the whole fleet, numbering twelve sail in all, was at anchor off Charlestown, and the work of discharging passengers was going actively on. Of these there were nearly a thousand;[91] and now the busy and fatal summer experience of 1630 was fairly entered upon.

For a few weeks longer Morton continued to live undisturbed at Mount Wollaston. The confusion and bustle of landing, and afterwards the terror and sense of bereavement which followed hard on pestilence, protected him. It was not until the 23d of August, or the present 2d of September, that the magistrates held any formal session. They then met at the great house at Charlestown,[92] as it would seem, Winthrop, Dudley, Saltonstall, Pynchon, Bradstreet and others being present. After some more important business had been disposed of, “It was ordered, that Morton, of Mount Woolison, should presently be sent for by processe.”[93] Of the circumstances of his arrest under the warrant thus issued Morton has given no account. Apparently he felt it was useless to try to evade the messengers, and resistance was wholly out of the question. At the next session of the magistrates, held two weeks later, on what would now be the 17th of September, he was formally arraigned. In addition to those already named as being at the earlier meeting, Endicott was now present. He had probably come down from Salem to give his personal attention to Morton’s case. It must from the outset have been apparent to the prisoner that the tribunal before which he stood was one from which he had nothing to hope. The proceedings were in fact summary. It would seem, from his own account of them,[94] that he endeavored to humble himself, and, that failing, he made a sort of plea to the jurisdiction of the Court. Neither submission nor plea produced any effect. On the contrary he was apparently cut short in his defence and his protest by impatient exclamations, and even bidden to hold his peace and hearken to his sentence. It appears in the records as follows:—

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.

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.

The plan now matured by Gorges was a large one. He had no idea of being balked of the prize which it had been the dream and the effort of his life to secure. He meant yet to grasp a government for himself, and an inheritance for his children, in New England. So far as the settlement of that country was concerned, what he for thirty years had been vainly ruining himself to bring about was now accomplishing itself; but it was accomplishing itself not only without his aid, but in a way which gravely threatened his interests. The people who were swarming to New England refused to recognize his title, and abused and expelled his agents. It was clear that the Council for New England was not equal to dealing with such a crisis. It was necessary to proceed through some other agency. The following scheme was, therefore, step by step devised.

The territory held under the great patent of the Council for New England extended from Maine to New Jersey. This whole region was, by the action of the Council, to be divided in severalty among its remaining members, and the patent was then to be surrendered to the King, who thereupon was to confirm the division just made.[121] The Council being thus gotten out of the way, the King was to assume the direct government of the whole territory, and was to appoint a governor-general for it. Sir Ferdinando Gorges was to be that governor-general.[122] He would thus go out to his province clothed with full royal authority; and the issue would then be, not between the settlers of Massachusetts, acting under the King’s charter, and that “carcass in a manner breathless,” the Council for New England, but between a small body of disobedient subjects and the King’s own representative. The scheme was a well-devised one. It was nothing more nor less than the colonial or New England branch of Strafford’s “Thorough.” It was a part, though a small part, of a great system.

The first step in carrying out the programme was to secure the appointment of the Commission of April 10. The influence of the Archbishop being assured, there was no difficulty in this. The board was composed of twelve members of the Privy Council. Laud himself was at the head of it, and with him were the Archbishop of York, the Earls of Portland, Manchester, Arundel and Dorset, Lord Cottington, Sir Thomas Edmunds, Sir Henry Vane, and Secretaries Cooke and Windebank. Any five or more of these Commissioners were to constitute a quorum, and their powers were of the largest description. They could revoke all charters previously granted, remove governors and appoint others in the places of those removed, and even break up settlements if they deemed it best so to do. They could inflict punishment upon all offenders, either by imprisonment, “or by loss of life or member.” It was in fact a commission of “right divine.” It embodied the whole royal policy of King Charles, as formulated by Wentworth and enforced by Laud. The new Commission was not slow in proceeding to its appointed work, and the potency of Gorges’s influence in it was shown by his immediate designation as governor-general.[123] How close Morton then stood to him may be inferred from the following letter, which shows also that he was well informed as to all that was going on.[124] It was written exactly three weeks after the appointment of the Commission, and was addressed to William Jeffreys at Wessagusset:—