Prospering in Rhode Island no more than at Plymouth, Morton is next heard of as a prisoner in Boston. How he came within the clutches of the Massachusetts magistrates is not known; his necessities or his assurance may have carried him to Boston, or he may have been pounced upon by Endicott’s officers as he was furtively passing through the province. In whatever way it came about, he was in custody on the 9th of September, just five weeks from the time of Coddington’s letter to Winthrop, and the latter then made the following entry in his Journal:[169]—

This passage is characteristic both of the man and of the time. The prisoner now arraigned before the magistrates had been set in the stocks, all his property had been confiscated, and his house had been burned down before his eyes. He had been sent back to England, under a warrant, to stand his trial for crimes it was alleged he had committed. In England he had been released from imprisonment in due course of law. Having now returned to Massachusetts, he was brought before the magistrates, “that the country might be satisfied of the justice of our proceeding against him.” As the result of this proceeding, which broke down for want of proof, the alleged offender is again imprisoned, heavily fined, and narrowly escapes a whipping. Under all these circumstances, it becomes interesting to inquire what the exact offence alleged against him was. It was stated by Winthrop. He had made a “complaint against us at the council board.”

“The council board” thus referred to was the royal Privy Council. It represented the king, the supreme power in the state, the source from whence the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company was derived. The complaint, therefore, charged to have been made, was made to the common superior, and it alleged the abuse, by an inferior, of certain powers and privileges which that superior had granted. It would seem to have been no easy task for the magistrates to point out, either to the prisoner or to the country it was proposed to satisfy, any prescriptive law, much less any penal statute, which made a criminal offence out of a petition to the acknowledged supreme power in the state, even though that petition set forth the alleged abuse of charter privileges.

But it is not probable that this view of the matter ever even suggested itself to Winthrop and his associates. It does not seem even to have been urged upon them by the prisoner. On the contrary he appears to have accepted the inevitable, and practically admitted that a complaint to the king was in Massachusetts, as Burdet had some years before asserted, “accounted a perjury and treason in our general courts,”[171] punishable at the discretion of the magistrates. Morton, therefore, denied having made the complaint, and the magistrates were unable to prove it against him. The most singular and unaccountable feature in the proceedings is that the New Canaan was not put in evidence. Apparently there was no copy of it to be had. Could one have been produced, it is scarcely possible that the avowed author of the libellous strictures on Endicott, then himself governor, should have escaped condign punishment of some sort from a bench of Puritan magistrates. But Winthrop merely mentions that he had “set forth a book against us,” and Maverick says that this was denied and could not be proved.[172] Had a copy of the New Canaan then been at hand, either in Boston or at Plymouth, a glance at the titlepage would have proved who “set [it] forth” beyond possibility of denial.

The only entry in the Massachusetts records relating to this proceeding is as follows:—

This entry is from the records of the General Court, held in November 1644. Among the unpublished documents in the Massachusetts archives is yet another petition from Morton, bearing no date, but, from the endorsement upon it, evidently submitted to the General Court of May, 1645, six months later, when Dudley was governor. This petition is as follows:—

Upon this document, certainly humble enough in tone, appear the following endorsements:—

Singularly enough the Major Gibbons to whom Morton’s petition was thus referred had, in former years, been one of his followers at Merry-Mount. He was a man of ability and energy, the whole of whose singular career, as traced in an interesting note of Palfrey’s, will not bear a too close scrutiny.[174] At the time of Morton’s arrest by Miles Standish, in 1629, Gibbons was probably one of those belonging to the Merry-Mount company who had then “gone up into the inlands to trade with the savages.”[175] During that summer he experienced religion in a quite unexpected way, and now, in 1645, while his old master was rotting in the Boston jail, Gibbons was a prosperous merchant, a deputy to the General Court, and “chief military officer of the train-band of the town.” Higher military honors and severe business vicissitudes were in store for him. It nowhere appears whether under these circumstances Major Gibbons had either the will or the ability to be of service to his former chief, and Winthrop is the only authority for what remains of Morton’s story. It is soon told.

Morton himself asserted that the harsh treatment he underwent in prison, while waiting for that evidence from England which was to convict him of some crime, broke down his health and hastened his end. If he was indeed, as Maverick subsequently stated,[177] kept in jail and, as he himself says, in irons, through an entire New England winter, on the prison fare of those days, and without either fire or bedding, this seems wholly probable.

There was about Thomas Morton nothing that was remarkable. On the contrary he was one of a class of men common enough in the days of Elizabeth and the Stuarts to have found their way into the literature of the period, as well as into that more modern romance which undertakes to deal with it. It is the Alsatian Squire and Wildrake type. Morton chanced to get out of place. He was a vulgar Royalist libertine, thrown by accident into the midst of a Puritan community. He was unable or unwilling to accept the situation, or to take himself off; and hence followed his misfortunes and his notoriety. Had he in 1625, or even in 1629, gone to Virginia or to New York, he would have lived in quiet and probably died in poverty, leaving nothing behind to indicate that he had ever been. As it is, he will receive a mention in every history of America.

More recently also certain investigators, who have approached the subject from a Church of England point of view, have shown some disposition to adopt Morton’s cause as their own, and to attribute his persecution, not to his immoral life or illicit trade, but to his devotion to the Book of Common Prayer.[178] It is another article in the long impeachment of the founders of New England, and it has even been alleged that “it still remains for Massachusetts to do justice to Morton, who had his faults, though he was not the man his enemies, and notably Bradford, declared him to be.”[179]

The New English Canaan is the best and only conclusive evidence on this point. In its pages Morton very clearly shows what he was, and the nature of “his faults.” He was a born Bohemian, and as he passed on in life he became an extremely reckless but highly amusing old debauchee and tippler. When he was writing his book, Archbishop Laud was the head of the board of Lords Commissioners. On the action of that board depended all the author’s hopes. In view of this fact, there are, in the New Canaan, few more delightful or characteristic passages than that in which, describing his arrest by Standish, Morton announces that it was “because mine host was a man that endeavored to advance the dignity of the Church of England; which they, on the contrary part, would labor to vilify with uncivil terms; envying against the sacred Book of Common Prayer, and mine host that used it in a laudable manner amongst his family as a practice of piety.”[180]

The part he was endeavoring to play when he wrote this passage was one not very congenial to him, and he makes an awkward piece of work of it. The sudden tone of sanctimony which he infuses into the words quoted, hardly covers up the leer and gusto with which he had just been describing the drunkenness and debauchery of Merry-Mount,—how “the good liquor” had flowed to all comers, while “the lasses in beaver-coats” had been welcome “night and day;” how “he that played Proteus, with the help of Priapus, put their noses out of joint;” and how that “barren doe” became fruitful, who is mysteriously alluded to as a “goodly creature of incontinency” who had “tried a camp royal in other parts.” Though, from the point of view before alluded to, it has been asserted that the Massachusetts magistrates “invented ... insinuations respecting [Morton’s] treatment of [the Indian] women, whom, in reality, he had fought to instruct in the principles of religion,”[181]—though this and other similar assertions have been made with apparent gravity, yet it is impossible to read the third book of the New Canaan, saturated as it is with drunkenness, ribaldry and scoffing, without coming to the conclusion that Don Quixote, Rabelais and the Decameron are far more likely to have been in request at Merry-Mount than the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer.

Not that the New Canaan is in itself an obscene or even a coarse book. On the contrary, judged by the standard of its time, it is singularly the reverse. Indeed it is almost wholly free from either word or allusion which would offend the taste of the present day. Yet the writer of the New Canaan was none the less a scoffer, a man of undevout mind. As to the allegation that his devotion to the Church of England and its ritual was the cause of his arrest by the Plymouth authorities, the answer is obvious and decisive. Blackstone was an Episcopalian, and a devout one, retaining even in his wilderness home the canonical coat which told of his calling.[182] Maverick and Walford were Episcopalians; they lived and died such. The settlers at Wessagusset were Episcopalians. In the dwellings of all these the religious services of the times, customary among Episcopalians, were doubtless observed, for they were all religious men. Yet not one of them was ever in any way molested by the Plymouth people; but, on the contrary, they one and all received aid and encouragement from Plymouth. Episcopalians as they were, they all joined in dealing with Morton as a common enemy and a public danger; and such he unquestionably was. It was not, then, because he made use of the Common Prayer that he was first driven from the Massachusetts Bay; it was because he was a nuisance and a source of danger. That subsequently, and by the Massachusetts authorities, he was dealt with in a way at once high-handed and oppressive, has been sufficiently shown in these pages. Yet it is by no means clear that, under similar circumstances, he would not have been far more severely and summarily dealt with at a later period, when the dangers of a frontier life had brought into use an unwritten code, which evinced even a less regard for life than, in Morton’s case, the Puritans evinced for property.[183]

As a literary performance the New Canaan, it is unnecessary to say, has survived through no merits of its own. While it is, on the whole, a better written book than the Wonder-Working Providence, it is not so well written as Wood’s Prospect; and it cannot compare with what we have from the pens of Smith or Gorges,—much less from those of Winslow, Winthrop and, above all, Bradford. Indeed, it is amazing how a man who knew as much as Morton knew of events and places now full of interest, could have sat down to write about them at all, and then, after writing so much, have told so little. Rarely stating anything quite correctly,—the most careless and slipshod of authors,—he took a positive pleasure in concealing what he meant to say under a cloud of metaphor. Accordingly, when printed, the New Canaan fell still-born from the press, the only contemporaneous trace of it which can be found in English literature being Butler’s often quoted passage in Hudibras, in which the Wessagusset hanging is alluded to.[184] It is even open to question whether this reference was due to Butler’s having read the book. The passage referred to is in the second part of Hudibras, which was not published until 1664, twenty-seven years after the publication of the New Canaan. It is perfectly possible that Butler may have known Morton; for in 1637 the future author of Hudibras was already twenty-five years old, and Morton lingered about London for six or seven years after that. There are indications that he knew Ben Jonson;[185] and, indeed, it is scarcely possible that with his sense of humor and convivial tastes Morton should not often have met the poets and playwrights of the day at the Mermaid. If he and the author of Hudibras ever did chance to meet, they must have proved congenial spirits, for there is much that is Hudibrastic in the New Canaan. Not impossibly, therefore, the idea of a vicarious New England hanging dwelt for years in the brain of Butler, not as the reminiscence of a passage he had read in some forgotten book, but as a vague recollection of an amusing story which he had once heard Morton tell.

It is, indeed, the author’s sense of humor, just alluded to, which gives to the New Canaan its only real distinction among the early works relating to New England. In this respect it stands by itself. In all the rest of those works, one often meets with passages of simplicity, of pathos and of great descriptive power,—never with anything which was both meant to raise a smile, and does it. The writers seemed to have no sense of humor, no perception of the ludicrous. Bradford, for instance, as a passage “rather of mirth than of weight,” describes how he put a stop to the Christmas games at Plymouth in 1621. There is a grim solemnity in his very chuckle. Winthrop gives a long account of the penance of Captain John Underhill, as he stood upon a stool in the church, “without a band, in a foul linen cap pulled close to his eyes,” and “blubbering,” confessed his adultery with the cooper’s wife.[186] Yet he evidently recorded it with unbroken gravity. Then, in 1644, he mentions that “two of our ministers’ sons, being students in the college, robbed two dwelling-houses, in the night, of some 15 pounds. Being found out, they were ordered by the governors of the college to be there whipped, which was performed by the president himself—yet they were about twenty years of age.”[187] If Morton had recorded this incident, he could not have helped seeing a ludicrous side to it, and he would have expressed it in some humorous, or at least in some grotesque way. Winthrop saw the serious side of everything, and the serious side only. In this he was like all the rest. Such solemnity, such everlasting consciousness of responsibility to God and man, is grand and perhaps impressive; but it grows wearisome. It is pleasant to have it broken at last, even though that which breaks it is in some respects not to be commended. A touch of ribaldry becomes bearable. Among what are called Americana, therefore, the New Canaan is and will always remain a refreshing book. It is a connecting link. Poor as it may be, it is yet all we have to remind us that in literature, also, Bradford and Winthrop and Cotton were Englishmen of the time of Shakespeare and Jonson and Butler.