The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes. Thomas MortonЧитать онлайн книгу.
suffer for it.”[163]
The Rigby referred to in this letter was Mr. Alexander Rigby, an English gentleman of wealth who, besides being a strong Puritan, was a member of the Long Parliament, and at one time held a commission as colonel in the army. Cleaves was the George Cleaves already mentioned as having come out in 1637, with a protection under the privy signet.[164] He had then appeared as an agent of Gorges, but subsequently he had got possession in Maine of the “Plough patent,” so called, under which the title to a large part of the province was claimed adversely to Gorges.[165] This patent Cleaves induced Rigby to buy, and the latter was now endeavoring to get his title recognized, and ultimately succeeded in so doing. Cleaves, as well as Morton, enjoyed the reputation of being “a firebrand of dissension,”[166] and the two had long acted together. As Gorges had joined his fortunes to the Royalist side, Morton clearly had nothing to gain by pretending at Plymouth to be his agent or under his protection. So he seems to have tried to pass himself off as a Commonwealth’s man, commissioned by Rigby to act in his behalf. Winslow was probably quite right in suspecting that this was all a pretence. Rigby’s claim was for territory in Maine. It is not known that he ever had any interests in Rhode Island or Connecticut. There can, in short, be little doubt that Morton was now nothing more than a poor, broken-down, disreputable, old impostor, with some empty envelopes and manufactured credentials in his pocket.
At Plymouth, as would naturally be supposed, Morton made no headway. But the province of Maine was then in an uneasy, troubled condition, and there was reported to be a strong party for the king in the neighborhood of Casco Bay. Thither accordingly Morton seems to have gone in June, 1644.[167] His movements were closely watched, and Endicott was notified that he would go by sea to Gloucester, hoping to get a passage from thence to the eastward. A warrant for his arrest was at once despatched, but apparently he eluded it; nor if he went there, which, indeed, is doubtful, did Morton long remain in Maine. In August he was in Rhode Island, and on the 5th of that month he is thus alluded to in a letter from Coddington to Winthrop:—
“For Morton he was [insinuating] who was for the King at his first coming to Portsmouth, and would report to such as he judged to be of his mind he was glad [to meet with] so many cavaliers; … and he had lands to dispose of to his followers in each Province, and from Cape Ann to Cape Cod was one. … And that he had wrong in the Bay [to the] value of two hundred pounds, and made bitter complaints thereof. But Morton would let it rest till the Governor came over to right him; and did intimate he knew whose roast his spits and jacks turned.”[168]
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]—
“At the court of assistants Thomas Morton was called forth presently after the lecture, that the country might be satisfied of the justice of our proceeding against him. There was laid to his charge his complaint against us at the council board, which he denied. Then we produced the copy of the bill exhibited by Sir Christopher Gardiner, etc., wherein we were charged with treason, rebellion, etc., wherein he was named as a party or witness. He denied that he had any hand in the information, only was called as a witness. To convince him to be the principal party, it was showed: 1. That Gardiner had no occasion to complain against us, for he was kindly used and dismissed in peace, professing much engagement for the great courtesy he found here. 2. Morton had set forth a book against us, and had threatened us, and had prosecuted a quo warranto against us, which he did not deny. 3. His letter was produced,[170] written soon after to Mr. Jeffreys, his old acquaintance and intimate friend.”
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:—
“For answer to Thomas Morton petition, the magistrates have called him publicly, and have laid divers things to his charge, which he denies; and therefore they think fit that further evidence be sent for into England, and that Mr. Downing may have instructions to search out evidence against him, and he to lie in prison in the mean time, unless he find sufficient bail.”[173]
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:—
To the honored Court at Boston assembled:
The humble petition of Thomas Morton, prisoner.
Your petitioner craveth the favour of this honored Court to cast back your eies and behould what your poore petitioner hath suffered in these parts.
First, the petitioner’s house was burnt, and his goodes taken away.
Secondly, his body clapt into Irons, and sent home in a desperat ship, unvittled, as if he had been a man worthy of death, which appeared contrary when he came there.
Now the petitioner craves this further that you would be pleased to consider what is laid against him: (taking it for granted to be true) which is not proved: whether such a poore worme as I had not some cause to crawle out of this condition above mentioned.
Thirdly, the petitioner