The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes. Thomas MortonЧитать онлайн книгу.
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
“Being ship’d againe for the parts of New Canaan, [he] was put in at Plimmouth in the very faces of them, to their terrible amazement to see him at liberty; and [they] told him hee had not yet fully answered the matter they could object against him. Hee onely made this modest reply, that he did perceave they were willfull people, that would never be answered: and he derided them for their practises and losse of laboure.”[80]
Bradford, looking at the transaction from the other point of view, says:—
“Mr. Allerton gave them great and just ofence in bringing over this year, for base gaine, that unworthy man, and instrumente of mischeefe, Morton, who was sent home but the year before for his misdemenors. He not only brought him over, but to the towne, (as it were to nose them,) and lodged him at his owne house, and for a while used him as a scribe to doe his bussines.”[81]
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,