Part 6

Chapter 64,135 wordsPublic domain

The pause in England was brief, and in 1829 he returned to Italy, took a house in Florence, and busied himself bringing up his little daughter Zela, born to him of his Greek wife, and writing his autobiographical romance. It seems reasonably sure that sometime during these Italian years he proposed to Mary Shelley, but without success; the lady was not exactly a person to be an incident in anybody’s life. The pirate, now a man of forty, then translated his affections to Claire (Jane) Clairmont whom he had met at Lerici in the romantic days. This love affair by letter lasted for long years. Tre was still Tre the corsair and Byronic lover. “Yes, Jane,” he wrote, in a letter full of rhetoric and misspelling,—“much as endurance has hardened me, I must give you the consolation of knowing that you have inflicted on me indiscribable tortures.”...

This friendship had one unfortunate result; the lady hated Byron and his memory with an all consuming hate, and this poison spread to Trelawny’s mind, making him cruelly hostile to a man he had never understood.

England again, and then a voyage to the United States, the purchase of the freedom of a slave, and a swim in the Niagara River. At Niagara a ferryman muttered that he was all “tuckered out.” “How old are you?” cried Tre as he scrambled up the bank after his wild swim. “Thirty-eight,” replied the ferryman. “Then you are not worth a damn,” shouted the adventurer rudely. “You had better look out for the alms house!”

English society welcomed him back; Shelley was coming into his own, the Byron legend had taken root, the “Adventures of a Younger Son” had been a striking success, and all the English world was anxious to see the last of the great company. Picturesque, dark and Arabic as ever, and possessed of great physical strength, Tre moved among the mirrors, the teacups and the talk, spinning his wild yarns and blazing out in fine rhetorical damnations of all poppycock and snobbery. After 1846, he retired to Usk in Monmouthshire, married, and busied himself planting, building and teaching scientific husbandry.

The seventies found him the last survivor of the past though Byron’s giant gondolier, the romantic “Tita,” had grown old along with him. The Hercules had come to England, found a place with the Disraelis, and married Mrs. Disraeli’s maid.

Trelawny had now become venerable, grown a white beard, and brought up two sons and a daughter. The little Greek girl had married very happily. “Our friend Tre” was now a fierce, venerable, wild-eyed, magnificent old man full of opinionated notions on many subjects. He had taken to preaching natural living, the virtues of abstemiousness, and the folly of wearing heavy underwear. To the generation of Rossetti and Burne Jones, he was “Captain” Trelawny, the fiery ancient who had been a comrade and friend of the gods.

Joaquin Miller saw him at the Savage Club in London. “On one occasion,” wrote the Californian, “he came in while a winter storm was raging, and he must have been wet all through. But he would not drink with us. His collar was open after the fashion of Walt Whitman, and he had neither overcoat nor umbrella. He stood with his back to the fire, straight and strong as a mast, looked about over us in quiet disdain for a while, then took off his coat, hung it over the back of a chair by the fire, and sat by and watched it drying till the storm abated.” When Miller went to visit him, old Tre “insisted in a most mysterious tone of voice that he had blood from some extinct race of kings in his veins, and that he had in early days been a famous pirate.” At eighty-one, he met undaunted the unconquerable enemy. He rests beside Shelley in Rome.

What a life the great, bony, awkward boy had made for himself, what a quality of courage and defiance it has! The man would have fought the stars in the courses. Being what he was, he had to see life as a struggle, and the best of him lies in the way that he accepted every challenge with a singing joy. The fighting type of human being very often finds a certain robust satisfaction in life, and so it was with Trelawny. Whatever he had done, whatever he had been, life had been gloriously worth living under the sun. And is it not strange that the great adventure of this life of struggle and strange lands should have centred about a lamp-lit room in a villa in Italy, and a friendship with the most fragile and the unworldly being of his time?

_Four_: THOMAS MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT

In a little room built of brown logs, and with casement windows open to the sun and the sounds of early summer, the pilgrim elders of Plymouth sat at table discussing a scandal on the coast. The abomination was amongst them, the sighing after strange flesh, yea, the very Calf of Horeb! At a plantation on the sylvan shores of the Great Bay of the Massachusees (for so was Boston Harbor anciently known) there had been held a scandalous carousal, much “quaffing and drinking of wine and strong liquors” and “friskings” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians.”

So Morton of Merry-Mount, the Lord of Misrule, was still at his tricks! This vagabond lawyer from London, this poet whose verses “tended to lasciviousness,” this scholar who hurled Latin puns at the saints of the elect, had gone far enough. “A feast of the Romans goddess Flora” in their unprofaned and sanctified wilderness! Captain Standish shall bring this scoffer to the rod, and his immoral merriment shall be stamped upon and quenched as men quench the embers of a fire. Presently a drum sounds its note of authority in the Plymouth street, and Standish marches away on an expedition which is still echoing down New England history.

It is not difficult to imagine the scene in the log-built room, the sombre elders with their lips drawn thin and judgment in their eyes, the old, angry phrases of punishment and vengeance coined thousands of years before under the desert’s pitiless sky, the narrator of the events leaning forward to tell his unseemly news of the impious merriment, and in the lulls of quiet and shocked meditation, the trills of a New England cricket and the neighbourly talk of birds.

Morton of Merry-Mount, first of American defenders of cakes and ale, song, music and the dance! The tale of how this man from Shakespeare’s London scandalised the righteous of Massachusetts Bay, fought their tyrannous abuse of power, and set them by the ears with a defiant jollification is the first of American comedies. It begins with a prologue in old England, a manor house in a wooded English park, and the lamentations of a lady in distress.

Dame Alice Miller, widow of a well-to-do gentleman of Swallowfield in Berkshire, was in trouble and distress of mind,—she was at odds with her own son. This son, co-executor with his mother of his father’s will, was cruel, violent, and ungovernable; he had been summoned to court for throwing a neighbour’s wife out of her pew during a church service; he was now attempting to brutalise his mother into giving him full control of all inherited property. As the poor woman had the interest of five little daughters and a posthumous son to protect from this ruffian, her days were anything but happy ones. Driven to the very last wall, she engaged an attorney to protect her and her minor children. His name was Thomas Morton, and he had been bred to the law in London at Cliffords Inn.

In the year 1617, James I being on the British throne, this advocate, Thomas Morton, was a man a little over forty, of robust body, and of fair height and agreeable presence. He was a man to know something of the properties in the case, for he was himself of the landed gentry; his father had been a soldier of the old queen, and he had been brought up in the country in the style befitting the son of an English country gentleman. With his great boots rising to flaring tops, his Stuart dress, long hair, and hat with a plume, this advocate from London must have had somewhat the air of a Cavalier.

Actually, however, the Stuart dress misdated him, for Master Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn was like his client, Dame Alice, an Elizabethan born and bred.

An Elizabethan, the fact explains both the man and his adventures. The boyhood of this advocate with the plumed hat had been spent in an England which was still the Merry England of Shakespeare’s artisans and Oberon and Titania. Brought up as the son of an English country gentleman, he had known and spoken to Bottom and Peter Quince at the doors of their thatched cottages; he had shared in the field sports, the hunting and the falconry which were the pleasures of rural gentlefolk. From this Shakesperian countryside, the youth had passed to the little, glorious London of Elizabeth.

Outwardly, the London of the old Queen was still largely mediæval. The libraries were ancient and churchly, the taverns vast as the Tabard Inn of Chaucer’s pilgrimage, and the streets through which the bedizened old Queen moved in the pageantry she loved were narrow and puddly. The story of Raleigh’s cloak preserves no empty courtesy. Dwelling as a student of law in this city of the poets and the theatres, the spirit of the great yet vanishing age had possessed the young man from the country; he had its zest of life, its eagerness to find and make use of beauty, its adventurousness of the spirit and the flesh, its honest, earthly good humour, its literary conventions, and even its delightful pedantry. He read Don Quixote, the plays of Ben Jonson, and a quaint world of Latin writers whose names only scholars nowadays remember, and he may well have seen the Man from Stratford in the street.

One imagines the picture, the ancient, oaken room in the red brick manor, the quiet of England, and the drowsy murmur of the trees, the brocaded chairs, the distressed lady, and the lawyer from London gathering the case together with shrewdness and intelligence.

Now follow other conferences, time ripens, the courts are slow and the years are long. The case of Dame Alice Miller and her little children against their ruffianly kinsman becomes a thing of writs and counter writs, processes, summons, visitations and suits and counter suits.

Presently George Miller, the ruffian, hears news which causes him to burst into a rage of foul-mouthed oaths,—his mother has married the London advocate!

As the case had now been dragging on for some five years, the advocate can hardly be accused of artfully hurrying a distressed lady into marriage. Morton and his wife now moved to the manor-house, the case became a matter of “Thomas Morton et Ux” against George Miller, and the hatred which the ruffian had borne to his mother’s protector blazed up into fresh malignity. The point is important, for in this blackguard Morton’s relentless and cruel foes of the Puritan bay were to find an unexpected and valuable ally.

Matters now become more complicated than ever; there is talk of riots and assaults, the year 1623 arrives, and then, ... silence.

What had happened? No certain answer can be made, but everything seems to point to the death of Dame Alice Morton as having occurred in either 1623 or ’24. There were other complications as well. Certain decisions in the case had gone against Morton, and he had been slow to follow their decrees. The attitude is a not unnatural one for a man who has fought a long battle with a scoundrel, and loathes giving the smallest advantage to a vindictive and unchivalrous foe. Morton cannot be held guilty of having committed any serious breach of the law. Indeed in all this rather ugly and unnatural business, Thomas Morton’s conduct as an attorney and as a man of honour appears above reproach. His management of the case had been alert and aggressive, and he had shown a sound knowledge of seventeenth century law.

Now comes a second mystery,—Morton himself disappears. George Miller, succeeding to his mother’s inheritance, takes over the manor house in the ancient wood by Swallowfield, and finds his stepfather gone no one knows where. Nothing remains to tell of the advocate of Cliffords who stepped so strangely into this tangle of lives and wills; even his hunting dog has disappeared. Silence in the old house. One hears George Miller shout some dull-tongued foulness in a tone that is blend of anger and relief, and then away he rides, this prince of cads, wondering how he may best defraud the minor heirs.

Where was the man of Cliffords Inn? The Elizabethan adventurer in him had led him travelling. Did he seek forgetfulness? His wife dead, the long, turbulent dispute settled in a kind of way, had he sought to close a door on the makers of strife and the memories of disorder? He had surely vagabonded to the south, for he once set down this, “I am not of opinion with Aristotle, that the landes under _Torrida Zona_ are altogether uninhabited, I myself having been so neare to the equinoctiall line that I have had the sun for my Zenith.”

Suddenly he emerges again into the light of history. Something brings him in touch with one Captain Wollaston, an English trader who is fitting out a ship for a trading expedition to America. This Wollaston has gathered thirty young and youngish Englishmen, “his servants,” and with their labour he will establish a trading post on the still uninhabited coast of New England.

It is a day in the early spring of 1625, and Wollaston’s ship is going to sea. Upon the upper deck of the _Mayflower_-like vessel, stands the vagabond advocate, muffled in the great cloak of the period. A hunting dog stands near.

Surely Thomas Morton “of Cliffords Inn, Gent.” thus bidding farewell to England, must have remembered the manor at Swallowfield,—the woodsy afternoons and the long, long twilights, the hunts with dog and gun, the falcons leaping to the blue, and the call of the hunter’s horn far away in the forest,—the most beautiful, the most melancholy-golden music in the world. And because it was the early spring, perhaps he recalled to mind the May day revels of the village, the dance about the garlanded pole, the merry, rustic clowneries, and the shouts and laughter. Alas! something was happening to his Merry England. Bottom and Peter Quince had taken to reading the theology of St. Paul, and cracking each other’s pates over its precise interpretation. Whither might it not lead? Perhaps even to civil war.

Thomas Morton was accompanying Wollaston as an investor in the trading enterprise. He was now a man of robust middle age, nearer fifty than forty, and mellowed by years, books, and a genial philosophy of life.

Unless all signs fail, there was a copy of Don Quixote in his baggage. Little did he know that he was soon to have his own battle with the windmills!

III

“The Great Bay of the Massachusees,” for so was Boston Harbor anciently known, is a pleasant place with its long, whaleback islands, its countrified, hillocky shores, drumlin mounds, and inland glimpse of the little mountains known as the Blue Hills; it still retains something of a sylvan air; in 1625 it was a sylvan wilderness. Until very recent years, the most conspicuous feature of the bay was a vast field, almost a domain, sloping from a thicket of inland trees to the curving beach of the pleasant Quincy shore. In July, when the grass of the field had ripened to yellow hay, this pleasant open land poured down to the sea like a river mouth of gold. Cleared and cultivated, by the Indians long before the arrival of the whites, the old domain had that mellow quality which Nature sometimes assumes when long allied with man.

A pleasant field, for the presence of the sea dwelt there and was not terrible and alien,—a field in which the hot, earthy odours distilled by an August sun mingled pleasantly with the fragrance of salt meadows. The sea birds of the North knew it, and ran along the edge of the ebbing tide, shadows of gulls passed swiftly over its bending grass, the plover rose piping from the reeds, and there were pondlets in it, in tiny round hollows, by whose shores yellow-speckled turtles sunned their backs. The Indians called the field Passonagessit.

Such was the domain of open land which Wollaston, the English trader, saw upon the greenwood shore of the “Bay of Massachusees” on a morning in early summer in the year 1625. The wilderness was his alone. Save for a small and declining trading station established at Wessagusset on what is now the Weymouth shore, the sylvan bay was an uninhabited land. The great Puritan migration of 1630-31, which was to found the town of Boston, was still six years away, and only at Plymouth, some forty miles south along the coast, did the New England forest echo to the day-long sermon soon to thunder through the land.

The imagination rebuilds the scene of the landing, Wollaston’s vessel anchored off the field, the shallop and her little boats plying between her and the shore, the ferrying over of the indentured bondmen, all well sunburnt from their long voyage and longing for a smell of fresh victuals on their wooden plates, the unloading of the stores, “the implaments,” the ancient muzzle loading muskets and fowling pieces, and the bags of powder and ball. One sees Thomas Morton, in great-boots, cape and plume, coax his hunting dog into the boat, one hears the scrape of the keel upon the gravelly beach, and an excited barking—the advocate of Cliffords Inn and his cherished “dogge” have arrived in the new world.

Presently a brave ring of the axe,—a sound that echoes through American history,—floats down the field to the bay; houses and chimneys rise, and the little plantation takes shape in the Massachusetts wilderness.

The vagabond advocate, beholding the vast, unsullied greenwood, loved it with a devotion few have equalled. He wandered everywhere north and south, he visited Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, he went north beyond the beaches of New Hampshire to the surf and the ledges of Maine. It was in truth a noble wilderness, and to Thomas Morton it became a veritable promised land, a “New English Canaan.” His own “Bay of Massachusees” he thought “the paradise of those parts,” and meditating on its virtues, his mellow spirit broke into a fine, old-fashioned Elizabethan panegyric.

“The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel’d, for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty, fine, round, rising hillucks, delicate, faire, large plaines, sweet cristall fountaines, and cleare running streams that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmuring noise to hear as lull the senses with delight asleepe, so pleasantly do they glide upon the pebble stones....”

The very words, “the bewty of the place,” reveal the man; the style of the passage his Elizabethan attitudes. In later years, he was to celebrate his love of the American landscape in the rich, full-flowered English of an Elizabethan marriage song.

“If Art and Industry should doe as much As Nature hath for Canaan not such, Another place, for benefit and rest, In all the universe can be possest. The more we proove it by discovery, The more delight each object to the eye Procures as if the elements had here, Bin reconciled, and pleased it should appeare Like a faire virgin longing to be sped And meete her lover....”

There were others at the plantation, however, who did not share these poetic raptures. As the summer wore away, furs proved scarce, and the severe New England winter enclosed the silent land, Wollaston began to lose faith in his venture. At the return of spring, he had made his decision; he would hold on to the trading post, leave a few men there to care for it, and sell to planters in Virginia the time still due him from his bondsmen. A spring morning sees the two groups of “servants” bid each other farewell, and Wollaston’s ship pass from view of the trading post behind the wooded isles. And with his ship, Wollaston himself disappears, for there is no evidence that he ever returned to the shores of Boston Bay.

Thomas Morton, left behind in his beloved Canaan with five or six young English exiles, now assumed command of the trading post by the old Indian field; there was joy in Olympus, and the golden reign began.

“There is a time for reaping and a time for sowing,” and for Thomas Morton a time for drinking the wine of life’s good pleasure. It is clear that the poet vagabond decided to enjoy life and, like Ecclesiastes, “prove his heart with mirth.” He had come to his years of philosophy, his path of life had led him to a glorious land, and a world of new adventures and impressions had cleansed from memory a past of tumult and bitterness. Master Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden was now his very own, and there was no enemy to be seen but winter and rough weather. This ripened desire to have joy of the good green earth took a characteristic and pleasant form,—the London advocate began to imagine himself as a genial host bidding his guests be merry, and sip their ale under the greenwood tree. This idea of himself presently took such a hold of the poet that he began to refer to himself as “Mine Host of Merry-Mount.”

For “Merry-Mount” it was; the name “Mount Wollaston” had gone by the board. Morton had christened the knoll at the head of the field “_Ma-re Mount_,” from the Latin noun meaning the sea, and he took an enormous pleasure in this ridiculous pun.

The golden reign on the Great Bay of the Massachusees! There was never a scarcity of food at the great log house on the knoll, for Morton was a keen sportsman, and soon taught his companions how to follow game. The country abounded in “turkies, which at divers times came in great flocks,” in venison and wild pigeons; the swift shadows of trout moved in every pool. “It was a noted custom at my House,” wrote my host, “to have every man’s duck upon a trencher.” There was wine to be had, probably purchased from trading vessels or distilled from the pagan New England wild grape, “good _Rosa Solis_,” the Rose of the Sun, a blessed name for an old wine with the day’s glory in the grape. “Mine Host” even began the old sport of falconry. “At my first arrival in these parts,” said he, “I practiced to take a lanneret, which I reclaimed, trained, and made flying in a fortnight, the same being a passenger at Michaelmas.” An odd fragment of history, this young New England hawk sent over seas to fly some English field!

Rarest touch of all, none need remain sad at the Merry-Mount. At the field “there was a water, by mee discovered, most excellent for the cure of melancholly.”

Trade flourished. The Elizabethan spirit, for all its poetic quality, was practical enough, and Morton was no middle-aged carousing ass, or befuddled idler. He found the furs he wanted because he sought them out, and because he had a country-born instinct for the ways of the natural world, an English sportsman’s training, and a genial humanity wide enough to include the Indians as members of the human race.

Unhappy Indians of the Great Bay of the Massachusees! Some terrible and unknown plague had descended upon them in the winter of 1616-17, and almost destroyed them from off the earth. They were a broken people, wandering about the lands of the ancestors like the ghosts of their race. In April, 1623, on very slight provocation, Standish had “massacred” seven of their men in cold blood; the word is that used by Charles Francis Adams. As Cotton Mather observed with charity eighty years later, “the woods were almost cleared of these pernicious creatures to make room for a better growth.”