Part 7

Such were the forlorn, quiet, and broken people who found an understanding friend in the poet host of Merry-Mount. Like any good scholar of his day, he thought them possibly the relics of the scattered Trojans! “I am bold to conclude,” begins Mine Host, “that the original of the natives of New England may well be conjectured to be from the scattered Trojans after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.” He would not sell them drink, for he pitied them, and, moreover, he was no man to want a drunken savage shattering the pleasant notes of an old English pipe with a primitive strain. He told them that wine was among the English “a sachem’s drink.” He could not discern the religious-mindedness others had noted in the redskins. “For my part,” declared Mine Host, “I am more willing to beleeve that the Elephants (which are reported to be the most intelligible of all beasts) doe worship the moon.” “Poor, silly lambes,” he called the dispossessed and unfortunate creatures when they came to lament over their old benefactor sitting ignominiously in the Puritan stocks.

Presently rumours arrive from Plymouth; the brethren look with anger at the Mount. Morton’s five young exiled Englishmen are in their eyes, “a drunken and deboste crew”; Morton himself is the “lord of Misrule” maintaining a “school of atheism.” This last is patently a gibe at Morton’s religious affiliations. A stout churchman by temperament and conviction, Morton still held to the typical Elizabethan attitude that matters of religion were best decided by the great and the learned of the realm. In the good old Merry England days, for instance, Parliament had on several occasions re-defined the Deity and nobody had been a penny the worse.

Anger at Plymouth, where men are forbidden to rejoice at the ancient and beloved festival of Christmas, anger at Plymouth because there is merriment in the land as well as fear and stern repression, anger at Plymouth because the diligence and business shrewdness of the lawyer from Merry England has cut into their trade in furs. The shoe pinches, the shoe spiritual and the shoe worldly. Clouds begins to gather on the bright waters of the woodland bay.

The intense New England autumn comes with the first swift frost, the long winter follows, snow lies deep on the great field, and beyond the field, ice flats cover the bay to open water of the bitterest, coldest green. “The aire doth begett good stomacks,” said Mine Host of Merry-Mount. In the log house on the knoll, so many worlds apart in spirit from the log house by shallow Plymouth Bay, fires leap merrily, ducks turn on the spits, pannikins of wine grow warm on the embers’ edge; Morton sits with his hand over the arm of his chair, and strokes the head of his “dogge.” The Forest of Arden it is, and winter no such dread enemy after all.

Then, with its strange passion and violence, arrives the New England spring. The country gentleman from England will show the “precise separatists” how in Merry England of Church and King, is freely kept an honest holiday. The first of May is approaching; he will go to the wood and find a tree worthy to be the first Maypole in New England! Such a one shall brew a barrel of ale, and such one shall roll out the latest barrel of “good _Rosa Solis_” to the new born splendour of the sun!

The first of May in the year 1627, a fresh New England morning with the sky still cool and silvery blue, and the trees thrusting out little, cautious leaf tips “the size of a mouse’s ear.” Music in the greenwood, merry music with an honest tune, the old, sweet, human music one might hear in Master William Shakespeare’s comedies in London over the sea. As the light ripens over the tawny eastern marsh now interwoven with the faint emerald green of the new growth, and his good majesty the sun climbs into the bright New England air, “Mine Host” steps from his house of logs to proclaim an English holiday! Heigho, be jolly, under the greenwood tree, for icicles shall no more hang by the wall; it is the first of May!

The New England robins pipe, and cock their heads to one side as Mine Host reads his proclamation, and their piping dies in a great shout as the merry advocate completes the mock solemnity. Guests have already arrived, more are coming across the bay in their little boats, some are hastening to the Merry-Mount along the brambly woodland trails. The ever hungry crew from Wessagusset is at hand, stray planters arrived within the year, and perhaps the captain of a trading ship and his chorusing, sunburnt tars. One hears the music, the wholesome, natural gaiety, the knock of pewter mugs on wooden table tops, and men singing. To these exiles, the festival meant the first touch of home they had in the wilderness. That tall, soldier-like lad of Morton’s company, Tom Gibbons, will “get religion,” and end his days as a pillar of the Puritan state; little does he foresee such a change as he waves his pewter mug about! A health to Master Thomas Morton of the Merry-Mount, and a fig for all who doubt that laughter is the truest distinguishing mark twixt man and beast! “Mine Host” was well prepared, he had brewed a huge barrel of “excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other good cheare for all comers of the day.”

Higher climbs the spring tide sun, lower sinks the good liquor in “barrell and botel”; it is time to sweep together up the knoll to the Maypole of New England!

The pole lay upon the ground, on the height of a knoll commanding the field and the sea. It was a noble pine mast, some eighty feet high, wreathed about with flowers and garlands of the New England spring, and somewhere near the top of it, a fine pair of garlanded antlers served as a rustic crown. Amid a thousand, noisy, contradictory counsels the pole is raised, the gods alone know how, and now comes a young lad of Morton’s company to sing the song the merry advocate has composed in honor of the day.

“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes! Let all your delight be in the Hymen’s ioyes; Io to Hymen, now the day is come About the merry Maypole take a Roome.

Make greene garlons; bring bottles out And fill sweet nectar freely about. Uncover thy head and feare no harme, For hers good liquor to keepe it warme.

Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!

Nectar is a thing assign’d By the Deities owne minde To cure the hart opprest with greif, And of good liquors is the chiefe.

Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!

Give to the mellancolly man A cup or two of’t now and than; This physic soone revive his bloud And make him be of a merrier moode.

Chorus: Then drinke and be merry!

Give to the Nymphe thats free from scorne, No Irish stuff nor Scotch o’er worne, Lasses in beaver coats come away Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.”

There is a stir in the greenwood at the close of the song, and through the bushes come trooping the last of the Massachusees. Morton had not forgotten his Indian neighbors. Tall, naked, coppery warriors, and Indian lasses in beaverskin coats have arrived to share in the merriment of Merry-Mount. English planter and Indian brave join hands, Morton seizes the brown fingers of two tawny princesses; all join hands, and round and about the pole dance the fantastic company mid the wild uproar of a drunkenly beaten drum, shouts, the thunderous roar of old-fashioned muskets, and the faint silvery piping of an English melody. Is there a stranger picture in all American history than this revel at the Merry-Mount, this glimpse of tawny bodies, beaver coats, English sailors in great Dutch breeches, and Morton, in his London best?

Nailed to the Maypole itself was a festival poem which “being Enigmattically composed pusselled the Separatists most pittifully to expound it.”

At nightfall there must have been many a befuddled head, and on the following morn, a sizeable crew at the spring so efficacious against the “melancholly.” But serious business was in the air, for the scandalised brethren of Plymouth had resolved on action, and Miles Standish was soon to descend on the disturber of Israel. The merry advocate knew where the wind lay. “The setting up of this Maypole,” he wrote in later years, “was a lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists who lived at New Plimmouth. They termed it an Idoll, yea, the Calfe of Horeb, and stood at defiance with the place naming it Mount Dagon, threatning to make it a woeful mount and not a merry-mount.”

It was Morton’s custom to go to Wessagusset once in a while, as he says, “to have the benefit of company,” and there Standish found and secured him. That he did not secure the poet well enough is apparent from the fact that Thomas Morton of Cliffords Inn escaped that night from his captors, and made his way through a wild thunderstorm to his beloved Merry-Mount.

There was a tremendous to-do on finding that the “Lord of Misrule” had “flowne.” In “Mine Host’s” own words....

“The word which was given with an alarme, was,—o he’s gon!—he’s gon!—What shell wee doe, he’s gon!—the rest (halfe asleepe) start up in a maze, and, like rames, ran their heads one at another at full butt in the darke. Theire grand leader, Captaine Shrimpe, took on most furiosly to see the empty nest and the bird gon. The rest were eager to have torne theire haire from theire heads; but it was so short that it would give them no hold.”

Standish, however, returned to the Merry-Mount for his prisoner. Some kind of judicial legerdemain took place at Plymouth, and Morton was sent to England as prisoner. The specific charge against him was the sale of firearms to the Indians. The arrest was illegal, the whole process and the imprisonment an outrageous injustice, and there is not a scrap of real evidence to show that there was a word of truth in the specific charge. On Morton’s arrival in England, the English authorities recognised the true state of affairs, and instantly released the prisoner.

It had been wisely observed that Puritanism is not so much a form of religion as an attitude to life, and that there are Puritan sects in Islam as well as in eastern and western Christianity. A meeting of the mind which comes into the world already “Puritan,” and the mind which is liberal by temperament has always meant a struggle, and the first named has never troubled to make a declaration of war, but has offered instant battle to his soul’s antagonist. Once victorious, the repressive type has shown no mercy to victims of its aggression. The story of the merry man of the Merry-Mount is the tale of such a challenge and such a defeat. His May day revel was no orgy of “beastlie practices” worthy of the “madd Bacchinalians,” nor did his verses “tend to lasciviousness”; it was simply an English country revel such as he must have often witnessed in his youth. And in historic justice to Morton, it ought to be remembered that the good fathers of Plymouth, ministering angels as they were beside the repressers at Boston, exemplified the “Puritan” attitude in every moment of their lives, that they had been difficult to deal with in England, and that they had on several occasions severely tried the tempers of their exceedingly tolerant hosts at Leyden. Theirs is a large documentation, and the facts are clear. Morton, moreover, suffered because he was a stray communicant of the Church of England. In his case Puritan antagonism for such as held a contrary attitude to life mingled with the _odium theologicum_ to beget what began as injustice and ended as cruel persecution.

So ends the Maypole scene of the comedy. There was a sequel, for Morton returned. The beauty of the New England wilderness had stirred the heart of this vagabond country gentleman, and moreover, he had property and an investment to protect. During his stay in England, the Puritans under Endecott and Winthrop began the settlement of “the Great Bay of the Massachusees.” What happened to the merry-maker when he fell into such hands is a tale for philosophers.

V

The Puritan settlement at Boston having been accomplished, the domain of Merry-Mount became part of the Puritan jurisdiction, and one of Endecott’s first acts was to go to the Mount, cut down the Maypole, and admonish the forlorn little band “to look ther should be better walking.” The surviving members of Morton’s company had not been attracting attention in any way, and Endecott’s visit was simply an outlet to the man’s hunger to punish. He was presently, for a very minor offence, to cut off the ears of an unfortunate home-sick Englishman, a member of the Church of England, who had been so browbeaten by “the saints” that he was half a madman. One of the saints in England ventured to send a warning to the New England brethren that there were already “diverse complaintes against the severity of your government, especially Mr. Indicutts, and that he shall be sent for over, about cutting off the Lunatick man’s ears.”

This thin-lipped man, with the icy and merciless eyes,—his portrait may be seen on the walls of the Massachusetts Historical Society,—was presently to judge the “Lord of Misrule.” For Thomas Morton was once more in his “Canaan.” While in London, he had been of service to Isaac Allerton, an agent of Plymouth Colony, and Allerton had outraged Plymouth by bringing back the disturber. There is still something mysterious about this return with Allerton; it may be that Morton arranged it for the sake of its irony.

From Plymouth, Morton went boldly to his property at the Merry-Mount, and with great courage ventured to brave the Puritan tyranny. At a general court in Salem, he very rightly refused to sign some hodgepodge of the Mosaic law and English custom which the saints intended as a kind of constitution, making his assent conditional on the addition of the words,—“So as nothing be done contrary or repugnant to the laws of the Kingdom of England.”

The refusal marked him for destruction. Now comes his arrest and trial on the most trivial of charges; he had, so the saints protested, “taken away a canoe from some Indians.” A delightful touch of Puritan love for the redskin. “Charges,” wrote Mr. Charles Francis Adams, who was no partisan of Morton’s, “which amount to absolutely nothing.” What chance had this English gentleman, who knew himself to be a subject of King Charles and whose soul was still a subject of Elizabeth, in this court composed of seventeenth century Englishmen labouring under the extraordinary delusion that they were primitive Jews of the Arabian desert? Once more the man of Cliffords was condemned, set in the stocks, his property confiscated, and he was sent to England penniless and half-starved for lack of money to buy food.

Nothing can excuse this brutal, inhuman, and lawless condemnation. Now comes a typical Puritan touch of vindictiveness. His persecutors waited till the vessel carrying Morton to England came in sight of Merry-Mount, and then set the house at the Mount afire, so that their victim might see the destruction of his property. “That the habitation of the wicked appear no more in Israel” wrote Winthrop sententiously. Was there ever anything more heartless?

Poor “Mine Host” of the festal Maypole! “The smoake that did ascend,” said he, “appeared to be the very sacrifice of Kain. Mine Host (that a farre of abourd a ship did there behold this woeful spectacle) knew not what he should doe in this extremity but beare and forbeare as Epectetus says: it was bootless to exclaime.... The stumpes and postes in their black livery will mourne.” And he cried, “Cruell Schismaticks!”

A campaign of slander now followed the violence, and it was whispered about that the Lord of Misrule had been sent for on “a foule suspition of murther.” There is no trace of any warrant, there is no trace of crime committed by Morton; the one actual fact is that the English authorities again delivered the prisoner. The source of the libel has recently been uncovered; it was the pretty thought of Morton’s delightful stepson! As Morton continued to live in England quite unmolested, though with a vindictive enemy at his heels, it may be safely said that the whole slanderous attack was a pure fabrication. Tested in England, the scene of the supposed high crimes and misdemeanours, the slanderous charges evaporate into unlovely wisps of Puritan malice and the imagination of a blackguard being sued by his sister for withholding her marriage portion.

Years pass, the last of Elizabeth’s Merry England melts away, Oberon and Titania forsake the moonlit glade, and a sullen and apprehensive England rises against its Stuart king. An old man in his seventies watches the tumult, his eyes full of memories. Far away from the storm, over the wide Atlantic, lies new Canaan where the sun itself is like _Rosa Solis_, where the tawny braves walk the trails of the greenwood, the sea birds feed by the marsh, and the plover rises piping from the grass. His Forest of Arden! And Merry-Mount is there where he played Mine Host, raised the antlered Maypole, and proclaimed an English holiday. He will return there again with his “dogge” and fowling piece; he is old now, and even the Puritan magistrate will be content to let him spend his old age roaming the fields. Little he knew the Puritan mind!

In the summer of 1643, he lands at Plymouth; one party is in favor of handing him over at once to the Boston magistrates; Governor Bradford, however, himself along in years, will suffer him to spend the winter in the Plymouth jurisdiction. The next spring, in compliance with this condition, the old man leaves Plymouth, and travels about; he goes to Rhode Island and to Maine. As he goes, Endecott watches him like a hawk. There comes some unlucky slip, a moment’s entrance, perhaps, into the Massachusetts jurisdiction; the warrant is already at hand, and the old Lord of Misrule is once more in the hands of his old persecutor. Again he was brought to trial before Winthrop and Endecott. On trial for what? For having, in England, “made a complaint against us at the council board.” How a criminal offence could be manufactured out of an English subject’s proper appeal to the head of the state did not worry Winthrop or his fellow casuists. They were both the law and the judges of the law. Some of the “evidence” had been collected by Winthrop’s pretty trick of opening his opponents’ letters.

Owing to Morton’s being “old and crazy,” wrote Winthrop, “we thought not fit to inflict corporal punishment on him but thought better to fine him.” What a smug air of self-approval there is in this phrase! It has not been hidden from impartial history, however, the other side of the story. Winthrop and Endecott actually kept the broken old man in prison a year, and caused him to pass through the bitterness of a New England winter without a fire, without bedding, and with fetters on his limbs.

Regaining his liberty only after a piteous plea, he made his way to the little royalist colony at Agamenticus in Maine. Let us hope there were some good souls about to welcome and understand the poet of Merry-Mount.

Two years at Agamenticus, the hill seen afar over the sea as a high blue dome; two years among friendly folk, and then Morton of Merry-Mount wanders from earth to the Elysian fields where Good Queen Bess still reigns, and Shakespeare and Ben Jonson dwell, and no man strives to shape into some petty human scheme the mighty purposes of the Lords of Life.

In _Cyrano de Bergerac_, De Guiche and Cyrano discuss Don Quixote’s famous battle with the wind mills. “Beware of such a battle,” says De Guiche; “you will be hurled into the mire.” And Cyrano replies—“Or upwards to the stars.”

_Five_: JAMES BRUCE

_Five_: JAMES BRUCE

I

A tall, broad-shouldered, powerful man, a man six feet four inches in height, sitting on “the largest horse ever seen in Scotland.” “Mr. Bruce ... is the tallest man you ever saw gratis,” said laughing Fanny Burney. Not a colossus or a Hercules like Belzoni, but a kind of eighteenth-century adult Olympian quite aware of the prestige of height and fine carriage, with the tolerant and humorous eye of an observer of life, and something of the pride and composure of a well-born Scottish gentleman.

The children of the folk who lived upon his estate used to stare at the huge man on the giant black horse. Their fathers had told them that the laird had visited the strangest kingdom in all the world, and that he had loved a great queen who was fair as the lady of Sheba in the Bible, and wore a golden crown. Sometimes at the “great house,” he would sit for hours in a chair, clad in magnificent robes, and the serving folk would whisper among themselves that the master was thinking of the old days and the great queen.

Sometime in the middle years of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary letter arrived at the house of His Majesty’s Prime Minister. It was addressed to “Mr. Pitt, Vizir of England”; its sender was the Dey of Algiers, and its message was terse and to the point. “Your consul in Algiers,” said the missive, “is an obstinate person and like an animal.” “Dear me,” said Mr. Pitt, “who is His Majesty’s consul at Algiers?”

A look at some great ledger, full of the brim of clerkly penmanship, and a question or two among the staff, soon elicited an answer. The consul at Algiers was Mr. James Bruce, a young Scot of excellent family, who had been recommended to the post by the honourable Lord Halifax. This young man was the son of David Bruce of Kinnaird in Stirlingshire, he had had an English education from tutors in London and at Harrow school, and he was interested in travel and archæological research. “Humph,” says Mr. Pitt, “anything else.” Yes, there was more to the story; he had married the daughter of a prosperous London wine merchant, taken over the business and then resigned it to his brother on the death of his wife scarce a year after the marriage. He had travelled in Spain, studied Arabic at the Escorial, was said to be “extremely good tempered and a good scholar.” And here was the Dey of Algiers saying that he was “like an animal.”

The angry phrase of the Dey, however, was quite natural. As master of a piratic kingdom cravenly humoured by the European powers, he had grown accustomed to obedience of the most servile kind from all Christians resident in his territories. If there is one supremely discreditable episode in the history of what is ironically called Western Christendom, it is surely this matter of the relations of the European powers and the Barbary pirates. Great European nations faint-heartedly directed their consuls to submit to incredible degradations,—the French consul in Bruce’s time had been loaded with fetters and harnessed to a cart for venturing to protest at some exaction, and another consul with gouty feet threatened with the bastinado—many thousands of unhappy European sailors were allowed to pass into the living death of Moorish slavery, and the cut-throat authors of these outrages timidly flattered and paid. The bare historical account does not tell the story; the reality of it is a ship’s crew of weary, thirsty and cruelly-beaten men standing fettered in the white glare of the Algerian sun, hearing “Christian dog” hurled at them like a stone meant to wound.