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!