Thomas Morton was born in Devon, England around 1578, into a conservative Anglican family of the Devon gentry. In the late 1590s Morton was studying law at London’s Clifford’s Inn where he made many influential contacts and lasting friendships. He was also exposed here to both a popular Renaissance Classicism and the ‘libertine culture’ of the Inns of Court themselves, where the bawdy revels included the Lord of Misrule performances associated with Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, and it is most likely that he first met Ben Jonson here, who would remain his friend throughout his life. Though an ardent Royalist, Morton became a proponent of the Common Law against the emerging direct legal powers of The Crown and the Star Chamber.

The early years of the 17th century saw Morton traveling between London and the Devonshire countryside as the legal champion of displaced countrymen ‘whose economic straits filled new tent-cities, furnished prisons and gallows, and pushed Devon men to the Bristol sea-trades’. He eventually settled into the service of Ferdinando Gorges, the governor of the English port of Plymouth, and a major colonial entrepreneur.

Morton spent three months on an exploratory trip to America in 1622, but was back in England by early 1623 complaining of the intolerance of certain elements of the Puritan community. He returned in 1624 as a senior partner in a Crown-sponsored trading venture, onboard the ship the Unity with his associate Captain Wollaston and 30 indentured young men. They settled and began trading for furs on a spit of land given them by the native Algonquian tribes, whose culture Morton is said to have admired as far more ‘civilized and humanitarian’ than that of his ‘intolerant European neighbours’. The Puritans of the New England colony of Plymouth objected to their sales of guns and liquor to the natives in exchange for furs and provisions, which at that time was technically illegal (although almost everyone was doing it). The weapons undoubtedly acquired by the Algonquians were used to defend themselves against raids from the Northern Tribes, however, and not against the fearful colonists. The trading post set up by the two men soon expanded into an agrarian colony which became known as Mount Wollaston (now Quincy, Massachusetts).

Morton fell out with Wollaston after he discovered he had been selling indentured servants into slavery on the Virginian tobacco plantations. Powerless to prevent him, he encouraged the remaining servants to rebel against his harsh rule and organise themselves into a free community. Wollaston fled with his supporters to Virginia in 1626, leaving Morton in sole command of the colony, or its ‘host’ as he preferred to be called, which was renamed Mount Ma-re (a play on ‘merry’ and ‘the sea’) or simply Merrymount. Under Morton’s ‘hostship’ an almost utopian project was embarked upon, in which the colonists were declared free men or ‘consociates’, and a certain degree of integration into the local Algonquian culture was attempted. However, it was Morton’s long-term plan to ‘further civilize’ the native population by converting them to his liberal form of Christianity, and by providing them with free salt for food preservation, thus enabling them to give up hunting and settle permanently. He also considered himself a ‘loyal subject’ of the British monarchy throughout this period, and his agenda remained a colonial one.

Morton’s ‘Christianity’, however, was strongly condemned by the Puritans of the nearby Plymouth Colony as little more than a thinly disguised heathenism, and they suspected him of essentially ‘going native’. Scandalous rumours were spread of the debauchery at Merrymount, which they claimed included immoral sexual liaisons with native women during what amounted to drunken orgies in honour of Bacchus and Aphrodite. Morton had transplanted traditional West Country May Day customs to the colony, and combined them with fashionable classical myth, couched according to his own libertine tastes, and fuelled by the enthusiasm of his newly-freed fellow colonists. On a practical level the annual May Day festival was not only a reward for his hardworking colonists but also a joint celebration with the Native Tribes who also marked the day, and a chance for the mostly male colonists to find brides amongst the native population.

Puritan ire was no doubt also fueled by the fact that Merrymount was the fastest-growing colony in New England and rapidly becoming the most prosperous, both as an agricultural producer and in the fur trade in which the Plymouth Colony was trying to build a monopoly. The Puritan account of this was very different, regarding the colony as a decadent nest of good-for-nothings that annually attracted “all the scum of the country” to the area.