When the Mayflower arrived in America in 1620, the famous Pilgrims only constituted a third of its passengers. Its non-Pilgrim majority has received little attention from historians, who have focused obsessively on both Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colony's religious establishments. In The Trials of Thomas Morton, Peter Mancall retells early New England's thoroughly mythologized history from the perspective of one of its religious dissidents. Short, readable, and accessible, The Trials is one of several new books commemorating the quatercentenary of the Mayflower landing (unfortunately overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic) (see Carla Pestana, The World of Plymouth Plantation [Belknap Press, 2020]; and John G. Turner, They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty [Yale University Press, 2020]). It emphasizes conflict, coercion, partisanship, and contingency: a retelling of the Mayflower story that speaks to our own time.

Thomas Morton is a fascinating individual and an appealing subject for a biography. He makes minor appearances in previous histories on account of his New English Canaan (Amsterdam, 1637), an anti-Puritan counterpoint to William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation. For Bradford, he was the “Lord of Misrule,” expelled from Plymouth after engaging in riotous maypole dancing. He is also known for saddling Plymouth's military leader Myles Standish with the irresistible nickname “Captain Shrimp.” The Trials, like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, centers this previously marginal character. Born in the West Country and trained as a lawyer, Morton's gift for litigiousness was already well developed when he settled in New England in 1624. He arrived in a land occupied by the Ninnimissinuok, whose world New English Canaan described in detail. His settlement at Mare-mount soon antagonized the nearby Pilgrims, perhaps because he had begun a rival trade with the Natives. A military force led by Standish expelled him in 1628, but he returned within a year. In 1631, he was sent back to England again, this time by the Massachusetts authorities, who for good measure burned his house to the ground as well.

He turned out to be far more dangerous back in England, where he joined Sir Ferdinando Gorges in maneuvering to undo the Massachusetts Bay Colony's legal foundations. Gorges was a member of the Council for New England, which held a rival charter for, but never succeeded in colonizing, the territory claimed by Plymouth and Massachusetts. Together, Gorges and Morton obtained a quo warranto from the Privy Council, a legal judgement which invalidated Massachusetts's charter. Demonstrating the importance of contingency, Gorges's plans to sail to America to enforce it were only dropped as a result of shipwreck and the outbreak of the Prayer Book Rebellion soon after. Morton rather unwisely returned to Massachusetts in 1643 and was immediately imprisoned and expelled yet again. This time he headed north to Maine, now the focus of Gorges's resumed colonization efforts, and he died there in 1647. Yet he was not forgotten: Mancall's final chapter traces his impact on the region's subsequent literary history, from John Adams to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Philip Roth, for all of whom he represented a counterpoint (and perhaps antidote) to their Puritan heritage.

How does New England's history appear differently when this contrapuntal figure is given center stage? Mancall's historiographical interventions are made sotto voce, but they are nevertheless bold. While previous historians have largely concurred with Bradford in characterizing him as an anarchic Lord of Misrule, Mancall suggests that Morton expressed an alternative, anti-Puritan vision for an English empire in America, based on Anglicanism, feudalism, and a paternalistic rather than exterminationist relationship with Natives. On this last point, Mancall lets Morton off too lightly: he was able to imagine a more benevolent style of colonization because he never had the opportunity to put it into effect. Moreover, readers of Church History will find that the religious content of this program is not explored in detail. Morton criticized the Puritans’ brutal treatment of Natives because he believed they should be converted. Although Mancall does not say so, Laudians were often more interested in missionizing than Puritans were, because their Arminianism made the national church responsible for the potential salvation of all its parishioners, English and Native alike.

Morton's life intersects with and is suggestive of this larger, Laudian imperial project but does not capture it effectively. Gorges and to a lesser extent William Laud loom large in the background of The Trials. In the wake of his second expulsion, Morton cooperated with these two men in presenting evidence against New England to the Privy Council. His New English Canaan, written at this time, praised Gorges, condemned Puritan religious principles, and claimed that the Pilgrims had expelled him for using the Prayer Book. However, it is unclear how much of the imperial vision The Trials describes would stick to Morton without Gorges and Laud's presence. Mancall claims that Morton's alliance with Gorges was already established when he first settled in New England: probably as early as 1622, and certainly by his first expulsion in 1628, but the first piece of evidence for this alliance is from 1634 (50, 109–110, 115–116). By contrast, Carla Pestana concludes that Morton was expelled from Plymouth not for using the Prayer Book (which Bradford does not mention) but because Mare-mount was attracting runaway servants; she suggests that he invented the Prayer Book story retrospectively in order to win Gorges and Laud's support (World of Plymouth Plantation, 149–150). In this line of interpretation, Morton's alliance with Gorges was far more opportunistic than Mancall allows. The disagreement comes down to a question of whether to trust Bradford or Morton, but it is significant because it emphasizes Gorges's importance to Mancall's analysis and highlights the limitations of a narrow focus on Morton. Morton only began articulating a religious critique of the Puritans to impress Gorges, who as early as 1620 advocated colonization by arguing that it would spread Reformed Christianity. Meanwhile, Laud's wide-ranging interest in America has been thoroughly neglected by historians, and unfortunately it remains so.