century existence, and which no man in those days could conceive of as independent each of the other had both fallen prey to the prevailing shallowness, sham and show, which to so many was considered intolerable. It was, therefore, quite a rational reaction when a great number of the yeomanry, and "ex"-yeomanry as well indeed as many of the gentry, found themselves at the time in full accord with the attempts then in progress to "purify" the Church (and therefore the State) of its gradually accumulating disorders. This so-called new school of thought which, in fact was but an ancient one, and as old as man himself, was called by its opponents, "Puritanism".* Over half of the people of England, in some degree or other, were indeed sooner or later, to be of this school, and in the efforts to discourage this supposedly radical group, and one so obnoxious to the Cavaliers and High Churchmen, then in power, propaganda of all sorts was frequently resorted to. In an age which knew no bounds in villfying opposing groups, whether Roman Catholics, Cavaliers, or Puritans, the latter, often referred to as "Saints", received their full share of jibes and taunts. "Of all those monsters which we read In Africk, Inde, or Nile, None like to those now lately bred The Canibal, the Tyger fell, The Turk, the Jew, and Infidel, And the early printing presses of the time were not slow to print any and all materials that would fill the pages of their pamphlets and books. The technique of appeasement or tolerance was little known, and to the sturdy, stubborn Englishmen of the time, such jibes hurled by opposing groups only helped to provoke their antagonisms to the situations which they had hoped to correct. And failing to remedy conditions as they saw them, these loyal Englishmen, called "Puritans", were considerably disturbed. Many of this school of thought, especially those whose hereditary acres had dwindled in size, and whose ventures into the channels of crafts and trades had not been as successful as they had anticipated, looked longingly overseas to the English possessions in the New World. Of these there were two main colonies, one at Plymouth and another at Jamestown; but neither of these quite satisfied their purposes. The Jamestown colony was frankly antagonistic to Puritanism, and the group of Separatists at Plymouth were quite beyond their ken. See Appendix 1 ** See Appendix 2 - And By 1628 several prominent and wealthy Puritans, doubtless more influenced by the religious aspect of the cause than by an economic one, determined upon a brave course of action. If they could not change conditions at home, they could at least provide in the new world, under the English flag, what they felt could be an ideal England". From the King, they obtained a large concession ostensibly for commercial purposes in the hitherto relatively neglected part of the English possessions in America. by visits and by pamphlets, urged many of their fellow Englishmen, in good standing, and those not adverse to Puritanism, to migrate overseas. By 1633 when conditions toward the Puritans were increasingly rigid at home, and many began to take a definite stand in the matter, a great migration set in.* In the decade ending in 1640, when over 60,000 Englishmen left their native shores to settle under the English flag along the fringe of a naked wilderness from the Caribbean Sea to Newfoundland, some 20,000 went to the Puritan colony called "The Massachusetts Bay". Of these the great bulk was the sons of yeomen of all shades of "Puritanism" whose quest 13 for a livelihood had forced into trades and cities, neither of which satisfied their inherent yearning for the fields and meadows for which they had been bred. Among these was Anthony Morse of Wilts. Anthony, as did almost all of his overseas companions, belonged to a landed yeoman family. His grandfather, William Morse, yeoman, of "Edward's House", had possessed no less than five farms; another relative, also a yeoman, was the owner of a library valued at forty pounds, and at his death had bequeathed money to aid the poor students at Cambridge; Lionel Morse, yeoman, remembered in his will the indigent of over a dozen parishes, and to his heirs left a considerable estate including his "black corselet of harness with all the furnishings thereto belonging". Some of their farms, which lay in that beautiful Wiltshire countryside between Marlborough and Hayden-Wicke, had been stocked with hundreds of sheep: these white faced variety peculiar to their Shire, with the long spiral horns bending downward. had owned numerous tenements, silver plate, and spoons with "Apostle's heads"; and when they died were buried with fitting honor under the aisles of their parish churches they loved so well. Many an old English yeoman in good times could well have satisfied the requisite estate that would have entitled him to be classed as a "gentleman".* The immediate family, to which Anthony belonged, was a minor branch of a main stem which had settled in Suffolk since Sir Hugo de Mors, a banneret knight whose title emanated from his Many See Appendix 3 * See Appendix 4 services in the field, had enrolled in France under the banner of the English King during the Hundred Years' War. He had been one of those many Netherlanders, those allies of the English, who had espoused the cause of Edward III, and who had formed the greater part of the cavalry force of the English Army on the Continent during that part of the 14th century.* In the dim past an adventuresome Viking expedition from the North of Denmark, had carried the name of Mors up the River Rhine to found, in the course of time, one of the most powerful families in the Netherlands, whose ancestral castle, west of that historic stream, and 100 miles easterly from Antwerp, survives to this day as a military museum. The Counts de Mors for half a century were Dukes of Westphalia. * From Suffolk, where the English branch of the family first settled about the middle of the fourteenth century, and where the head of the family in that section is today officially represented in the person of the Lord of the Manor of Kessingland, branches migrated to Norfolk, Essex and Wilts. By the time of the American migration, they were in a large part Puritans, although more than one were Roman Catholic, and Henry Morse, a Jesuit priest, -- whose diary is a prized possession of the British museum -- was imprisoned more than once for his activities on behalf of the Papacy, and finally, was executed at Tyburn prison, a martyr for his faith. Several of of the family, at the time of the American migration, were "gentlemen", a number were owners or part owners of ships, and more than a score were educated at Cambridge. But it was only the yeoman branches which gave their sons to the American adventure. And in the early days, very few, other than yeomen, or yeomen's sons, left England, voluntarily, to settle overseas. * Anthony, son of Anthony Morse, Sr., was born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, in 1606, within a few years of the death of two of England's chief personalities, Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare. It was. also the same year, that two companies (the London Company and the Flymouth Company) were chartered by James I for the purpose of establishing colonies in Virginia, as that broad territory extending from the later Canada to the later South Carolina was then called. Left fatherless at the age of 14 and with little estate save his father's dwelling house at Marlborough, he, and his brother William, were both apprenticed by their stepfather to a cord-wainer or shoemaker. By the time he was twenty-nine years of age, with a household consisting of his wife, formerly Anne Cox, and their several * See Appendix 5 See Appendix 8 * See Appendix 6 See Appendix 7 |