The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England. By Peter C. Mancall. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. x + 278 pp. $30.00 cloth

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]). 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. [...]readers of Church History will find that the religious content of this program is not explored in detail. 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).