Charles Morton

Charles Morton (15 February 1627 – 11 April 1698) was an English nonconformist minister and founder of an early dissenting academy, later in life associated in New England with Harvard College. Morton was raised with strong Puritan influences in England and attended Oxford (1649-1652). As a result of the English Revolution, he was arrested and excommunicated for promoting progressive education (he was the teacher of Daniel Defoe), forcing his immigration to relative safety in Massachusetts Bay Colony (1685-1686), although he was soon arrested for sedition (and then acquitted) in Boston. His system of vernacular teaching at Harvard was basically Scholastic/Aristotelian with modern flavors of John Wallis, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and even René Descartes. His works include discussions of astrology and alchemy, and (as a minister) he was known to have some interest in witchcraft. As a result, Compendium Physicae is now considered to be semi-scientific, and although the work contains then-modern references to Galileo, Torricelli, and gravity, his ancient/medieval Aristotelian approach was eventually replaced by Newtonian mechanics (Principia was also published in 1687). Life He was born at Pendavy, Egloshayle, in Cornwall, and baptised there on 15 February 1627, the eldest son of Nicholas Morton, who married, on 11 May 1616, Frances, only daughter of Thomas Kestell of Pendavy. He was probably the Charles Morton, undergraduate of New Inn Hall, Oxford, who submitted on 4 May 1648 to the jurisdiction of the parliamentary visitors. On 7 September 1649 he was elected a scholar of Wadham College, and he graduated B.A. 6 November 1649, M.A. 24 June 1652, being also incorporated at Cambridge in 1653. At Oxford he was known as a mathematician and highly thought of by John Wilkins. In 1655 Morton was appointed to the rectory of Blisland in Cornwall, but he was ejected after the 1662 Act of Uniformity, whereupon he retired to a small tenement, his own property, in St Ive. He lost property through the Great Fire of London, and went to London to support himself. Morton was probably the ‘Charles Morton, presbyterian,’ who in 1672 was licensed for a room in his dwelling-house in Kennington.