Fools make a mock at sin... Proverbs 14:9
"Morton established his own unrecognized offshoot of the Plymouth Colony. Governor Bradford nicknamed Morton the “Lord of Misrule”.
“He was very much a dandy and a playboy,” says William Heath, a retired
professor from Mount Saint Mary’s University who has 
published
extensively on the Puritans.
Thomas Morton, (born c. 1590—died c. 1647, Province of Maine), one of the most picturesque of the early British settlers in colonial America, who ridiculed the strict religious tenets of the Pilgrims and the Puritans.
He arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 as one of the owners of the Wollaston Company, which established a settlement at the site of modern Quincy.
In 1626, when Wollaston and most of the settlers moved to Virginia,
Morton stayed on and took charge of the colony and named it Merry
Mount.
Inevitably this free-living, prospering, sharp-tongued Anglican
conflicted with his pious neighbors. He erected a maypole, encouraged
conviviality and merriment, wrote bawdy verse, poked fun at his saintly
neighbors, conducted religious services using the Book of Common Prayer, monopolized the beaver trade, and sold firearms to the Indians.
There could be no greater symbol of such misrule than Morton’s maypole.
Reaching 80 feet into the air, the structure conjured all the vile,
virile vices of Merry England
that the Puritans had hoped to leave behind. Throughout medieval
Europe, maypoles had been a popular installation for May Day (or
Pentecost or midsummer, in some regions)—encouraging human fertility as
the land itself sprung up from winter. Now that was a tradition that
Morton could get behind, and he gladly called upon the residents of
Merrymount to drink, dance, and frolic around the pole.
During the 1628 festivities, a Puritan militia led by Myles Standish invaded Merrymount and chopped down the maypole. 
The Pilgrims arrested Morton, and exiled him to the Isle of Shoals, whence he escaped to England. He returned within two years and was soon taken into custody again (1630) and his property confiscated. Exiled to England, he collaborated
with the enemies of Massachusetts in an attempt to get the charter of
the Puritans revoked and wrote an account of the colonies, New English Canaan (1637). On returning to Massachusetts in 1643, he was imprisoned again, fined, and exiled to Maine."
Britannica/epocket
