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Myles Standish, Born Where? The State of the Question: Part 3

Military Service Records?

The question might be approached from another angle, for example, Myles' military service in the Low Countries. Unfortunately, no solution comes from that direction, because no detailed records of military recruitment were kept that would give a place of birth. Instead, we are left with the information that recruitment for the regiment of Sir Horatio Vere, to serve in the Low Countries, was carried out at about the same time, by the same officers, both in Lancashire and on the Isle of Man. No other recruitment for service in the Low Countries is known to have taken place in either region (and there were no other English regiments serving in the Low Countries than Vere's.¹⁹ In 1898, E. Irving Carlyle wrote (in the Dictionary of National Biography) that "before 1603 Standish obtained a lieutenant's commission in the English forces serving under the Veres in the Netherlands, and took an active part in the war against the Spaniards."²⁰ Carlyle cites no specific source for this information; no such document has been discovered in archival research in the United States, England, or The Netherlands. Bromley reported having seen it; no one else has.²¹ The missing document was said to have mentioned Standish's age, from which his birth-date was calculated as 1584. Moreover, it is sometimes claimed that the commission was signed by Queen Elizabeth herself. No similar commissions exist, a circumstance that suggests this is a spurious detail from some nineteenth-century romance.

Was Standish a Member of the Pilgrim Congregation?

Yet another avenue has been pursued -- Standish's religious leanings. As just mentioned, the Lancashire Standishes of Standish were suspected recusants.²¹ The branch of the Standishes on the Isle of Man, however, became Anglicans, as evidently did the Standishes of Duxbury Hall, or at least many of them. Therefore, it becomes potentially significant to determine what the religious affiliation of Myles Standish was. (Even so, one cannot discount the possibility of individual conversion. Myles might have grown up in a Catholic family and nonetheless have become a Protestant; or vice-versa.)

Support for the idea that Standish was from Lancashire is found in the belief that he was not a member of the Pilgrim Separatist congregation. Expanding on this presumption, sometimes it has been said that Myles Standish was a Catholic, and, with more than a little circularity, that this proves that he came from Lancashire.²³ But in contrast to this assumption of Catholicism, it is unlikely that a Catholic would first have fought in the Dutch Wars on the Spanish side against the Protestants and then join the extremely Protestant Pilgrims to emigrate. On the other hand, it is very unlikely that an English Catholic would have been found among the soldiers fighting on the Dutch side in an effort to protect both the Protestant Netherlands and Protestant England against a Catholic conquest. Furthermore, that the Pilgrims would hire a Catholic to organize the defense of their Protestant colony not only against potential Indian enemies but also against French and Spanish Catholics underestimates Protestants' reaction to news of the Guy Fawkes plot and their consequent distrust of Catholics and Catholic goals of international dominance. The idea that Myles Standish was Catholic is, moreover, inconsistent with the contents of his library. The inventory of his estate drawn up on 2 December 1656 includes three "old bibles," a (New) Testament, a Psalm book, and around fifteen works of Protestant theology, including Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion -- hardly likely as the possessions of a Roman Catholic!²⁴ The only "Catholic" author is Eusebius, who lived long before the Reformation.

The Pilgrims' minister in Leiden, John Robinson, was evidently well acquainted with Standish, referring to him, in a letter Robinson sent from Leiden to William Bradford in America, as "your captain, whom I love and am persuaded the Lord in great mercie and for much good hath sent you him, if you use him aright. He is a man humble and meek amongst you, and towards all in ordinarie course."²⁵ This evidence of obviously personal acquaintance alone is enough to indicate that the Pilgrims' contact with Standish began in Leiden, but in addition there is a silver cup inscribed, apparently authentically, as a gift from Robinson to Standish; and there is the final circumstance that Standish left a legacy to John Robinson's grandaughter "marcye Robenson whome I tenderly love for her Grandfathers sacke."²⁶ Only in Leiden could Robinson have met Standish; and only in Leiden could Standish have formed such an attachment to Robinson.

But much is made of the idea that Standish never joined the Plymouth church, and that this is proven by the fact that his name is not among those of people who joined the Plymouth congregation, whose names are listed in that church's records. As George F. Willison puts it, "Alone of the Pilgrim leaders, he never joined the church at Plymouth. His name is conspicuously absent from its records and rolls. Nowhere is he listed among the communicants."²⁷ A couple of reasons could account for the absence of Standish's name in the Plymouth church records, without proving he was not a member. The first is fairly simple: there are no lists of communicants. Standish moved to Duxbury about forty years before the Plymouth church records in fact begin. He died eleven years before the first entries. Although the Plymouth church records include excerpts from William Bradford's journal "Of Plymouth Plantation" and his "Dialogue" to cover the early years, these were copied by Nathaniel Morton to provide a general introduction before the beginning of the records, in 1667. Even then, the records do not list communicants.²⁸ Bradford's information does not constitute "church records"; and it does not include lists of anyone joining the church in Plymouth. In other words, had Standish joined the congregation in Plymouth before moving to Duxbury, his name would not be in the records, because they were not yet being kept. Even if he had been alive when record-keeping started, communicants were not listed. Although the pertinent sources have long been in print, many people remain satisfied instead with Willison's forthright formulation, "Nowhere is he listed among the communicants." As for the Duxbury church records, they also do not exist for the period before Standish died. Neither of these observations about the records proves that Standish was a member. They do, however, provide reasons for understanding why his name cannot be found in the church records of Plymouth and Duxbury, if he was a member.

Other Plymouth colonists who did not move away from Plymouth were members of the congregation and are not recorded in the Plymouth church records as having joined. In point of fact, everyone from the Leiden congregation who moved to Plymouth continued as a member of the church without any of them having to "join" and be recorded as doing so. The Plymouth group was not considered a separate church from the original Leiden congregation. Nor was it a congregation without a pastor in its first years. Robinson was its pastor, and he was in Leiden hoping to join them soon. No letters of transfer were necessary, nor was a new covenant necessary.²⁹ Because no records are preserved from the Leiden congregation as a whole (i.e. specific church records, such as entries of baptisms and lists of communicants), there is no church-book record of any individual member's participation, despite identification in other records of William Brewster in the office of Elder, and of John Carver and others as deacons. If Myles Standish was an ordinary member of the Leiden congregation, he would not have "joined" the church in Plymouth or in Duxbury.

What is the origin of the idea that Standish was not a member of the Leiden congregation or its branch in Plymouth? This belief arose in the nineteenth century, when William Hubbard's manuscript history of New England, written in 1680, was finally published (1815).³⁰ In his book Pilgrim Colony, Eugene Aubrey Stratton remarks that Alexander Young, who wrote about Standish in 1841, drew from Hubbard: "Young [...] gives an excerpt from Hubbard that 'Captain Standish had been bred a soldier in the Low Countries, and never entered the school of our Saviour Christ, or of John Baptist, his harbinger,' and this is the evidence that Myles Standish never joined the Separatist Church."³¹ William Hubbard (1621-1704) was a Congregationalist minister at Ipswich, Massachusetts. He was an observer of New England's development, especially from a religious point of view; and he wrote one of the histories of King Philip's War. He represented New England orthodoxy in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and his language reflects his position within society, grudgingly accepting the Separatists because they, in his view, eventually became good Puritan Congregationalists, while violently denouncing Familists, Antinomians, Baptists, and Quakers. His descriptive terms regarding Standish (whom he did not apparently know personally) are peculiar. The second comment on Standish's church relations indicates that Standish did not become a Baptist, but it is not immediately clear what is meant by the statement that Standish "never entered the school of our Saviour Christ." The unusual phrase "school of our Saviour Christ" has pietist origins. It seems unnecessarily coy, if merely intended to indicate that Standish did not join a local congregation. Arch metaphors frequently inflate Hubbard's prose. Conceivably the phrase is parallel with what follows it about the Baptists. It could refer either to Antinomians, perhaps, or to pietist Quakers, who were notably gentle in their relations with the Indians, unlike Standish. Hubbard's full comment suggests that he may have been referring obliquely to Quakers. Hubbard elaborates: "Capt. Standish had been bred a soldier in the Low Countries, and never entered the school of our Savior Christ, or of John Baptist, his harbinger; or, if he was ever there, had forgot his first lessons, to offer violence to no one, and to part with the cloak rather than needlessly contend for the coat, though taken away without order. A little chimney is soon fired: so was the Plymouth captain, a man of very little stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper. The fire of his passion soon kindled, and blown up into a flame by hot words, might easily have consumed all, had it not been seasonably quenched." But Hubbard is not revealing to us whether or not Standish joined the Pilgrims' church. The context in which Hubbard made these comments clearly indicates that little more was intended than fulsome moralizing about an unnecessarily heated argument concerning possession of a fishing wharf, constructed by Plymouth but arrogated to their own use by Massachusetts settlers. Immediately after his characterization of Standish, Hubbard concludes his chapter by revealing that he viewed the Plymouth colonists as principally serving as a stepping stone for those who came later to Massachusetts Bay Colony: "In transactions of this nature were the first three years spent, in making way for the planting of the Massachusetts."

The phrase "several forms of Christians in the school of Christ, every one learning their own lesson" is used by the Quaker Isaac Pennington in his 1660 objection to the anti-Quaker laws of Boston, Massachusetts, and the judicial murders of Quakers.³² Hubbard defended the justice of those murders, claiming that the Quakers, by returning to a place where their beliefs were outlawed on pain of mortal punishment, were therefore guilty of their own deaths. He did not idealize the Quakers as representatives of pacifism. Nonetheless, while Hubbard's use of the phrase, "the school of our Savior Christ, or of John Baptist, his harbinger," is, in the context of an argument over a fishing wharf, insignificant, the words, because of their pietist connotations, do emphasize the pacific in opposition to the martial. To figure out what this odd phrase (school of our saviour, school of Christ) means when employed by Hubbard requires reading Hubbard in a way that goes beyond categorizing his work as a biographical dictionary, grabbing what few words he had to say about Standish and leaving the rest.

Hubbard did write a few more words about Standish in a biographical vein. Taking note of Standish's death in 1656, he says, "Captain Standish ended his warfare, that was the military chieftain of that Colony. He was allied to the noble house of Standish, in Lancashire, inheriting some of the virtues of that honorable family, as well as the name." When summarizing the early history of Plymouth Colony, Hubbard mentions Standish's appointment as military leader. Needing experienced military leadership, "they were well furnished by a person of that company, though at that time not of their church, well skilled in the affair, and of as good courage as conduct, Capt. Miles Standish by name, a gentleman very expert in things of that nature, by whom they were all willing to be ordered in those concerns. He was likewise improved with good acceptance and success in affairs of greatest moment in that colony, to whose interest he continued firm and steadfast to the last; and always managed his trust with great integrity and faithfulness."³³ If Hubbard's "though at that time not of their church" implies anything, what it suggests is that in his view the Pilgrims asked Standish to be their military leader before he had joined their congregation (perhaps already in Leiden) but that he did join their church afterwards. Alexander Young, in 1841, rephrases, expands, and slightly alters Hubbard: "He [Standish] was not one of Robinson's church before it left England; but serving in the Low Countries, in the forces sent over by Queen Elizabeth to aid the Dutch against the Spaniards, he fell in, as Winslow did, with Robinson and his congregation, liked them and their principles, and though not a member of their church, either voluntarily, or at their request, embarked with them for America." In a footnote, Young remarks, "It seems Standish was not of their church at first, and Hubbard says he had more of his education in the school of Mars than in the school of Christ."³⁴ Young's note again implies that Standish later became a member of the Pilgrim church.

Only after 1841 did the imaginary Standish become the trusty, courageous, romantic outsider, eventually to figure prominently among Willison's fictive "Strangers." In contrast to that stereotype, we must conclude that there is no evidence that Standish was not a member of the Pilgrim congregation, and that there are several circumstances strongly suggesting that he was a member. But let us return to the question of his place of birth.

CONTINUED

¹⁹ G.V.C. Young provided me with the results of his research at the Public Record Office in London (now National Archives, Kew), including photocopies of the preserved records related to Vere's regiment. My research in The National Archives, The Hague, turned up parallel records consistent with Young's findings. Significantly, commissions for officers in Vere's regiment were not issued by the English crown but were in the gift or appointment of the Dutch parliament, as is mentioned in my survey of Standishs military career.

²⁰ E. Irving Carlyle, "Myles Standish," in Sidney Lee (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 53 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1898), pp. 474-476, specifically 474. Carlyle does not specifically identify the sources of particular biographical details. Among his list of works about Standish are several whose reliability is questionable. According to Young, Porteus claimed that the commission document had indeed been seen by someone in the nineteenth century: Young, Pilgrim Myles Standish [note 3], p. 22, note 54, referring to T. C Porteus, Captain Myles Standish: His Lost Lands and Lancashire Connections, A New Investigation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920), p. 4. Porteus must have been referring to Bromley, as reported by Winsor [note 5], a source with which he was familiar.

²¹ The real source may be the novel Standish of Standish, A Story of the Pilgrims, by Jane G. Austin (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890). No details of document location are given by T. J. Porteus, "The Ancestry of Myles Standish," New England Historical & Genealogical Register, Oct. 1914, p. 348, who may have taken the information from Carlyle's article in the Dictionary of National Biography [note 20].

²² Hill, Gentlemen of Courage [note 3], p. 135 quotes evidence that Edward Standish was a recusant, but mentions that in 1600 he was appointed Justice of the Peace, a position supposed to have been prohibited to Roman Catholics (but apparently not always strictly prohibited unless this indicates that he accomodated).

²³ For examples of the claim that he was a Catholic, "John Alden and the Pilgrims on the Kennebec,' by Pat Higgins, published online in "Maine Stories," Higgins writes, "The French, who operated a tiny mission only a few miles up river were on good terms with their English neighbors. Pilgrim leader John Winlsow [sic] and Father Druillettes were reasonable friends; Druilletes visited both Boston and Plymouth. There is even a rumor that Miles Standish, who was a Catholic, visited the little mission upstream to attend mass." [said to be] "Derived from: When John Alden Went to Jail, by John Clair Minot, excerpted from the book Maine, My State, published in 1919 by the Maine Writer's [sic] Research Club. This resurfaces online "There is a story that one Englishman who came to Koussinoc frequently worshipped at the little mission chapel above the post. It is assumed it was Myles Standish, who came of a Catholic family in England, and who never joined the Pilgrims in their church relations. It rather upset the popular notion of bigotry of those times to read that Father Druillettes went from Koussinoc to Plymouth and Boston, where he was most cordially received. He was even allowed to celebrate mass in a Puritan home."

²⁴ Simmons, Plymouth Colony Records [note 1], p. 315.

²⁵ Ford (ed.) Bradford, I: 368 (cited in Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony, Its History & People, 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1986), p. 358); cited also by Young, Pilgrim Myles Standish [note 3], p. 24 (from 1912 ed., p. 375.

²⁶ Charles H. Simmons, Jr., Plymouth Colony Records, Volume 1, Wills and Inventories 1633-1669 (Camden, ME: Picton Press, 1996), p. 313. This legacy is mentioned by G. V. C. Young, Pilgrim Myles Standish [note 3], p. 56. The inscribed cup is in Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts.

²⁷ George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers, Being the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers & Their Families with Their Friends & Foes; & an Account of Their Posthumous Wanderings in Limbo, Their Final Resurrection & Rise to Glory, & the Strange Pilgrimages of Plymouth Rock (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945), p. 132. Willison goes further, pp. 132-133: "This is all the more startling because Plymouth early adopted the theocratic principle that no one could be a citizen, let alone a magistrate or officer shaping and executing policy, who was not a member of the church and a communicant in good standing. Why this signal exception? Can it be that the Pilgrims needed him and appreciated his success in organizing the defense of the colony, and for that reason were willing to overlook his religious scruples? And what were his scruples? No one knows, but it is interesting at least that the Standishes of Standish and all the branches of that family had never accepted Protestantism in any form, steadfastly adhering to their old Roman Catholic faith." Continuing in the next paragraph, Willison says, "Among the 'strangers' appeared others of note. There was James Chilton, a tailor of Canterbury []." Chilton, in fact, belonged to Robinson's congregation.

²⁸ Bradford's "Dialogue" a brief ms. published numerous times since the nineteenth century: Governor Bradford's First Dialogue: A Dialogue, or the Sum of a Conference between Some Young Men born in New England and Sundry Ancient Men that came out of Holland and Old England, anno Domini 1648 (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, 1896 [?]).

²⁹ Covenanted members of Plymouth's congregation, when they moved to found Scituate in 1633, joined themselves again in a new covenant because they were forming a new church that would call its own minister. See: Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs, The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts (Boston, Massachusetts: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 3 vols., 1997, 1999, 2001), I, pp. 19-20; III, Appendix 30, pp. 512-519.

³⁰ William Hubbard, A General History of New England, from the Discovery to MDCLXXX, published by the Massachusetts Historical Society (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Hillard & Metcalf, 1815); (second edition, Boston, Massachusetts: Charles C. Little & James Brown, 1848); see also: A General History of New England {Supplementary and Substitute Pages edited by Charles Deane}, pp. i-xvii, 3-14, 669-676 (Boston, 1878). The 1848 edition corrects misreadings in the first edition and includes a small amount of ms. pages that had been lost from the original but could be recovered from an early transcription. The quotation about Standish is found on pp. 110-111 of the 1848 edition: "In one of the fishing voyages about the year 1625, under the charge and command of one Mr. Hewes, employed by some of the West Country merchants, there arose a sharp contest between the said Hewes and the people of New Plymouth, about a fishing stage, built the year before about Cape Ann by Plymouth men, but was now, in the absence of the builders, made use of by Mr. Hewes's company, which the other, under the conduct of Captain Standish, very eagerly and peremptorily demanded: for the Company of New Plymouth, having themselves obtained a useless Patent for Cape Anne about the year 1623, sent some of the ships, which their Adventurers employed to transport passengers over to them, to make fish there; for which end they had built a stage there, in the year 1624. The dispute grew to be very hot, and high words passed between them, which might have ended in blows, if not in blood and slaughter, had not the prudence and moderation of Mr. Roger Conant, at that time there present, and Mr. Peirse's interposition, that lay just by with his ship, timely prevented. For Mr. Hewes had barricaded his company with hogsheads on the stagehead, while the demandants stood upon the land, and might easily have been cut off; but the ship's crew, by advice, promising to help them build another, the difference was thereby ended. Captain Standish had been bred a soldier in the Low Countries, and never entered the school of our Savior Christ, or of John Baptist, his harbinger [... the quotation as given fully in the text above]."

³¹ Stratton, Plymouth Colony [note 11], p. 357, refers to "Young, Planters, p. 33-34"; this is Alexander Young, Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1623-1636Now First Collected from the Original Records and Contemporaneous Manuscripts, and Illustrated with Notes, (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846).

³² Isaac Pennington, An Examination of the Grounds or Causes which are said to induce the Court of Boston in new England to make that Order or Law of Banishment, upon Pain of Death, Against the Quakers ... (London: L. Lloyd: 1660); the quoation below is on pp. 240-242 of Part 1, in Pennington, The Works of the long-mournful and sorely-distressed Isaac Pennington [...] (London: Benjamin Clark, 1681); republished online "And oh! how sweet and pleasant is it to the truly spiritual eye, to see several sorts of believers, several forms of Christians in the school of Christ, every one learning their own lesson, performing their own peculiar service, and knowing, owning, and loving one another in their several places, and different performances to their Master, to whom they are to give an account, and not to quarrel with one another about their different practices! Rom. 14:4. [...] Yea, and this I very well remember, that when I walked in the way of Independency (as it hath been commonly called) I had more unity with, and more love towards, such as were single-hearted in other ways and practices of worship (whose spirits I had some feeling of in the true simplicity, and in the life) than with divers of such who were very knowing and zealous in that way of Independency, in whom a wrong thing in the mean time had got up, which had caused them to swerve from the life, and from the simplicity. [...] The great error of the ages of the apostasy hath been, to set up an outward order and uniformity, and to make men's consciences bend thereto, either by arguments of wisdom, or by force; but the property of the true church government is, to leave the conscience to its full liberty in the Lord, to preserve it single and entire for the Lord to exercise, and to seek unity in the light and in the Spirit, walking sweetly and harmoniously together in the midst of different practices."

³³ Hubbard [note 30], pp. 556, 63

³⁴ Alexander Young, hronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, of the Colony of Plymouth, from 1602 to 1625, Now First Collected from Original records and Contemporaneous Printed Documents, and Illustrated with Notes (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1841), pp. 125-126, n. 4; p. 339, n.1.