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The very presence of Edward May offers several more reasons to exclude a local “Alexander gent”. One is his name. May is not a Lancashire name, which in itself means nothing, because a lawyer could have come from anywhere. In every other document in the family papers where a lawyer was used, however, he was always from Lancashire, even if based in London. Intriguingly, also, the IGI revealed that there were many Mays in New England at the time, and the main concentration of Mays in Old England was south of London, including several named Edward May. Anyone interested might wish to pursue this ‘signpost’ and if anything new turns up, it would not surprise me at all if the Mays turned out to be close friends of Myles and Alexander and that one of their relatives was a lawyer in or near London. However, this hardly matters because of the next reason.
I must have read the following long ago in the Victoria County History, but it had escaped my memory until a later re-reading. Edward May was employed two years later to take Richard and Elizabeth to court again on behalf of yet another stray male from the family at Duxbury Hall. This was Gilbert Standish, with the case reported as follows:
In a fine of 1657 the moiety of the manor (of Heath Charnock), with lands, &c., in Heath Charnock, Knowley and Chorley, the deforciants were Richard Standish, Elizabeth his wife, Robert Charnock and Mary his wife, while the plaintiffs were Edward May and Gilbert Standish, probably trustees for the first named; Pal. Of Lanc. Feet of F. bdle 160, m 155. (Farrer, VCH, vol. 6, p. 214, note 2.)
This needs an awful lot of explaining and as so often, while solving one problem, it presents several more. Farrer had no knowledge as to who this Gilbert Standish might have been, as he had appeared in no previous account of Family A. Gilbert, the only one ever in the family of Duxbury Hall with this name, can only have been the last son of Thomas the M.P. He seems to have escaped the notice of any previously interested in the Standishes of Duxbury because he was baptised at Standish Parish Church, or at least by the Rector of Standish, who recorded him as “Gilbert son of Thomas and Anne Standish, Duckesburi” on 8 July 1631. The only other local Gilbert Standish was a younger brother of Colonel Richard, who appears on the Visitation Pedigree of Family B in 1613. This pedigree was known to Farrer and presumably lay behind his conclusion that Edward May and Gilbert were “probably trustees for” Richard and Elizabeth. This abstract of the text of 1657, however, is so similar to the one of 1655 that it seems that this was an almost identical re-run, with Richard and Elizabeth being fined again. The differences lay in the main claimant and the lands involved.
I think we can dismiss Colonel Richard’s brother Gilbert, as it is difficult to believe that a younger brother would hire a lawyer to take his older brother to court, and that his older brother would be ordered to pay his younger brother a fine, and still make him one of his heirs in his will in the same year.
It is much easier to believe that Gilbert was the youngest son of Thomas the M.P., who heard about the successful case in 1655 and realised that he also had a good chance of receiving compensation, which apparently he did. At the same time this poses several more anomalies and problems. We will specify these in the section “The mysterious Gilbert in the 1657 case”.
So where does all this leave us at the moment? With the well-nigh (complete?) certainty that “Alexander gent” in 1655 was Myles’s son, that a lawyer (the same Edward May?) won the cases for him and Gilbert, and that these two fines were almost certainly behind Colonel Richard’s financial anguish when he wrote his will in the year of the second case. It also leaves us with a few more anomalies revolving around the rather low estimate of £600 and the highly mysterious young Gilbert. Let us first read the full text of the 1655 settlement.