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PILGRIM FATHER CAPTAIN
MYLES STANDISH OF DUXBURY
LANCASHIRE AND MASSACHUSETTS

(Part 1)

BY

HELEN MOORWOOD

Reproduced by kind permission of the Editor of Lancashire History Quarterly, Phil Hudson, and of the Author

HIS ANCESTRY AND LOST LANDS IN LANCASHIRE Most Myles Mysteries Solved Captain Myles Standish, Lancashire’s most famous American son, entered documented history when he stepped aboard the Mayflower in 1620 to serve as Military Governor of Plymouth, Massachusetts, the fledgling settlement that provided many of the religious and political tenets of the future U. S. A. He held many official positions including Assistant Governor of Plymouth and commander-in-chief of all New England companies until his death in 1656. His heroic exploits were related in several contemporary writings, and many family details were documented in Plymouth colony records. Largely as a result of Longfellow’s 1858 poem, “The Courtship of Myles Standish” he joined the panoply of early American heroes, and is commemorated by the second highest monument in the U.S. to an individual (surpassed only by George Washington’s), a 14 foot statue atop a 110 foot (116’? - a discrepancy in various accounts) column on Captain’s Hill in Duxbury, Massachusetts. His name is a household word in New England, but he is barely known in Lancashire outside the Chorley (Duxbury) and Wigan (Standish) area, and even less in the rest of Old England. He is commemorated locally only by two unobtrusive memorials in St Wilfrid’s, Standish (a modern stained-glass figure in a crowd and some framed quotations in the vestry), and by an American flag over the Standish pew in St Laurence’s, Chorley, donated by U.S. soldiers stationed nearby during the Second World War.

He is commemorated nationally only by the inclusion of his name on a plaque in Plymouth Harbour, which records the departure of the Mayflower on 6 September, 1620. According to old and persistent New England tradition, Duxbury was named after Duxbury Hall, Myles’ ancestral home near Chorley, Lancashire, in honour of him. This tradition, together with details in Clause 9 of his Will (given below), have prompted many attempts to discover the identity of his great-grandfather Standish of Standish and the nature of his close connection to Standish of Duxbury. Three attempts in particular produced remarkable results. The first was in 1846, when Myles’ American descendants engaged I.W.R. Bromley, Esq. to search Chorley and Isle of Man Parish Registers for his baptism and his marriage to his first wife Rose (History of Duxbury, Justin Winsor, 1849), with a view to claiming Duxbury Hall after the male line had died out in 1812 and again in 1840. This attempt was unsuccessful in finding any relevant details, but spectacularly successful in becoming a cause-célèbre, souring British-American relations, spawning a cloak-and- dagger short story by Charles Dickens and planting the seeds of a connection with the Manx Isle, which fifty years later were to blossom into “old Manx traditions”. Despite this failure, his descendants continued to believe fervently in their cherished traditions until the next notable search. This was by the Rev. T. C. Porteus, who in 1912 discovered the abstract of a deed naming the same six townships of Myles’ Will, owned by widow Margaret Standish of Ormskirk.

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