The estates to which he asserts his rights lay, as expressed in the will, in Ormistock, Bouscouge, Wrightington, Maudsley, Newburrow, Cranston, and in the Isle of Man.
The latest history of Lancashire, by Baines, unfortunately gives no detailed pedigree of the house of Standish of Standish, that of Duxbury being given to some extent, though not in the line of descent of the younger sons. As, however, he does not claim at all to have belonged to the Duxbury branch, it is useless to look there for him.
Standish Hall, the seat of the branch from which he was descended, “is a large brick house, irregular
in form, to which is attached an ancient Catholic chapel, still used for that purpose” (Baines, Hist. Lancashire, iii., p. 505). Standish forms a parish in the Hundred of Leyland. “The extensive and fertile township of Duxbury, at the northern extremity of the parish of Standish, stands on the banks of the Yarrow, by which the township and parish is divided from the parish of Chorley” (Ib., p. 517).
Ormistock is evidently Ormskirk, an adjoining parish, in which Baines mentions that there are two Catholic chapels (iv., p. 244). In the Buscouge of the Plymouth record we easily recognize Burscough, where once flourished a famous priory, suppressed by Henry VIII. The Lancashire historian notes that there was formerly a Catholic chapel at Burscough Hall (iv., p. 256). Of the next place mentioned in Standish’s will, Baines says: “Adjoining Wrightington Hall stands a small Catholic chapel for the use of the family” (iii., p. 481); Mawdsley or Mawdesley is an extensive flat and fertile township between Croston and Wrightington (iii., p. 404); Newbury and Croston are in the same Hundred (iii., 171, 391-5).
He was thus of Catholic stock, and born and brought up amid families where the old faith is still cherished to this day. Almost every place mentioned in his will is linked with Catholic life in his time and the present.
Of his early life not a tradition or trace has been preserved. In that day the younger men of Catholic families constantly went abroad to gain an education and to seek service in the Continental armies, many too to study for the priesthood, and return to England, unawed by the terrible fate that awaited them if they fell into the
hands of the myrmidons of English law.
That Miles Standish should have sought service abroad is therefore natural. Ignoring his Catholic origin, New England writers have sought to explain his military career on the Continent. All seem to assume that he served in the Low Countries. Baylies, in his History of Plymouth (part ii., p. 21), says explicitly that “he served as an officer in the armies of Queen Elizabeth in the Low Countries, when commanded by her favorite, the Earl of Leicester.”
Captain Wyman, at the laying of the corner-stone in 1872, goes further: “In early life he was trained to the hardships and trials of war, having been commissioned at the age of twenty a lieutenant in the army serving in the Low Countries against the armies of the Inquisition.” The Rev. G. E. Ellis and Charles Deane on the same occasion limit themselves to the assertion that he served in the Low Countries (pp. 21, 24).