In 1630, leaving Plymouth, he crossed to the north side of the harbor, and took up his residence on a spot still called Captain’s Hill, where his house has stood till our day, and the spring remains as kerbed with stone in his time. This place, probably after his birth-place in England, he called Duxbury, a name it still retains.
We find him reducing Morton; marching to defend the Pokanokets, allies of Plymouth, against the Narragansetts; going to Boston to maintain his colony’s rights to the
Kennebec trade after a collision there with a Boston trader; sent in 1635 to recover Penobscot from the French; commanding the Plymouth quota in the Pequot war; engaged against the Narragansetts in 1651, against the Mohawks and their allies in New York; and finally, in 1653, when very old, appointed to command the troops which Plymouth raised in anticipation of hostilities with the Dutch of New Netherland.
This was his last public service. He died in his house at Duxbury, October 3, 1656, leaving several sons, and his widow Barbara. His descendants at the present time must be many. “Nature endowing him with valor, quickness of apprehension, and good judgment, had qualified him for business or war. Of his other peculiarities, nothing has been recorded except that he was of small stature and of hasty temper. He had no ambition except to do for his friends whatever from time to time they thought fit to charge him with—whether it was to frighten the Narragansett or Massachusetts natives, to forage for provisions, or to hold a rod over disorderly English neighbors, or to treat with merchants on the London exchange. In the misery of the early settlement especially, the reader does not fail to reflect what relief must have been afforded by reliance on a guardian so vigilant and manful” (Palfrey).
On the 7th of October, 1872, the Standish Monument Association, incorporated by the State of Massachusetts, laid the corner-stone of a monument to this Catholic soldier, a round tower, to be surmounted by a bronze figure of the first captain of Plymouth colony. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery
Company of Boston were there, Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Good Templars, military delegations, the governor, magistrates, Protestant clergymen, and citizens; but there is no record that any bishop or clergyman of the faith professed by the Standishes of Standish assisted at the ceremony. The Catholic element was ignored. It should have been safe from insult.
But it may be asked, how can we claim Miles Standish as a Catholic? He was of a known Catholic family, then, since, and now Catholic. Though associated with Robinson’s flock, he never became a member of their church in Leyden, Plymouth, or Duxbury. His Catholic convictions give the simplest reason for this, which one of the New England historians regards as “an anomaly in human nature” (Baylies). If amid all the temptations from the associations around him he thus persistently declined to connect himself even nominally with the Protestant Church, it shows that he still clung to that of his family.
But why should a Catholic thus isolate himself from all the ministrations of the church, and throw himself into a Protestant community? Deprived of the heritage he claimed, he had to seek his fortune elsewhere. In England, the number of Catholics in proportion to the population was less than in Holland; but he probably found life more congenial with these countrymen of another faith than with men of the same faith but of another country. Circumstances, too, control our paths in life. Catholics count in this country by millions, yet there is many a Catholic thrown almost entirely into Protestant circles.
But Standish, it may be said,
married out of the church, and allowed his children to be brought up as Protestants. So did Gerard, one of the founders of Maryland, although there were priests in the colony and no Protestant minister; so did Matthew Carey; so did Chief-Justice Taney—yet all are regarded as Catholics, though we regret their indifference to the salvation of their children. It will not do on these grounds to deny his Catholicity.