41. Blessed are the Peacemakers

 

This is the final version of Budleigh artist John Washington’s painting. I have lots of thoughts about it. But the outstanding thought that I have today, Remembrance Sunday, 8 November 2020, is ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’. 

I hope that John’s painting will inspire millions of people everywhere, in the knowledge that Roger Conant, born just over 400 years ago in the same Devon village as Sir Walter Raleigh, was a worthy and respected man. 

At that critical moment in 1625, he helped to avoid conflict and divisiveness among the early European settlers in the New World.

40. A Conant 400 ale?

 

Raleigh 400 ale was served to guests at Fairlynch Museum's 2018 exhibition in Budleigh Salterton, Devon, where the celebrated 'Boyhood of Raleigh' by Millais was painted in 1870      Image credit: Lizzie Mee

Back in 2018 I helped to launch a drink in honour of Sir Walter Raleigh, marking the 400^th anniversary of the Great Devonian’s death.

 

Celebrating Sir Walter’s 400^th with an ale and at the pub named after him in East Budleigh: (l-r) Budleigh blogger Michael Downes, Sally Miller and Jonathon Crump, owner of Black Tor Brewery   Image credit: Nigel Jones  

I’m just wondering whether something similar might be served at a future banquet in honour of Roger Conant, and to mark the 400^th anniversary of his arrival in America.

Now don’t tell me that Puritans like Conant didn’t drink ale.

Back in 1970 Courage (Western) Breweries produced a Mayflower Ale, brewed to mark the 350th anniversary of the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers from Plymouth. 

Image credit:  https://drizly.com

No surprise then that to coincide with the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the 1620 Pilgrims, an American version has been produced by the Mayflower Brewing Company, based in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  Beer was the staple drink on board the Mayflower, reads their publicity. The Pilgrims drank beer with nearly all of their meals and the ship’s crew had a daily ration of a gallon. 'Mayflower Daily Ration is an unfiltered session IPA that is crisp, dry and bursting with citrusy hop flavor and aroma.'

 

Image credit: www.bateman.co.uk

Back on this side of the Atlantic, a Lincolnshire brewery launched Batemans Pilgrim Fathers, a 4.4% ABV, golden-coloured cask beer with what they described as a big, hoppy flavour with fruity undertones of blackcurrant and citrus from the Bramling Cross and Chinook hops – chosen to represent the mixed heritage of the Pilgrim Fathers and for the perfect balance they bring to this popular Lincolnshire beer.

 

 

Image credit: www.hallwoodhousebeerfest.com

Closer to home and Roger Conant’s birthplace, Dorset brewers Hall & Woodhouse have produced Puritan 6, a 4.8% ABV American Pale Ale, of a light gold colour with a malty backbone and a huge hit of American Piney Grapefruit Hops. The ale is named, says the brewery, after the Puritan church in Dorchester, St Peter’s, where the Rev John White supported fellow-sympathisers in religious matters by helping to colonise America.

 

Portrait of Rev. John White, from the National Portrait Gallery. Unknown artist woodcut, late 17th century

Which brings us very neatly to Roger Conant. For it was the Rev John White who arranged for him to cross the Atlantic and supervise the fishing enterprise at Cape Ann, near present-day Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Forget the notion of Puritans as killjoys. It was encouraged by cartoonists who wished to discourage the Prohibition Amendment of 1919 which outlawed the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors in the USA, writes Roger’s biographer Clifford K. Shipton. ‘Actually, Roger Conant and his contemporaries consumed amazing quantities of beer, quantities which stagger our imagination’.

So let’s get brewing in time to raise many glasses of Conant ale during the 2023 festivities in celebration of East Budleigh’s other hero.  

39. A memorial to the Uphams of Bicton

 

 

It’s widely known that the Mayflower’s passengers were not the first or the only Europeans to emigrate to America in 1620 in search of a new life, though they are the best known. Thanks to the efforts of institutions like the Virginia Company of London many English settlers had decided that their future lay in the New World. 

According to a Jamestown 350^th Anniversary booklet published at Williamsburg VA in 1957, by the summer of 1622 the Council for New England announced that over 3,500 people had migrated to Virginia since the spring of 1619. The so-called Great Migration between 1620 and 1640 saw roughly 80,000 people leave England for America.

For those who know East Budleigh it is pretty extraordinary that New World pioneers Raleigh and Conant came from the same village, though Raleigh, of course, never set foot in North America.   

But Roger Conant and his brother Christopher were not the only emigrants to the New World to be born in this little corner of East Devon. Back in March 2020 I mentioned the Upham family who lived in the neighbouring hamlet of Bicton.  You can read about them at https://conant400.blogspot.com/2020/03/weymouth-new-plymouth.html

 

 

So I was intrigued to see the above memorial plaque telling us of the family’s deep local roots. It’s on the churchyard wall next to the ancient and atmospheric ruin of St Mary’s Old Church at Bicton, pictured above. You can get to it only through Bicton Park Botanical Gardens, for which there is an admission charge. A visit to the Gardens, with their magnificent collection of trees and plants, makes a great day out.

But why no mention on the plaque of the illustrious Deacon John Upham who led his family across the Atlantic in 1635 and, like Roger Conant, founded a city in Massachusetts?   

 

 

The Upham name is still known in Bicton. Nearby, on Woodbury Common, is a woodland known as Upham’s Plantation. And in the pretty graveyard across the lane from St Mary’s Church – which you can visit free of charge – I came across this gravestone for ‘a loving wife and mother’, Doris Upham who died on 22 May 1999, aged only 73.  I searched for a meaning of TAMAM, the last word on the gravestone, but could find only that it means ‘complete’ in Turkish.   

38. Fine detail on the Fishermen

 

 

 

An update from Budleigh artist John Washington for Conant 400 group members which will be of special interest both to British Devonians with links to East Budleigh and American residents of Gloucester, Massachusetts. 

John is continuing to work on his painting of the celebrated 1625 scene at Fishermen’s Field. That was when Roger Conant intervened and avoided possible bloodshed in the confrontation between fishermen from England’s West Country, led by John Hewes, and Captain Miles Standish, military adviser to the Plymouth Pilgrims:

‘I thought you might like to see the fishermen who now have their characters more clearly identified in their faces. Also, I’ve brought more detail into Tablet Rock at the back as that is such a well known landmark in the context of the story.

Next on the left hand side of the painting is to work on the hogshead salt barrels to bring them into line with the rest of the painting - more paint, more colour, more depth.’

 

37. Roger Conant and Sir Walter Raleigh: The Book

Statues of Sir Walter Raleigh in East Budleigh, and Roger Conant in Salem. Note Raleigh’s headless shadow!

 

For those who know East Budleigh it’s extraordinary that such a tiny village was the birthplace of two very different pioneers of modern America.

 

Artist John Washington at work on his painting of Roger Conant

Much has been written about Sir Walter Raleigh and of course he’s been the subject of various paintings. Roger Conant is less well known, but now we have Budleigh artist John Washington working on his splendid portrayal of the 1625 scene at Fishermen’s Field on Cape Ann. That was when Roger’s intervention helped to avoid bloodshed in the confrontation between West Country fishermen and Captain Miles Standish, military advisor to the Plymouth Pilgrims.   

A further 400^th anniversary tribute to Roger Conant is now being considered by members of the Conant 400 group, who are planning to publish a book about him and his achievements, including an insight into his origins in East Devon.  Inevitably, Raleigh will feature in the story.

 

Engraving of Roger Conant meeting Sir Walter Raleigh. Conant family tradition says that as a boy young Roger met Sir Walter Raleigh.  Image credit: www.lyndon-estate.co.uk

 

But did he and Roger Conant ever meet? It’s one of the questions being considered by the book’s authors, along with other aspects of the two men’s Devon background.   

 

Three celebrated bench ends in All Saints’ Church, East Budleigh, dated 1537: the ship, the 'Red Indian' (or a Green Man), and 'the man eating a banana' (or 'a man with a swollen tongue)

Could those celebrated bench ends in All Saints’ Church really have inspired the pair to explore the exciting and mysterious New World of the 16^th and 17^th centuries? Some believe that the carved oak image of a ship was an obvious influence. Some East Budleigh people are convinced that one of the bench ends portrays a Native American Indian. There’s even one historian who believes that a third bench end shows a man eating a banana.

 

Raleigh’s letter to Richard Duke of Otterton, seeking to buy Hayes Barton. Copy of the 1671 petition from Roger Conant and other Beverly residents seeking to change the name to Budleigh, with a note stating that the Magistrates ‘see no cause to alter the name of the place as desired.’  

Image credit: Beverly Historical Society and Prof Donna Seger

 

One definite and documented link between Raleigh and Conant is their affection for their home village. We know that Raleigh at the height of his power at court in 1584 wanted to buy his birthplace of Hayes Barton. And almost a century later, finally settled in the Massachusetts community of Beverly, Roger Conant petitioned to change its name to Budleigh. Both men were unsuccessful in their wishes.

 

Beverly Freemasons’ Budleigh Lodge seal  

But it’s nice to know that there is a Budleigh Avenue in the city of Beverly.  And at 134 McKay Street in Beverly, the local Freemasons meet at Budleigh Lodge! I learnt that in 1920 it was thought fitting to perpetuate the name of Roger Conant’s old home in England by naming the new Lodge after it.

 

Hayes Barton Cafe and Dessertery

Equally, further south in the city of Raleigh in North Carolina, two districts were named Budleigh and Hayes Barton at around that time, the latter being described as the city’s ‘first twentieth century upper-class neighborhood’ in the words of a 1992 official survey. ‘Hayes Barton was and is an area of impeccably manicured landscapes, and pristinely maintained residences which still house some of the capital city's political and social leaders.’

You could say that it was in East Budleigh that the fondly named Special Relationship between our two countries took root!   

36. Painting Budleigh history: East Budleigh’s Roger Conant the Peacemaker

A work in progress - Roger Conant the Peacemaker: How John Washington's painting of the 1625 scene at Fishermen's Field, Cape Ann, was looking by 3 September

Local history is often better told in pictures than in words. A visual impact is more engaging, and artistic licence means that a controversial slant can be introduced – which is always good for enjoyable and balanced discussion.

There are very few paintings inspired by Budleigh’s history, and yet our area is crowded with fascinating events and people who would make good subjects.  Sir John Everett Millais’ 1870 painting ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ was surely the first and the best known.

Then a century or so later we have Peter Goodhall’s 1983 depiction of smuggler Jack Rattenbury’s escape from the excise officer Captain Stocker – now in Fairlynch Museum. That painting was followed by the more recent one of the German Heinkel bomber strafing Budleigh High Street during WW2

And now local artist John Washington is working on a painting based on events even further back in history, but relevant to this year’s 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the Plymouth Pilgrims in America, and the Mayflower 400 celebrations.

Dedication of the Tablet Rock plaque in 1907 at Fisherman’s Field, with, below the inscription: ‘Here in 1625 Gov. Roger Conant by wise diplomacy averted bloodshed between contending factions one led by Myles Standish of Plymouth the other by Capt Hewes. A notable example of arbitration in the beginnings of New England. Placed by the Citizens of Gloucester 1907’. Photo credit: Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester MA, and  Mary Ellen Lepionka

His subject is the peace-making role of East Budleigh-born Roger Conant in the 1625 confrontation between West Country fishermen and the Plymouth Pilgrims’ military adviser Captain Miles Standish. The event took place in Fishermen’s Field at Cape Ann, near the present-day city of Gloucester in Massachusetts.

Since the first sketches back in May this year good progress has been made. Originally, the concept was a simple representation of Roger Conant himself, but over time John has found himself excited by the historical background and by the interaction between the characters of the 1625 story.

Giving the central figure a sufficiently authoritative but friendly pose faced with the notoriously fiery Miles Standish - known by his enemies as Captain Shrimp because of his small stature – has been a challenge. ‘The content of the painting has developed significantly from what I initially thought would be a quite straightforward portrait, he says.

Budleigh artist John Washington at work 

Accuracy of historical detail has been to the forefront of John’s thinking and he is pleased with the reception that the painting has had from experts in the USA, notably from Gloucester historian Mary Ellen Lepionka who has offered her congratulations on the depiction of the stand-off on Fishermen’s Field – ‘nice job’ was her comment.   

Recently, John has worked mostly on the background - the sky, the sea, the grass and rocky path. Conant’s clothes have also received more attention. ‘I shall be working my way through the various images in the same way over the next few weeks,’ he says. ‘The fishermen are looking a bit light in colour but as I overpaint them, they’ll tone down and the painting will gel much better.’

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.

35. Unsettling statues: why a painting was chosen for Roger Conant’s birthplace of East Budleigh

The statue of Roger Conant, by sculptor Henry Kitson, completed in 1911, stands outside Salem’s Witch Museum.    Photo credit: John Andrews

It’s been a tough time for statues, especially in 2020. Many of them must be wondering whose turn it will be next, to be unceremoniously toppled from their plinth.  

But a year or so ago, a group of East Budleigh residents decided that they wanted to honour Roger Conant, the mill owner’s son who left England in 1623 to found the city of Salem.

How the Conant family mill in East Budleigh, sadly demolished in the early 20^th century,  might have looked. Frontispiece illustration from Upper Canada Sketches by Thomas Conant, Toronto: William Briggs 1898

And a mini version of Salem’s statue, perhaps located near the Conant family mill, seemed an obvious tribute.  

The unveiling of the statue of Sir Walter Raleigh in East Budleigh, 7 February 2006. L-r: HRH The Duke of Kent, East Budleigh Parish Chairman Steve Baker, Hugo Swire MP, the sculptor Vivien Mallock FRBS

However even a small statue would have been expensive. The above statue of Sir Walter Raleigh was famously financed by British American Tobacco. And that source of funding, as you can imagine, was controversial. The charity Action on Smoking and Health even called it ‘a cynical publicity stunt’ by the company.    

Detail of Henry Kitson's statue of Roger Conant as seen at

https://www.johnwashingtonartist.com/blog.html

Further research into Roger Conant’s life has revealed a man whose character was somewhat different from the impression given by the Salem statue with — in descendant Jeff Conant’s words — its ‘stern wind-burned face’.

The American lawyer and historian John Wingate Thornton (1818-78). His book The Landing at Cape Anne or The Charter of the first permanent colony on the territory of the Massachusetts Company was published in 1854  

Biographers have written of Conant’s attitude of tolerance and conciliation, of his self-effacing but meticulously honest character and of his mild and moderate views: he was, wrote John Wingate Thornton, quiet, unobtrusive and unambitious, ‘preferring the public good to his private interests’.

Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh in All Saints’ Church, East Budleigh. It shows Raleigh in court dress at the height of his favour with Queen Elizabeth I.  

Rather different in character from the flamboyant and ambitious Sir Walter Raleigh!

  

As in Europe, the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of imposing statues in American towns and cities.

In some cases, nationalistic pride was allied to a moral crusade, clearly inspired by reverence towards people seen as the nation’s Puritan Founding Fathers.

Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-64 by Charles Osgood

A minority took a different view. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, wrote of his Puritan ancestors as ‘stern and black-browed’ members of ‘the most intolerant brood that ever lived’.

This statue, ‘The Puritan’ created by the American sculptor Augustus St Gaudens (1848-1907) and unveiled in 1887, stands in Springfield, Massachusetts. I’m not the only one to be struck by its grim face: art historian Dr Dianne Durante describes it as ‘a figure of authority, somewhere between militant and menacing’.       

Here is a later 1904 version of the same figure sculpted by St Gaudens, this time entitled ‘The Pilgrim’ and carrying a clearly labelled Bible. It stands in Philadelphia, and I find the face just as unappealing as the earlier ‘Puritan’!   

The sternness of the Salem statue’s facial features has inspired an interesting view of why and how it was erected in the city so closely associated with Conant.  

The sculptor, it seems, according to Professor Joseph Conforti, was sending a conservative message to Salem residents at a critical time in the city’s history during the early 20th century.     

‘Labor unrest provoked fears of mounting violence and radical political protest’, he explains in his book Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2001.     

Anglo-American sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson (c.1864-1947)  Photo by J.P. Purdy in Henry Hudson and Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

‘Amid a rising tide of immigrants and growing alarm over labor unrest, a new monument to Salem’s past was erected — a grand human figure that, in Professor Conforti’s words, ‘hovered like a moral sentry over Salem’s changed social  order’. 

‘In 1911, noted sculptor Henry Kitson  completed a statue of Roger Conant, the first  permanent settler in Salem. Situated next to the common in the center of the city, the magnificent figure rivaled Saint-Gaudens’s statue of The Puritan, to which it bears a striking resemblance. Bestride an eight-foot boulder, the stern, manly Conant towered over pedestrians’.  

In Professor Conforti’s view, Kitson’s sculpture had a political purpose. It ‘served to inspire the native-born minority and to encourage respect for Salem’s heritage among the city’s immigrant throng.’

  

The idea of a painting by Budleigh artist John Washington was chosen as a tribute to Roger Conant rather than a statue. 

John’s painting, still a work in progress, focuses on the famous 1625 incident at Fishermen’s Field on Cape Ann, near the city of Gloucester in Massachusetts. It is there that Roger Conant is recorded as having averted a bloody confrontation between two groups of settlers.

You can follow John’s progress on the project at  https://www.johnwashingtonartist.com/blog.html

The artist’s portrayal of Conant the Peacemaker will strike, it is hoped, a completely different note from Kitson’s statue, and one that is more in keeping with what we know of the character of Salem’s founder.  There is, sadly, no portrait of Roger Conant in existence.

And of course, thanks to John’s generosity, East Budleigh’s Conant 400 Group has not had to appeal again to a company like British American Tobacco.

  

34. Conant at Cape Ann: a painting’s progress online

I’m not the only blogger in Budleigh Salterton!

And not the only one blogging about Roger Conant.

Local artist John Washington, Chair of our town’s Art Club, has thrown himself enthusiastically into the project of an exciting ‘history painting’.

Two years ago, John organized a successful re-enactment of the scene in 1870 when the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Everett Millais stayed in Budleigh Salterton and started work on his masterpiece ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’.

Set on our pebble beach, the painting shows an imagined scene where young Walter Raleigh and his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert are inspired by the stories of travel and adventure told to them by a local sailor. John, in costume as Millais, is pictured above.

John’s current work focuses on the famous 1625 incident at Fishermen’s Field on Cape Ann, near Gloucester MA, when Roger Conant is recorded as having averted a bloody confrontation between two groups of settlers.

‘A degree of artistic license will be required but I still intend to include as much historical accuracy as possible,’ says John.

You can follow John’s progress on the project at  https://www.johnwashingtonartist.com/blog.html

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.

33. ‘A kind of ruffling course in the world’: Perceptions of ‘Captain Shrimp’

Continued from 
https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/06/history-in-art-arms-and-men.html

A purported portrait of Myles Standish, allegedly painted in 1625, first published in 1885. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myles_Standish

From Plymouth to Gainsborough and from Southampton to Scrooby, towns all over England have been anticipating Mayflower 400, with plans to mark what has been seen as a historic moment four centuries ago when the Plymouth Pilgrims arrived in the New World and set up their Massachusetts colony. 

After so much hard work to prepare pageants and exhibitions the disruption and postponement of events caused by Covid 19 is being  keenly felt.

Myles Standish Way, Chorley

Image credit: Chorley Council

Most of the Pilgrims came from the East of England – none was from Devon. But Chorley in Lancashire was particularly proud of its link with the Mayflower through Captain Miles Standish, the Pilgrims’ military commander.

The Standish family were Lords of the Manor of Duxbury to the south of Chorley. Miles named his estate in New England Duxbury after what is thought to be his manorial birthplace. The town reciprocated by naming one of its roads after him.  

In some ways it seems incongruous that the Pilgrims, seeking spiritual freedom, should have felt the need for military aid in their New World venture. 

St Laurence Church, where the Standish family worshipped

Chorley people seem less concerned by this aspect than by Standish’s family connections to the area.  ‘He is an enigma, a man of mystery and almost a virtual being,’ observe the Friends of St Laurence Church in Chorley’s town centre, where they have been researching Standish’s early life.

Plimoth Plantation, a replica reconstruction of the original Pilgrim village in Plymouth, Massachusetts, including the palisade surrounding the settlement  Image credit: Nancy 

What they describe as ‘a chronic lack of evidence’ makes it well nigh impossible to answer the obvious and interesting questions about him, such as the date and place of his birth, his family origins and his career prior to joining the Mayflower Pilgrims in 1620.

An 1873 lithograph depicting the expedition against Nemasket led by Standish and guided by his Indian friend Hobbamock

A major issue with regard to Miles Standish, especially in the period leading up to the confrontation on Fishermen’s Field is the brutality he displayed in hostile encounters with Native Americans. 

Four years before, in August 1621, he led an abortive night raid on the village of Nemasket in an attempt to kill Corbitant, a chief from the Wampanoag Indian tribe suspected of plotting against the Plymouth Pilgrims. Standish failed to capture Corbitant, but the raid had the desired effect. The following month, nine sachems or chiefs, including Corbitant, came to Plymouth, to sign a treaty of loyalty to King James.

Better known is the so-called Wessagusset Massacre of March 1623. Standish had invited Chiefs Pecksuot and Wittawamut and several other warriors of the Massachusett tribe to what had been described as a ‘peaceful summit’. On an arranged signal, the door was shut and Standish attacked Pecksuot, stabbing him repeatedly with the man's own knife. Wituwamat and three other warriors were put to death along with several native villagers.

Wituwamat’s head was cut off and displayed on a pole as a warning. As a consequence, Plymouth’s trade with the Indians was devastated for years.  

The scene is the deck of the ship Speedwell before the departure of Protestant pilgrims for the New World from Delft Haven, Holland, on July 22, 1620. Pastor John Robinson leads Governor Carver, William Bradford, Miles Standish, and their families in prayer, as depicted by the American artist Robert W. Weir (1803-89) in his Embarkation of the Pilgrims (1857)    Image credit:  Architect of the Capitol   

News of the massacre and Standish’s role in it alarmed the Rev John Robinson, the Plymouth Pilgrims’ former pastor in Holland. This is what he wrote to the Pilgrims from Leyden on 19 December 1623:

‘Concerning the killing of those poor Indians of which we heard at first by report, and since by more certain relation, oh! how happy a thing had it been if you had converted

some before you had killed any! Besides where blood is once begun to be shed, it is seldom stanched of a long time after. You will say they deserved it. I grant it : but upon

what provocations and invitements by those heathenish Christians! Besides, you being no magistrates over them, were to consider not what they deserved, but what you were by necessity constrained to inflict. Necessity of this, especially of killing so many (and many more it seems they would if they could) I see not. Methinks one or two principals should have been full enough, according to that approved rule ‘The punishment to the few, and the fear to the many.’ Upon this occasion let me be bold to exhort you seriously to consider the disposition of your Captain whom I love, and am persuaded the Lord in great mercy and for much good hath sent you him, if you use him aright. He is a man humble and meek among you and toward all, in ordinary course: but now, if this be merely from a human spirit there is cause to fear that, by occasion especially of provocation, there may be wanting that tenderness of the life of man, made after God's image, which is meet. It is also a thing more glorious in men’s eyes than pleasing in God's or convenient for Christians, to be a terror to poor barbarous people, and, indeed, I am afraid lest, by these occasions, others should be drawn to affect a kind of ruffling course in the world.’  

The title page of the Rev William Hubbard's General History of New England

Standish’s reputation for such violence was well established by 1625 when the encounter on Fishermen’s Field took place. The Captain was a dangerous man to cross, as is clear from the words of the Rev William Hubbard (1621-1704), to whom Roger Conant gave an account of the incident.

 

‘Capt. 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,’ wrote Hubbard in his General History of New England, ‘or, if he was ever there, had forgot his first lessons, to offer violence to no man, 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.’

Illustration from the story by the 19^th century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘The Maypole of Merrymount’.  Hawthorne’s striking observation – ‘Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire’ – leaves the reader in no doubt as to where his sympathies lay

Three years later, in June 1628, saw Standish in action at the Merrymount colony in modern-day Quincy MA. Its English founder Thomas Morton had infuriated the Plymouth Puritans with what were viewed as his heathenish beliefs. Merrymount’s 80ft maypole was a particular target of the Puritans’ anger and Miles Standish was sent to arrest Morton and destroy the maypole.

‘Captain Shrimp’ was Morton’s name for Standish when he recounted the episode in his three-volume New English Canaan (1637). Perhaps he was thinking of Standish when he later wrote that the local Indians were ‘more  full of humanity than the Christians’.

 

American historian Jeremy Belknap and the title page of his work American Biographies

Very different was the view of Miles Standish as an American hero expressed by later writers in a proudly free United States, following the victorious outcome of the War of Independence against Britain.

‘Sedentary persons are not always the best judges of a soldier’s merit or feelings,’ wrote the clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap (1744-98), aiming no doubt at William Hubbard’s criticism of the Captain. While acknowledging that Standish had his faults, Belknap was laying the foundations for the pedestal on which the Puritans’ military commander would achieve his iconic status in the eyes of the American public.

‘If the arm of flesh to establish the rights and defend the lives and property of Colonists, in a new country, surrounded with enemies and false friends, certainly such a man as Standish, with all his imperfections, will hold a high rank among the worthies of New-England,’ he wrote in his two-volume American Biographies, published in 1794 and 1798.   

25,000 copies of Longfellow's poem were sold in the first two months of publication. The depiction of Standish on the cover of this edition is by the American artist N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), known for his illustrations of The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Treasure Island (1883) 

By the 19^th century, the Captain had become a folk hero, partly because of Longfellow’s 1858 poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. 

American historian John Stevens Cabot Abbott and the title page of his book Miles Standish The Puritan Captain  

The historian John Stevens Cabot Abbott (1805-77), author of Miles Standish The Puritan Captain (1872) writes in epic style of the 1623 Wessagusset Massacre in which the Massachusett chief Pecksuot was murdered. Standish is described as ‘a conquering hero’ congratulated by his Puritan friends on his return to Plymouth for ‘his success in his chivalric adventure’:

‘Captain Standish was a slender man, of small stature. Pecksuot was almost a giant. The savage approached him, whetting his knife, and boasting of his power to lay the “little man” low. The other Indians were equally insulting and threatening, with both word and gesture. The Captain, perfectly preserving his calmness and self-possession, ordered the door to be shut and fastened, that no other Indians could come in. Then, giving the signal to the others of his men, he sprang, with the wonderful strength and agility for which he was celebrated, upon the burly savage, wrenched the knife, which was sharp as a needle at the point, from his hand, and after a desperate conflict, in which he inflicted many wounds, succeeded in plunging it to the hilt in the bosom of his foe. In like manner Wituwamat and the other Indian, after the fiercest struggle, during which not a word was uttered, were killed. Wituwamat’s brother, a boastful, blood-thirsty villain of eighteen, was taken and hanged, for conspiring for the massacre of the English.’

Abbott’s account is that of the triumphalist historian: ‘As we have mentioned, the unintelligent Indians often behaved like children,’ he explains. ‘This energetic action seemed to overwhelm all those tribes with terror, who were contemplating a coalition with the Massachusetts Indians against the English. They acted as if bereft of reason, forsaking their houses, fleeing to the swamps, and running to and fro in the most distracted manner. Many consequently perished of hunger, and of the diseases which exposure brought on. The planting season had just come. In their fright they neglected to plant; and thus, in the autumn, from want of their customary harvest of corn, many more perished.’

For Abbott, the massacre was justified because of the alleged conspiracy against the Plymouth colony in which Pecksuot and Wituwamat were involved: it was evident that

‘Captain Standish was the military commander of the colony, and in a sense responsible for its safety; that the measures he adopted were purely in self-defense, and that in no other way could he possibly have saved the colonies from massacre.’

Standish with the head of Wittawamut

Artist unknown           Source: www.clipart.com 

To those critics of the manner in which the Indian chiefs had been killed, Abbott retorted that one cannot apply today’s moral standards to the past:

 ‘Captain Standish took back with him the head of Wituwamat, which was placed upon the fort as a warning to all hostile Indians. This measure has been severely censured. But it is replied that the savages, whose bloodthirsty desires were fully roused, could be influenced by deeds only, and not by words; that no people should be blamed for not being in advance of the age in which they lived, and that more than a century after this, in the year 1747, in refined and Christian England, the heads of the lords, who were implicated in the Scots rebellion, were exposed upon Temple Bar, the most frequented avenue between London and Westminster.’

Abbott’s book was inscribed to the many thousands of the descendants of Miles Standish. In the Preface he wrote: ‘It has been a constant pleasure to the author to endeavor to rear a worthy tribute to the heroic captain and the noble man, who was one of the most illustrious of those who laid the foundations of this great Republic.’

Image credit: http://www.danielnpaul.com/MylesStandish.html  

For centuries, Miles Standish has been seen by most Americans as the brave man who ensured the survival of the Plymouth Pilgrims by his bold actions. In the Massachusetts town of Weymouth, this tablet placed in 1923 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the settlement commemorates the killing of the Indian chiefs Pecksuot and Wituwaumet as an act 'averting serious disaster to the colonies'. The tablet was rededicated by the Weymouth Historical Commission in 1998. 

American historian Nathaniel Philbrick and his 2006 book Mayflower A story of courage, community and war 

Modern writers have been more circumspect about Standish and his role in early America. For historian Nathaniel Philbrick, Standish’s raid, combined with the complexities of inter-tribal Indian politics ‘had irreparably damaged the human ecology of the region’, initiating ‘a new and terrifying era in New England’.

Questions still persist about the rights and wrongs of the Captain’s actions just as they remain about his birth origins. But in the year of Mayflower 400, Chorley still insists on Standish’s links to the Lancashire town.

Astley Hall   Image credit: M.D. Beckwith

At the splendid 16^th century building Astley Hall, owned by Chorley Town Council and now known as Astley Hall Museum and Art Gallery, a special Miles Standish exhibition was set up.  Sadly the Covid-19 outbreak at the moment of writing has prevented its public opening. But the key slides proposed for the exhibition can be seen online, along with those serious questions to be answered.

‘Was his character too warlike - especially in his treatment of the native Americans?’  is one of the questions.

And the exhibition’s answer?

‘History is about interpretation and judgement. Readers will have to make their own mind up about Myles’ record.’

You can view the online Miles Standish exhibition at https://astleypark.co.uk/mylesstandish/

The Miles Standish monument in Duxbury, Massachusetts. A dedication and cornerstone-laying ceremony attended by 10,000 persons took place on October 7, 1872. The monument was not completed until 1898. The monument was built on Captain's Hill, the highest point, 200 feet above sea level, on what was once Standish's farm    
Image credit: Pete Forsyth

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