STANDISH, MILES, or Myles (c. 1584-1636), American colonist, was born about 1584 in Lancashire, probably of the Duxbury Hall branch of the family. Nothing definite is known of him before 1620, when with his wife, Rose (d. 1621), he emigrated to New England in the “Mayflower.” He became the military leader of the Plymouth colony; was sent to London in 1625 on an unsuccessful mission to secure the intervention of the Council for New England in the affairs of the colony; and in 1628 was one of the eight members of the colony who pledged themselves to pay 1800 and thus buy out the merchant adventurers. In 1631 with William Brewster and others he settled at Duxbury, where he died on the 3rd of October 1656, and where on “Captain's Hill,” near the site of his home, there is a monument to him, consisting of a stone shaft, 110 ft. high, and a bronze statue of him. Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish apparently has no basis in fact; Standish's second wife, Barbara, a sister of Rose, must have been summoned to Plymouth a year before the marriage of John Alden to Priscilla Mullins. Lowell's Interview with Miles Standish misrepresents him: he was not a typical Puritan.
See William Bradford's History of Plimouth Plantation. Tudor Jenks's Captain Myles Standish (New York, 1905) and Henry Johnson's Exploits of Myles Standish (New York, 1897) are popular sketches.