190 SOLDIERS AND SAILORS At the beginning of the seventeenth century the provinces of the Nether- lands were battling for life against the tyranny of Spain. The Protestant Eliza- beth of England gave help and support to the Protestant Stadtholder Maurice, and many of her fighting men carried pike or arquebus at the sack of Cadiz, fought at Nieuport and Ostend, or served the guns in the great sea-fight off Gibraltar that, in 1607, broke the power of Spain. Among these fighting-men was young Miles Standish, and he fought so stoutly and to such good purpose that, before he was twenty-one he had attained the rank and title of captain, and was known to Englishmen in the Low Countries as a brave and gallant soldier. In 1609 came the twelve years' truce between tired Spain and not less wearied Holland, that gave way in 1621 to the stubborn and bloody Thirty Years' War. It was, prob- ably, in the early years of this truce that Captain Miles Standish, a born fighter, went back to England to battle for his heritage. Not being the match for the law men in England that he was for Spanish dons in Holland, he was forced to retire from the unequal contest, defeated but not conquered. This belief in his rights to the inheritance of the Standishes he sturdily maintained to the last ; for, dying forty years after in the new land his sword had helped to conquer and his wisdom to found, he left by his last will and testament unto his son and heir, Alexander : " Ormistic, Bonsconge, Wrightington, Maudeslay, and the estates in the Isle of Man " none of which he nor his descendants were ever to occupy or hold. It was after this unsuccessful struggle for his heritage that he crossed again to Holland and, from some cause not apparent perhaps his disgust at English law, perhaps the attractions of one who, later, became Mistress Rose Standish, may supply the motive settled among the self-exiled English folk in Leyden who, because of religious differences with the established Church, had left their English homes and, calling themselves Pilgrims because of their wanderings, had made a settlement in the Dutch city of Leyden, " fair and beautiful and of a sweet situation." Although not of the religious faith and following of the Pilgrims of Leyden indeed the story runs that the fiery little captain had been, at one time, a Ro- manist he must have been settled among them for years, for, on the eve of their emigration to America, we find him as one of their leaders, accepted and com- missioned as the military adviser of the colonists. The time of his life in Leyden was one of religious unrest in Europe ; and in Holland, during that twelve years' truce with Spain, the theological disputes between Calvinists and Arminians ran so high as to bring John of Barneald to the scaffold, and to drive Grotius the scholar into exile. These days of stern* dispute may have had their influence on the sturdy English soldier living in the midst of Dutch life and Dutch disputa- tions, and made him lean to the side of Puritanism, even if never openly avowing it as his religious faith. It is, indeed, a singular fact that the mainstay and chief protector of the first Puritan colonists of America was neither of their communion nor of their connection, and is openly censured by Puritan writers as one who, so says Hubbard, "had been a soldier in the Low Countries and had never en-
