Speed Dating Events

Miles Standish is a Founding Father, a great hero and war-leader in the early days of US colonial settlement. But he is grim, old and unattractive, both wrinkly and grizzly as a result of his martial life.

His friend John Alden is, by contrast, a pretty cute specimen of Early American Beefcake, ‘fair-haired, azure- eyed, with a delicate Saxon complexion’ (Robert Redford should play him in the film version). John also has a delicate Saxon reticence when it comes to women. He is nursing a manly passion for the lovely Priscilla, and can’t breathe a word of it. Then he gets the thunderbolt revelation that grumpy old Miles Standish wants to make a Founding Mother out of her, and has delegated him to carry the offer!

Go to the damsel Priscilla,

the loveliest maiden of Plymouth, Say that a blunt old Captain,

a man not of words but of actions, Offers his hand and his heart,

the hand and the heart of a soldier . . .

Sounds terrific, no? the proposal you always wanted? Shame on you, where’s your sense of ‘my country, ’tis of thee . . .’? To John’s further confusion, the great warrior confesses:

I can march up to a fortress,

and summon the place to surrender, But march up to a woman,

with such a proposal I dare not. I am not afraid of bullets,

nor shot from the mouth of a cannon,

But of a thundering `No!’

point-blank from the mouth of a woman, That I confess I’m afraid of . . .

So there’s no getting out of it. With a heavy heart John makes his way to Priscilla, and gets down to his task: ‘I have come to you now, with an offer and proffer of marriage‘. And offer and proffer he does, stumbling his way through this strange proxy proposal.

Understandably, Priscilla is not impressed. She floors the proposer with one practical question: ‘Why does he not come himself, and take the trouble to woo me?’ John’s attempts to get his bat to this googly get him into an even deeper mess. Finally the exasperated Priscilla gives him a man-sized nudge in one of the immortal lines of American literature:

Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?

And she gets him in the end. But not all women are as good judges of husband material as Priscilla. Both Americans and British know the larky ballad, ‘Oh soldier, soldier, will you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum?’ In this song the girl has obviously fallen hook, line and sinker for what you might call the soldier’s outward parts. Oh yes. Oh, soldier. You know what she means. There is something about a soldier — preferably a Heavy Dragoon. Thomas Hardy certainly knew what he was doing in Far From The Madding Crowd, when he put Sergeant Troy in the dashing brigade of the 11th Hussars, and made him bewitch the heroine with his . . . what’s the word? . . . swordsmanship . . .

The soldier in the ballad is just such another lady-killer and jack-go-nimble as Sergeant Troy. Although there are as many variants of the song as voices to sing them, in all

The versions he successively extracts from the besotted maid a complete new wardrobe, down to hat, sock and boots, as the price for marrying her, and then delivers the

coup de grace:

Oh no, sweet maid, I cannot marry you, For 1 have a wife and children, too — For I’ve got me a wife at home.

Filthy swine, as my father would have said. And the pater finds plenty of support for his view in both history and literature. The woman betrayed is a very common theme, while never less than heartbreaking. W. H. Auden updated it with a modern inflection in his poem Johnny:

0 but he was as fair as a garden in flower,

As slender and tall as the great Eiffel tower,

When the waltz throbbed out on the long promenade His eyes and his smile they went straight to my heart; ‘0 marry me, Johnny — I’ll love and obey’:

But he frowned like thunder and he went away.

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