Priscilla Alden

Priscilla Alden (née Mullins or Mullens), (c. 1602 – c. 1685) was a noted member of Massachusetts's Plymouth Colony of Pilgrims, the wife of fellow colonist John Alden (c. 1599–1687). They married in 1621 in Plymouth.

Priscilla was most likely born in Dorking in Surrey, the daughter of William and Alice Mullins. She was just eighteen when she boarded the Mayflower. She lost her parents and her brother Joseph during the first winter in Plymouth. She was then the only one of her family in the New World, although she had another brother and a sister who remained in England.

John Alden and Priscilla Mullins were probably the third couple to be married in Plymouth Colony. William Bradford’s marriage to Alice Carpenter on August 14, 1623 is known to be the fourth. The first was that of Edward Winslow and Susannah White in 1621. Francis Eaton’s marriage to his second wife Dorothy, maidservant to the Carvers, was possibly the second.

Priscilla is last found in the records in 1650, but oral tradition states that she died only a few years before her husband (which would be about 1680). She lies buried at the Miles Standish Burial Ground in Duxbury, Massachusetts. The exact location of her grave is unknown, but there is a marker honoring her.

She is known to literary history as the unrequited love of newly widowed Captain Miles Standish, the colony's military advisor, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1858 poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. According to the poem, Standish asked his good friend John Alden to propose to Priscilla on his behalf, only to have Priscilla ask, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

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