In the dearth of ministers he was urged to enter the pulpit; he preached first at Middleton, Lancashire, and was offered the post of assistant to the rector, but declined it.
[1] His first charge was at Gorton Chapel in the parish of Manchester, on which he entered in April 1646, a few months before the establishment (2 October) of parliamentary presbyterianism in Lancashire.
On 8 July John Angier was deputed to find out why Martindale still held back, 'seeing hee hath professed to have receiv'd satisfaction;' on 2 September he was 'warn'd to appeare at the next meeting,' but did not do so.
After protracted negotiation Martindale, tiring of delay, obtained an order (26 March 1649) from the committee for plundered ministers, appointing him to the vicarage (worth £60 a year), and declared himself (10 July) 'unwillinge to proceed any further in this classe touchinge his ordination.'
[1] A meeting of Lancashire and Cheshire ministers was held at Warrington early in 1650, to consider the propriety of taking the engagement (of fidelity to the existing government), subscription to which was demanded by 23 February.
He held, however, two open-air disputations with quakers; in the first, on Christmas Day 1654, he had 'to deale with ramblers and railers;' the second, in 1655, on Knutsford Heath, was with Richard Hubberthorn, whose sobriety of judgment he commends.
It was called a 'classis;' but whereas in the Lancashire 'classes' the lay element (ruling elders) always preponderated, the Cheshire 'classis' consisted solely of ministers, neither episcopalians nor congregationalists being excluded.
'[1] Martindale was privy, through Henry Newcome, to the projected rising of the 'new royalists' under Sir George Booth, and strongly sympathised with the movement, which, however, he did not join.
The act of September 1660 for confirming and restoring ministers 'made me vicar of Rotherston,' he says; nevertheless he was prosecuted in January 1661 for holding private meetings, and imprisoned at Chester for some weeks, but released on his bond of £1,000.
On 29 August George Hall, bishop of Chester, issued his mandate declaring the church vacant, and inhibiting Martindale from preaching in the diocese.
[1] At Michaelmas he removed to Camp Green in Rostherne parish, attending the services of his successor (Benjamin Crosse), and 'repeating' his sermons in the evening 'to an housefull of parishioners.'
For two years he took boarders; this being unsafe for a nonconformist, he thought of turning to medicine, but eventually, aided by Lord Delamer, he studied and taught mathematics at Warrington and elsewhere.
Martindale preached openly in the chapels of Gorton, Birch, Walmsley, Darwen, Cockey, and in the parishes of Bolton and Bury, Lancashire.
John Wilkins, bishop of Chester, 'proposed terms' in 1671 to the nonconformists, that they might officiate as curates-in-charge, and they were inclined to accept, but Sterne, the archbishop of York, interposed.
He was imprisoned at Chester (27 June – 15 July 1685) on groundless suspicion of complicity with the Monmouth Rebellion; in fact his principles were those of passive obedience, and he had written (but not published) in 1682 an attack on the 'Julian' of Samuel Johnson, which he regarded as 'a very dangerous booke.'
He married, on 31 December 1646, Elizabeth (who survived him), second daughter of John Hall, of Droylsden, Lancashire, and uterine sister of Thomas Jollie.
Besides the animadversions on 'Julian,' a treatise on kneeling at the Lord's Supper (1682) was circulated in manuscript, and a critique on Matthew Smith's Patriarchal Sabbath, 1683, was sent to London for press, but not printed, owing to a dispute between Martindale's agent and the bookseller.
Martindale's autobiography, to 1685, was edited in 1845 for the Chetham Society by Canon Parkinson from the autograph in the British Museum, formerly in the possession of Thomas Birch.