Samuel Ward (minister)

On 1 November 1603 he was elected by the corporation of Ipswich to the office of Town Preacher, and he occupied the pulpit of St. Mary-le-Tower with little intermission for about thirty years.

In 1604 he vacated his fellowship at Sidney College by his marriage to Deborah Bolton, widow, of Isleham, Cambridgeshire, and in 1607 he proceeded to the degree of BD He was one of the preachers at St Paul's Cross, London, in 1616.

After a brief detention he was permitted to return to Ipswich, and he subsequently confined his talents as a designer to the ornamentation of the title-pages of his published sermons.

In 1624 Ward and Yates, another Ipswich clergyman, complained to a committee of the House of Commons about the Arminian tenets broached in A New Gag for an Old Goose by Richard Montagu.

On 2 November 1635 he was censured in the high commission at Lambeth for preaching against bowing at the name of Jesus and against the Book of Sports on the Lord's day, and for saying that religion and the gospel were in imminent danger.

Written in large black writing, this is a quote from the Gospel of Mark XI:17 Having at last obtained his release, Ward retired to Holland, where he first became a member of William Bridge's church at Rotterdam, and afterwards his colleague in pastoral work.