This plain speaking having excited the wrath of the Laudian party, the next Saturday the vice-chancellor William Smyth called Ford before him and demanded a copy of his sermon.
Appearing on the day appointed he was pressed to take an oath, ex officio, to answer any questions about his sermon; but he refused it, because there were no interrogatories in writing.
From them the vice-chancellor himself appealed to convocation, who again appointed delegates; but the time limited by statute expired before they could arrive at a decision.
Ford went abroad as chaplain to an English regiment under the command of Colonel George Fleetwood, in the service of Gustavus Adolphus.
He was instituted to the rectory of Aldwinkle All Saints, Northamptonshire, 18 October 1637, a preferment which he owed to Sir Myles Fleetwood.
He held his rectory for ten years; but on the outbreak of the First English Civil War, after a short stay at Exeter, he retired to London, and was chosen minister of St Faith under St Paul's, and in 1644, on the death of Oliver Bowles, a member of the Westminster Assembly.
He preached in the choir of Exeter Cathedral, as his brother pastors, Lewis Stucley and Thomas Mall, did in the nave.
Calamy relates that in 1649, Major-general John Desborough, who quartered there, expelled Ford for refusing the engagement.
He died in December 1674, in his seventy-sixth year, and was buried on the 28th in St. Lawrence's Church, Exeter, near his wife, Bridget Fleetwood, and several of his children.