Samuel Ward (minister)

Samuel Ward (1577–1640) was an English Puritan minister of Ipswich.

Born in Suffolk, he was a son of John Ward, minister of Haverhill, and his wife, Susan. Nathaniel Ward was his younger brother. Another brother, John, was rector of St. Clement's, Ipswich. On the nomination of Lord Burghley, Samuel was admitted a scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge on 6 November 1594 – a college established in 1511 thanks to a foundation from Lady Margaret Beaufort. He graduated with a B.A. in 1596–7, was appointed one of the first fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1599, and commenced there with an M.A. in 1600. Having finished his studies at the university, he became a lecturer at Haverhill, where he was a successful evangelical and became the 'spiritual father' of Samuel Fairclough.

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 B.D. He was one of the preachers at St Paul's Cross, London, in 1616.

In 1621 he designed an engraving, the Double Deliverance, with an anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish message, showing the Spanish Armada and Gunpowder Plot. Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador in London, represented it as an insult to his royal master. On one side was to be seen the wreck of the armada, driven in wild confusion by the storm; on the other side was the detection of the plot; and in the centre the pope and the cardinals appeared in consultation with the king of Spain and the devil.

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