Objections were urged against the removal, and after long
discussion waxing hotter and hotter Dudley resigned, in a most
Puritan fit of temper, leaving the council in a passion and
"clapping the door behind him." Better thoughts came to all. The
gentle temper of both wife and daughter quieted him, and disposed
him to look favorably upon the letter in which the council refused
to accept his resignation, and this was the last public occasion
upon which such scandal arose. But Ipswich was a safe harbor, and
life there would hold fewer thorns than seemed sown in the
Cambridge surroundings, and we may feel sure, that in spite of
hardships, the long-suffering Anne and her mother welcomed the
change, when it had once been positively decided upon.

The most serious objection arose from the more exposed situation
of Ipswich and the fact that the Indians were becoming more and
more troublesome. The first year, however, passed in comparative
quiet. A church was organized, sermons being the first necessity
thought of for every plantation, and "Mr. Wilson, by leave of the
congregation of Boston whereof he was pastor, went to Agawam to
teach the people of that plantation, because they had yet no
minister," to be succeeded shortly by Nathaniel Ward, a man of
most intense nature and personality, who must have had marked
effect on every mind brought under his influence. A worker of
prodigious energy, he soon broke down, and after two years of
pastorship, left Ipswich to become a few years later, one of the
commission appointed to frame laws for the Colony and to write
gradually one of the most distinctive books in early American
literature, "The Simple Cobbler of Agawam." That he became the
strong personal friend of the Bradstreet family was natural, for
not only were they of the same social status, but sympathetic in