Samuel Ward

Map of England | Second Cambridge Company

(1572–1643)

An admirer of Laurence Chaderton, the Puritan master of Emmanuel College, Samuel Ward was a devout, perhaps over-scrupulous, figure. A surviving notebook he kept in his twenties records in detail the temptation posed by some plums, his decision not to succumb to gluttony, and his shame when he ate the plums anyway.

By the time of the Bible project, Ward was a fellow at Emmanuel College. This required him to take clerical orders, a challenge for him because a speech impediment made preaching difficult. In 1610, Ward became the master of Sidney Sussex College, which, like Emmanuel, was a center of Puritan theology.

Ward’s role as a Bible translator led to numerous clerical positions, but he found himself increasingly out of the intellectual and theological current of the times during the reign of King James’s son Charles I. In the early 1640s, Ward refused to aid either side of England’s unfolding Civil War and was imprisoned in 1643 by the parliamentary army as it occupied Cambridge. He was released from prison that August when he became ill, and died a month later.