Dudley contested the point hotly, the governor taking no "notice of these speeches, and bore them with more patience than he had done upon a like occasion at another time," but the breach had been made, and it was long before it ceased to trouble the friends of both. With all his self-sacrifice, Dudley desired leadership, and the removal to Ipswich gave him more fully the position he craved, as simply just acknowledgment of his services to the Colony, than permanent home at Cambridge could have done. 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 many points, though Simon Bradstreets' moderation and tolerant spirit undoubtedly fretted the uncompromising Puritan whose opinions were as stiff and incisive as his way of putting them. An extensive traveller, a man of ripe culture, having been a successful lawyer before the ministry attracted him, he was the friend of Francis Bacon, of Archbishop Usher and the famous Heidelberg theologian, David Pareus. He had travelled widely and knew men and manners, and into the exhortations and expoundings of his daily life, the unfoldings of the complicated religious experience demanded of every Puritan, must have crept many a reminiscence of old days, dear to the heart of Anne Bradstreet, who, no matter what theory she deemed it best to follow, was at heart, to the end of her life a monarchist. We may know with what interest she would listen, and may fancy the small Simon and Dorothy standing near as Puritan discipline allowed, to hear tales of Prince Rupert, whom Nathaniel Ward had held as a baby in his arms, and of whom he wrote what we may be sure he had often said: "I have had him in my arms; . . . I wish I had him there now. If I mistake not, he promised then to be a good prince; but I doubt he hath forgot it. If I thought he would not be angry with me, I would pray hard to his Maker to make him a right Roundhead, a wise-hearted Palatine, a thankful man to the English; to forgive all his sins, and at length to save his soul, notwithstanding all his God-damn-me's."
Even in these early days, certain feminine pomps and vanities had emigrated with their owners, and much disconcerted the energetic preacher. Anne Bradstreet had no share in them, her gentle simplicity making her always choose the least obtrusive form of speech and action, as well as dress, but she must have smiled over the fierceness with which weaker sisters were attacked, and perhaps have sought to change the attitude of this chronic fault- finder; "a sincere, witty and valiant grumbler," but always a grumbler, to whom the fashions of the time seemed an outrage on common sense. He devotes a separate section of his book to them, and the delinquencies of women in general because they were "deficients or redundants not to be brought under any rule," and therefore not entitled to "pester better matter with such stuff," and then announces that he proposes, "for this once to borrow a little of their loose-tongued liberty, and mis-spend a word or two upon their long-waisted but short-skirted patience." "I honor the woman that can honor herself with her attire," he goes on, his wrath rising as he writes; "a good text always deserves a fair margent, but as for a woman who lives but to ape the newest court- fashions, I look at her as the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of a quarter of a cipher, the epitome of nothing; fitter to be kicked, if she were of a kickable substance, than either honored or humored. To speak moderately, I truly confess, it is beyond the ken of my understanding to conceive how those women should have any true grace or valuable virtue, that have so little wit as to disfigure themselves with such exotic garbs, as not only dismantles their native, lovely lustre, but transclouts them into gaunt bar-geese, ill-shapen, shotten shell-fish, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or at the best into French flirts of the pastry, which a proper English woman should scorn with her heels. It is no marvel they wear trails on the hinder part of their heads; having nothing it seems in the forepart but a few squirrels' brains to help them frisk from one ill-favored fashion to another…. We have about five or six of them in our colony; if I see any of them accidentally, I cannot cleanse my fancy for a month after…. If any man think I have spoken rather merrily than seriously, he is much mistaken; I have written what I write, with all the indignation I can, and no more than I ought."
Let it be remembered, that these ladies with "squirrels brains," are the "grandmothers" whose degenerate descendants we are daily accused of being. It is an old tune, but the generations have danced to it since the world began, each with a profound conviction of its newness, and their own success in following its lead. Nor was he alone in his indignation, for even in the midst of discussions on ordnance, and deep perplexities over unruly settlers, the grave elders paused, and as Winthrop records:
"At the lecture in Boston a question was propounded about veils. Mr. Cotton concluded, that where (by the custom of the place) they were not a sign of the woman's subjection, they were not commanded by the apostle. Mr. Endecott opposed, and did maintain it by the general arguments brought by the apostle. After some debate, the governor, perceiving it to grow to some earnestness, interposed, and so it brake off." Isaiah had protested, before Nathaniel Ward or the Council echoed him, but if this is the attitude the sturdy preacher held toward the women of his congregation, he must have found it well to resign his place to his successor, also a Nathaniel, Nathaniel Rogers, one of the row of "nine small children," still to be seen in the New England Primer, gazing upon the martyr, John Rogers, the famous preacher of Dedham, whose gifts of mind and soul made him a shining mark for persecution, and whose name is still honored in his descendants.
Of less aggressive and incisive nature than Nathaniel Ward, he was a man of profound learning, his son and grandson succeeding him at Ipswich, and the son, who had accompanied him from England becoming the President of Harvard College. His sympathy with Simon Bradstreet's moderate and tolerant views, at once brought them together, and undoubtedly made him occasionally a thorn in the side of Governor Dudley, who felt then, precisely the same emotions as in later life were chronicled in his one attempt at verse:
"Let men of God in Courts and Churches watch,
O'er such as do a Toleration hatch,
Lest that ill egg bring forth a cockatrice
To poison all with Heresie and Vice."
Nathaniel Rogers has left no written memorial save a tract in the interest of this most objectionable toleration, in which, while favoring liberty and reformation, he censured those who had brought false charges against the king, and as a result, was accused of being one of the king's agents in New England. Anne Bradstreet's sympathies were even more strongly with him than those of her husband, and in the quiet listening to the arguments which went on, she had rarest opportunity for that gradual accumulation of real worldly wisdom to be found in many of her "Reflections" in prose.
At present there was more room for apprehension than reflection. Indian difficulties were more and more pressing, and in Sept., 1635, the General Court had included Ipswich in the order that no dwelling-house should be more than half a mile from the meeting- house, it being impossible to guard against the danger of coming and going over longer space. The spring of 1636-7 brought still more stringent care. Watches were kept and no one allowed to travel without arms. The Pequot war was the culmination for the time, the seed of other and more atrocious conflicts to come, and whatever the judgment of to-day may be on the causes which brought such results, the terror of the settlers was a very real and well- grounded fact. As with Deerfield at a later date, they were protected from Indian assaults, only by "a rude picketted fort. Sentinels kept guard every night; even in the day time, no one left his door-steps without a musket; and neighborly communication between the houses was kept up principally by underground passages from cellar to cellar."
Mr. Daniel Dennison, who had married Anne Bradstreet's sister, was chosen captain for Ipswich and remained so for many years. As the Indians were driven out, they concentrated in and about New Hampshire, which, being a frontier colony, knew no rest from peril day and night, but it was many years before any Massachusetts settler dared move about with freedom, and the perpetual apprehension of every woman who dreaded the horrible possibilities of Indian outrage, must have gone far toward intensifying and grinding in the morbid sensitiveness which even to-day is part of the genuine New England woman's character. The grim details of expeditions against them were known to every child. The same impatience of any word in their favor was shown then, as we find it now in the far West, where their treachery and barbarity is still a part of the story of to-day, and Johnson, in his "Wonder- Working Providence," gives one or two almost incredible details of warfare against them with a Davidic exultation over the downfall of so pestilent an enemy, that is more Gothic than Christian.