The period between the passing of the Second Reform Bill in 1867 and his assumption of the office of Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies in 1875 marks a transition between two different phases of Ludlow's career.

A change in his way of life was necessary because Maria Forbes, ‘after eleven years of peremptory silence and thirteen of peremptory rejection’, in 1867 agreed to marry him. The next year his serene, Liberal-minded mother died. More anxious than she was, Ludlow asked her, ‘if she felt that God was with her. “I think He is taking me away”, she replied, that was all, not a particle of fear or anxiety.’ Everyone agreed that he had been a model son and never let his crusading activities come before his duties to her.

Ludlow had to confess that his wife was ‘neither young nor pretty (though she was once).’ He was forty-seven and she forty-six when in 1869 they finally married, the opposition of Maria's aged father having still to be overcome. She did not care for many of the things in which he was interested, nor share some of his opinions. Yet, with his mother, Maria Forbes was, for Ludlow ‘the gentlest, the sweetest, the most self-devoted woman I have ever known’.