Aside from the witch trials, Alden was involved in a number of scandals and controversies, which featured heavily in the accusations against him for witchcraft. The only one to bring much modern attention, however, occurred in Salem when he stopped there on his return home from Quebec, where he had gone in February 1692 to ransom New England settlers captured in the Candlemas attack on York, Maine. According to the Massachusetts state archives, he had been involved in several exchanges of this type over the years; this fed mightily into controversies about the man as another piece of gossip that surrounded him was that he sold weapons to the enemy for personal profit, including Native American tribes like the Wabanaki, allies of the French in 1692. This was a time period in which colonization of Northern New England was a battlefield between Puritans, the French, and their Native American allies with high casualties, violent skirmishes, and several raids on each other. It began with King Philip's War and would not be completely over until the French and Indian War, with Great Britain defeating France after their victories at Quebec and Montreal; the French and Indian War removed France as a threat to the New Englanders and made the French alliance with the existing tribes irrelevant.