i i LIBRARY j WNtVERSiTY Of I :caiik)??niaV LyU*-* l Ci vi PREFACE. I send the result forth now in the hope that others may share this pleasure with me, and under the convic- tion that, notwithstanding the many lives of Bunyan that have appeared, there is still room, and even need, for one that should aim at strictest accuracy, and bring up to present date all that can be known concerning him. My long residence among the scenes and surroundings of Bunyan' s life has given me some advantage over previous biographers, who were only able to make occa- sional visits to the neighbourhood. I have had, how- ever, still greater advantage in the fact that recent years have made available, for purposes of local and personal history, resources till quite lately unknown or inacces- sible to the historical student. For the purpose of this biography researches have been made among the stores brought to light by the Eoyal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. Through the labours of the gentlemen who have acted as inspectors under that commission, there have been found among the MSS. of the House of Lords and in the numerous private collections scattered through the country, documents which have supplied missing links in our history, and made more vivid to us the story of the past. The papers relating to the diocese of Lincoln, in the Archbishop's Library at Lambeth, I have also found to be of considerable interest and value. I have, of course, availed myself of the priceless stores garnered up among the State Papers at the Kecord Office, and among the steadily accumulating materials in the manuscript and printed book departments of the British Museum. I have also found great help from the collections in the Bodleian, in the University Library at PREFACE. vii Cambridge, and in Dr. Williams' Library in London. Among resources of a more local kind I have found the most valuable assistance from the Transcript Eegisters and Act-Books of the Archdeaconry of Bedford, the Minute-Books and other documents in the Archives of the Bedford Corporation, and the Bedfordshire wills pre- served in the district registry of the Court of Probate at Northampton. In addition to these materials of a more public and national character the records of the church at Bedford, with which Bunyan was so long associated, have for the first time been woven into the story of his life ; and for the first time, also, his general works have been placed in due order and chronological relation to his personal history. On this latter point it may be well to say, that as during the sixty years of Bunyan' s life he wrote something like sixty books, the account of most of these had necessarily to come within limited space. I have, therefore, sought to give not so much an abstract or general estimate as to bring together whatever was most characteristic of his special genius and cast of mind. In the course of these researches I have always found the name of Bunyan a certain spell with which to divine, and I have most gratefully to record the readiness on all hands to afford me the most kindly help in the further- ance of my enterprise. Where so many have been kind it seems invidious to make selection for special acknow- ledgment, yet I feel I must express my personal thanks to Archdeacon Bathurst for ready access, readily granted, to the documents in the Archives oi his viii PREFACE. registry, also for important references or suggestions, and sometimes both, to the Eev. S. E. Wigram, author of '' The Chronicles of the Abbey of Elstow ; " to Henry Gough, Esq., F.S.A., of Eedhill; to Edward Arber, Esq., E.S.A., Professor of English Language and Literature, Sir Josiah Mason's College, Birmingham ; to Edward Peacock, Esq., F.S.A., of Bottesford Manor, Brigg ; to J. Allanson Picton, Esq., M.P. ; and to J. E. Bailey, Esq., E.S.A., of Manchester. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the sympathetic zeal with which Mr. Edward Whymper has undertaken the work of illustration. The choice of subjects has been made in great measure on his suggestion ; and the sketches, taken by him on the spot, of places and buildings asso- ciated with memories of Bunyan will perhaps do more than is possible by any verbal descriptions to give local colouring to the narrative. It is hoped also that the value of this work will be increased by his careful reproduction of the Portrait of Bunyan, taken on vellum, by Eobert White, which was preserved in the Cracherode Collec- tion, and which forms the frontispiece to this volume. JOHN BEOW]^. The Manse, Bedford, October Uth, 1885. PEEFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. In this edition, as in the second, I have to make grateful acknowledgment of the kind reception accorded to this my endeavour to reproduce the facts of Bunyan's life. It has been gratifying, indeed, to receive from many^ both in this country and in the United States, the assurance that this, the latest biography of the great dreamer, has met and supplied a felt want in our litera- ture. It is sent forth in its present form without any change, except such as was required in bringing up the bibliographical appendices to the latest date. When two years ago I ventured in the first edition of this biography (pp. 253 262) to put forth a theory of my own as to the time of Bunyan's later imprison- ment, and to express my belief that he was arrested for the third time in 1675, I little thought that this supposition of mine would so soon receive complete confirmation. Yet such is the fact. A few weeks ago, when the Chauncy Collection of Autographs came to the hammer at Messrs. Sotheby's, the original warrant for his apprehension was found to be among them. It is signed by no fewer than thirteen Bedfordshire justices, X PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. ten out of the thirteen adding their seals as well as their signatures, and is as follows : TO THE CONSTABLES OF BEDFORD AND TO EVERY OF THEM. J. Napiek Whereas information and complaint is made unto us that (l.s.) (notwithstanding the Kings Majties late Act of most gracious generall and free pardon to all his subjects for past mis- demeanours, that by his said clemencie and indulgent grace and favour they might bee mooved and induced for the time W. Beecheii to come more carefully to observe his Highenes lawes and (l.s.) statutes, and to continue in theire loyall and due obedience to his Maj"e)^ yett one John Bunnyon of your said towne, (l.s.) Tynker, hath divers times within one month last past in G. Blundell contempt of his Majties good laws preached or teaehed at a Conventicle meeteing or assembly under colour or pretence of exercise of Religion in other manner then according to the Hum MoNOUx ^^^^^^^^ ^^ Practise of the Church of England. These are therefore in his Majt'^s name to comand you forthwith to ,^ -p apprehend and bring the Body of the said John Bunnion "^ (ls^^*^^^^ beefore us or any of us or other his Maj^es justice of Peace within the said county to answer the premises and further to doe and receavo as to Law and Justice shall apportaine, and hereof you are not to faile. Given our handes and scales the ffowerth day of March in the seaven and twentieth yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles the Second, A^ q"^ D'" juxta gr: 1674. [New Style 1675.] John Venteiss ^tll : Spenceb (L.s.) Will: Geey St: Jo: Cheenocke (l.s.) W'"^' Daxiell (l.s.) (l.s.) T. Beowne Gaius Sciuiee W. efostee (l.s.) This document was purchased by "W. G, Thorpe, Esq., F.G.S. of the Middle Temple, to whose kindness, in first sending me a copy and afterwards furnishing me with every opportunity of making a personal examination, I desire to bear grateful testimony. The document is undoubtedly genuine. To those familiar with seven- teenth century MSS., the paper and handwriting are evidence sufficient of this. In addition, Mr. Thompson, head of the department of MSS. in the British Museum, has verified several of the seals with the coats of arms of PREFACE TO TEE THIRD EDITION. xi the justices, and I have myself independent evidence bearing on the genuineness of some of the signatures. The magistrates signing were : Sir John ]N'apier of Luton Hoo, Sir William Beecher of Howbury, Sir George Blundell of Cardington, these two being also upon the bench at Bunyan's first conviction in 1661 ; Sir Humphrey Monoux of Wootton, Sir "William Franklin of Bolnhurst, Mr. Yentriss of Campton, Mr. Spencer of Cople, Mr. Gery of Bushmeade. Sir St. John Chernocke of Hulcote, Mr. Daniell of Silsoe, Mr. Browne of Arlesey, Mr. Squier of Eaton Socon, and Dr. Foster of Bedford. It will thus be seen that there was a formidable and unusual list of names to the warrant, and Bunyan was evidently regarded as an offender to be secured by the strongest exercise of authority. Foster, whom Bunyan had met at the time of his first arrest in 1660, whom he then described as " a right Judas," and who, as this work shows, pursued the Nonconformists with relentless malignity through all the intervening years, was almost certainly the main mover in the matter. The document was evidently prepared beforehand by a professional scrivener, probably one of Foster's own clerks, and was ready to be signed and sealed when the Justices met for Quarter Sessions at Bedford. Foster was in hot haste ; for the King's proclamation recalling the preachers' licences was only signed on the 3rd of February. It would be the 4th before it was known in London, and probably the 6th before it reached Bedford. The month therefore mentioned in this warrant signed on the 4th xii FREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. of March, was a short month indeed. Bunyan, as a marked man and an old offender, was probably on his arrest committed for trial, he being held to bail, and the trial coming on at the following Quarter Sessions. Various considerations, such as the date of the publica- tion of ^' The Pilgrim's Progress ; " the tardy and circuitous interference on his behalf by Bishop Barlow, who was not consecrated till the end of June ; and the condition of Bedford Gaol in the early months of 1675, all point to the latter half of that year as the time of his six months' imprisonment after conviction. It may be indeed that it was in prospect of such a prisoner as Bunyan that the Borough Council gave that order for the repairing of the prison on the bridge, which was passed on the 13th of May. It is only necessary to add, on the authority of their solicitors, Messrs. Maples, Teesdale & Co., that it was the Chauncy family who recently sold the collection in which this interesting document was found, and that that collection was made in the last century by Br. Charles Chauncy, a celebrated physician and antiquary (1706 1777), and his brother l^athaniel, who succeeded to the collection and increased it. It originally included paintings and prints, coins and books, and among the MSS. were many important documents, some of them bearing the autographs of Charles I., Oliver Cromwell, Prince Eupert, Charles II., William III., and various eminent statesmen and officials of the 17th century. If I am not prolonging this preface unduly, it may ba interesting to mention a reference to Bunyan' s maternal PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. xiii grandfather, "William Bentley, recently met with. In the month of November, 1886, G. A. Aitken, Esq., of Kensington, purchased at Sotheby's a number of old deeds principally relating to property in Elstow. He very courteously sent them down to me for inspection, and in looking them through I found William Bent ley's signature as that of a witness attesting a deed of sale between two inhabitants of Elstow, bearing date 12th June, 1611. This signature of the father of Bunyan's mother is written in a superior manner, and indicates an amount of education not common in those days even among persons of good social position. There was also another deed by which Thomas Purney sold to Thomas Hoddle, late of Elstowe, ^' All that messuage, tenement, or Inne called The Bell in Elstowe, between a tenement in the tenure of William Bentley on the south side and a tenement in the tenure of Widdowe Braye on the north." This deed is dated 1st November, 1612, and indicates the spot which was the home of Bunyan's mother in the days of her childhood. In conclusion, I would fain express the hope that this Life of a brave and godly Englishman may further those principles of civil and religious freedom to which he bore such faithful testimony, and on behalf of which he suffered so much. Above all, it is pleasant to me to think that renewed intercourse with the spirit of Bunyan in these pages may deepen the religious life in the hearts of some of my readers, bringing them into a closer, diviner fellowship with his Lord and theirs. The Manse, Bedford, October lOtk, 1887. CONTENTS. I. PAOB EARLY CHURCH LIFE IN BEDFORDSHIRE 1 II. ELSTOW AND THE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW 17 ni. THE CIVIL WAP.S 39 IV. SPIRITUAL CONFLICT 63 V. THE CHURCH AT BEDFORD 69 YI. FIVE YEARS OF BEDFORD LIFE: 1655-1660 .... 96 YII. IIARLINGTON HOUSE AND THE CHAPEL OF HERNE . . 130 YIII. TWELVE YEARS IN BEDFORD GAOL 160 IX. THE CHURCH IN THE STORM 192 X. THREE YEARS OF LIBERTY : 16721675 223 Bedford Town Gaol. From an old Print. I. EARLY CHURCH LIFE IN" BEDFORDSHIRE. John Bunyan, born in tlie English Midlands, may be taken as in some sense a characteristic representative of the region that gave him birth. For the tract of country between the Trent and the Bedfordshire Ouse, which from its northern half gave the Pilgrim Fathers to ]New England, furnished from its fens and fields in the south a succession of men of his. own sturdy independence of thought, and in strong sympathy with his own Puritan faith. In the development of even the most original genius, the environment counts for much ; it may help us, therefore, to a truer estimate of the man if we first briefly recall the spiritual antecedents of the county in which he was born and in which his life was spent. When the Reformation broke in upon the old ecclesiastical B 2 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap i. system of England, Bedfordshire seems to have been more than usually receptive of the new ideas then rising over Europe. Not that the whole county, any more than other counties, was prepared to become Protestant at a stroke. Here, as elsewhere, many Englishmen, after their manner, were inclined to "stand in the ways, and see and ask for the old paths.'' Leading families, like the Mordaunts of Turvey, remained firm in their allegiance to the ancient faith, and turned their houses into hiding-places for its bishops and priests during the hard days of Elizabeth and James. Not a few of the yeomen also held tenaciously to the old well-worn modes of religious thought, even while diligently attending the services of a Reformed Church. As late as 1579, or more than forty years after England had broken with the See of Rome, farmers like Robert Bony on, of Wingfield, in the parish of Chalgrave, in the w^Us the}^ made, still commended their souls not only to Almighty God, but also " to our blessed Ladie St. Mary and to all the holy company of heaven." * No wonder, therefore, that Protestant vicars did not always find it easy to carry their slowly moving parishioners with them. It was far on in the reign of Elizabeth, for example, when Peter White, the Minister of Eaton Socon, having reconstructed the rood-loft of his parish church, where anciently stood the rood called Mary and John, had in 1581 to preach and publish a ** Godlye and fruitefuU sermon against Idolatrie," to quiet " the consciences of the simple." He found it needful to assure troubled souls among his parishioners that the changes he had made were really very slight. ''The Rood-lofte wanteth nothing of his former state, but only the images and uppermost front." The loft itself, ''being nine foot in bredth, yet standeth with the beame," only instead of having " the Roode or Idoll," " the Tabernacle that sometimes stood upon the Altar is placed from the beame aforesaid." The rest " remaineth as it did in the time of popery." Even yet they were not altogether reassured, and another pamphlet issued by the vicar the following year, shows that the feeling roused by his Protestant innovations was neither slight nor soon allayed.f Possibly similar clashings of opinion disturbed * Bedfordshire Wills, 1576-9, No. 126. t A Godlye and fruitefuU Sermon against Idolairie. Preached the xv daye of 1581.] EARLY C EUROS LIFE IN BEDFORDSHIRE. 3 other parishes in the county ; and it is tolerably certain that in the hearts of many there was still, from old association, a strong attachment to the religious usages and superstitions of the Church, now no longer the Church of the State. Still, these instances were exceptional. The tradespeople in the towns, as well as a majority of the gentry in the country- houses, were staunchly Protestant, as were also the two great noblemen, the natural chieftains of the county, the Earls of Kent and Bedford. The county, indeed, became a recognised asylum of religious liberty for many from across tte sea. Refugees for conscience sake came from Aiencon and Valen- ciennes, and settled at Cranfield in 1568, bringing with them their lace pillows, and establishing the lace trade of the district. And while many Protestants from the Netherlands, fleeing from Philip of Spain and the Duke of Alva, thus found a home in the villages of Bedfordshire, introducing names still to be recognised in the parish registers, collections were also made in the churches of the county for others still in their own land, and still suffering cruel hardships on account of their faith. Both before the E/cformation and for a century after we get what is probably the most realistic view possible to us now, of the ecclesiastical life of the people of England, from a source hitherto comparatively neglected, the *' Act-Books" of the Archdeacons' Courts. From the middle of the fifteenth century certainly, and probably much earlier, with the exception of the brief reign of Edward YL, down to the year 1640, when the procedure known as ex officio was abolished, there was kept up a close surveillance of the lives of the people in each parish of each of the deaneries of which the archdeaconry was composed. These Courts, which were regularly held, took cognisance of every conceivable ofience against morals as well as against eccle- siastical discipline. The form of procedure was either by Inquisitmiy when the judge was the accuser; by Accusation, lanuarie, 1581, in the Parrishe Church of Eaton Sooken, within the Countie of Bedforde, by P. W., Minister and Preacher in that place. At London Imprinted by Frauncis Coldocke, 1581, 8vo. [black letter]. An Ansvveare vnto certaine crabbed Questions, pretending a real presence of Christ in the Sacramento. Gathered & set foorth by Peter Whyte. London, Imprinted by John Wolfe and Henry Kirkham, 1582. b2 4 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. i. when some other person made the charge ; or by Denuncia- tion, which was simple presentment. The most frequent penalty on conviction was a money fine, but in many cases the culprit had to do penance in a white sheet, or make public confession before a congregation of his neighbours. More serious offences were followed by excommunication, a penalty carrying with it social consequences of the gravest kind. For example, from the Act-Books of the Bedford Archdeaconry, we find that in 1617, William Worrall of Kempston was cited before the Court at Ampthill for buying and selling with Thomas Crawley, which he ought not to have done because Thomas Crawley was an excommunicate person. The same year John Glidall, fuller, of Craufield, and Francis Crashop, were cited and fined, " for setting Richard Barrett, an excommunicate person, a work." Even love must be crossed and courtship forbidden till the Church was reconciled. In 1616 Roger Perriam, of St. Cuth- berts, Bedford, was cited, " for that there is a report that he doth frequent and keep company with Margarett Bennett, who standeth excommunicate," If an excommunicated person ven- tured to appear among his neighbours in the parish church, the minister was compelled to call public attention to his presence, and absolutely stop the service till the proscribed person had left the building. Indeed, the consequences which followed a man through life did not even cease with his death. Robert Baker, the parish clerk of Potton, was punished for burying the body of an excommunicate person in the churchyard ; and some years later Anne Skevington of Turvey was herself excommunicated because that, in widowed grief, she had been present at the burial of her own husband, who for his noncon- formity had died under the ban of the Church. It lies outside the range of our present purpose, of course, but it would be interesting to show what curious light the records of the various Archdeacons' Courts throw on the morals and manners of our forefathers. A large proportion were cases of intemperance and impurity. Among the ecclesiastical offences were such as refusing to follow the cross in procession, hanging down the head at the elevation of the host, throwing the pax- bread on the ground, separating the holy oil, washing hands in the baptismal font, singing the Litany derisively, refusing to 1500.] EARLY CHURCH LIFhl IN BEDFORDSHIRE. 5 pay dues and keep feast days, reading heretical and English books during the mass, not receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday, and not confessing at Easter. Among offences of a more mis- cellaneous character, we find one man bringing judgment upon himself for '' marieing his wife in their parish church in her mask ;" another " for being married to his wife under a bush;" and yet a third, " for that the day he was marryed he dyd blowe oute the lightes about the altar and wolde suffer no lightes to bourne." One unloving spirit was dealt with " for not treating his wife with affection ; " another, yet more un- loving, "for cheening his wife to a post and slandering his neighbours." People offended by " exercising the magic art," by consulting cunning women, by using private conventicles, and by " hiring foreigners to work at their art." It was an offence also not to " make two torches and keep the drynk- ynge in the parish, according to the laudable use and custom ;" and a shoemaker was punished, for that he " kepeth his bedd upon the Sundaies and other holy days at time of mattens and mass, as it were a hownde that shuld kepe his kenell." One man came into trouble for " folding some sheep in the church during a snow storm ; " and another, for "living in the church- porch, and suffering his wife to travail in childbirth there and to continue there her whole moneth." "Women fell under the judgment of the Court for "coming to be churched without kercher, midwife or wyves ; " or not " as other honest women, but comynge in her hatt, and a quarter about her neck ; " or for " not coming in a vaile ; " and one brisk housewife, striking out a bright idea on a rainy day, found to her cost that she had offended by " hanginge her lynnen in the church to dry." The law was administered with even-handed justice against the officials of the parish as well as against the common people. The clergy were cited for " not sprinkling holy water on the parishioners," for "letting divers die without howsill or shrifte throw his defaute ; " for " refusing to reply to the archdeacon in the Roman tongue ; " for refusing to hear confessions, " because it grieves him to heare the confessions made." One rector went quite wrong by " taking upon himself to the scandal of his calling, to be lord of misrule at Christmas among certein yongelinges," and another by leaving some ecclesias- 6 JOKN BTJNYAN. [chap. i. tical ceremony to be present at the more exciting spectacle of an execution. The churchwardens incurred penalty by '* suf- fering unrulie persons to ring and jingle the bells out of due season," by permitting a minstrel to play in church at a wed- ding, and because the white sheet used for penance was missing. The schoolmaster was fined for teaching children above sixteen years of age without licence, or for " being negligent in his place, his schollers not profiting under him." And, finally, that chartered libertine, the parish clerk, was dealt with sum- marily, and surely most righteously, *' for that he singeth the psalmes in the church with such a jesticulous tone and altito- nant voyce, viz. squeaking like a pigg, which doth not only interrupt the other voyces, but is altogether dissonant and dis- agreeing unto any musicall harmonic." * Some of the citations in the Act-Books of the Court of the Archdeaconry of Bedford relate to Puritan scruples on the part of several of the clergy of the county. For example, in 1601, Caesar Walpole, curate of Woburn, and in 1617, William Moore, minister of Sharnbrook, Oliver Eoberts, vicar of Gold- ington, and Christopher Watson, curate of Pertenhall, were cited for "not wearing the surplisse usuallie," or for " wanting a hoode," or for not making the sign of the cross in baptism, or for not reading prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays. It is usually assumed that the Puritan party were the only strict Sabbatarians in the country ; but in Bedfordshire, as a matter of fact, the same court and the same commissary dealing with the ministers just named for Puritanism, enforced also upon the laity the strictest observance of the Sabbath. Within the years 1610 1617, Oliver Lenton and Walter Lewin of Bar- ford, were punished for looking on football players on Sunday ; John Hawkes of Renhold, for playing at nineholes; and William Shellie of Bedford, for playing at tables on that day. Roger White of Risely, also was cited for travelling his horses on the Sabbath day ; Robert Kinge of Shelton, '' for going towards London on the Sabbath day in winter," and William Dennys of Bedford, "for going out of St. John's Church to Elstowe in sermon tyme." The following persons were also cited : John Tirold of Bedford, for " bringing in his wares on * Hale's Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes, 1457 1640. 1617.] EARLY CHURCH LIFE IN BEDFORDSRIRE, 7 tlie Sabbath day in praier time ; " John Sharman, for killing meat ; Thomas Styles, for dressing a calf in the open Butcher- rowe, and Peter Lord, the barber of Woburn, for " trimming men" on that day. Saints' days were to be as rigorously observed as Sundays. Three parishioners of Milton Ernys came under the lash of the court : Leonard Willimot for cart- ing on St. Luke's day ; James Hailey, for winnowing corn on Easter Tuesday ; and Walter Griffin "for putting upp netts and catching larks on a holliday." John Neele of Luton, also found to his cost that he had done wrong in " stocking a fruit tree on All Saints' day," so did Thomas Bigrave of Pavenham, and John West of Stevington, who were " at a foote-ball plaie on Ascension Day, and absent from praiers ; " and Henry Waters of Litlington had to answer at Ampthill " for carry- ing a burthen of woode home from Beckring Park on Easter day last." Among others presented before the court were five parishioners of Poddington, for not receiving the communion thrice a year ; Anna Chandler, of Studham for being " a Brownist ; " the wife of John Wheeler of Cranfield, with others of his neighbours, for not frequenting church; Richard Peade of Keysoe, for so far anticipating the Quaker, George Fox, by some thirty years as to sit " with his hatt on usually at the reading of the Epistle and Gospell," and William Shackspeare of Odell, for not communicating. It is curious to see the uses to which the churches were sometimes put in the days to which the Act-Books refer. Indeed we are almost startled to find Harman Sheppard, the curate of the parish, presented in 1612, for baiting a bear in the church at Woburn.* Some years later, also, the church- wardens of Knotting were cited because that on three successive Shrove Tuesdays they and their sons and Mr. Alvey, the rector of the parish, '' permitted and were present at cockfigh tings in the chancell of the said church in or about the sacred place where the communion table stands, many persons being there assembled and wagers laid." t In still later years the rector of Carlton was presented because " immediately before service he did lead his horse in at the south doore into the chancell of * Lambeth MSS. Miscell., 952 ; 43. t State Papers, Bom., Chas. I., 1637, vol. ccclxx., 90. 8 JOHN BUNYAN, [chap. i. Carlton church, where he sett him and there continued all the time of the said service and sermon." Patrons of benefices also, as well as clergy and churchwardens, sometimes dealt with the sacred edifice in remarkably free and easy fashion. An instance of this may be found in a village between Bedford and Northampton, of which in 1641, it was certified that the vicarage had been pulled down, the glebe lost, and the tithes detained, and that the lord of the manor, Jasper Hartnell, after dismantling the body of the church, selling the lead and the bells, had turned the chancel into a kennel for his greyhounds, and the steeple into a dove-house for his pigeons.* The country squires who could so rudely handle the churches would not be over nice in their treatment of the clergy. Jasper Fisher, the rector of Wilden, in his visitation sermon preached at Ampthill in 1635, complained that " the great men do send God's messengers upon their base errands, place them below their serving-men, esteem them below their parasites ; nay, deride and abuse, persecute and destroy them for their mes- sage." t In the same strain speaks out that Shakespeare of the Puritans, as he was called, Thomas Adams, the vicar of "Willington. In a Visitation Sermon preached at St. Paul's, in Bedford, in 1612, he asks, " Shall the Papists twit us that our Our Father hath taken from the Church what their Paternoster bestowed upon it ? Were the goods of the Church for this intrusted to gentlemen and lords of the manors, that they should set them to sale and turn their benefits into their own purses ? . . . We are well freed from the Bonners and butchers of Christ's lambs ; but we have still fleecers enough too many that love to see learning follow Homer with a stafi" and a wallet. Every gentleman thinks the priest mean, but the priest's means hath made many a gentleman." + The Puritan movement, like the Protestant before it, found a congenial home in Bedfordshire. Thomas Brightman, the vicar of Hawnes, a celebrated preacher and writer in his time, was one of several ministers who, in 1603", waited upon King * A Certificate from Northamptonshire, 4to. London, 1641. t The Friesfs Duty and Dignity, by Jasper Fisher, Presbyter and Rector of Wilden in Bedfordshire : London, 1636. X Heaven and Earth reconciled : a sermon preached at St. Paul's Church in Bedford, Oct. 3rd, 1612. Adams' Practical Works, 1862, I., 448, et seq. 1633.] JEARLY CHURCH LIFE IN BEDFORLSHIRK 9 James, at that time the guest of the Cromwells at Hinchin- brook, near Huntingdon. Speaking for the people from whom they came they " had some good conference with his Majesty and gave him a book of reasons." They pleaded against the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, against baptism by women, and against the use of the cap and surplice. They urged that there ought to be examination into the life of such persons as came to the communion, and that ministers ought not to be called priests. They petitioned against *' longsome- ness of service, and the abuse of church songes and music," against profanation of the Lord's Day, and against excommu- nication by such lay persons as the Archdeacon's commissary, or for trifles, and without the consent of pastors.* It need not be repeated here how the Puritans got nothing from King James but this "good conference" at Hinchin- brook. But though disappointed in their hopes from him they held on their way, their opinions obtaining wider and firmer hold among the people. In 1633, the Bishop of Lincoln, reporting the condition of his diocese to Archbishop Laud, observes, " Some in Bedfordshire use to wander from their own parish churches to follow preachers afiected by themselves, of which the officers are caused to take special care." The follow- ing year Laud himself reports to the King : " As for Lincolne, it being the greatest diocese in the kingdom, I have now reduced that under Metropolitical Visitation, and visited it this preceding year. My visitors there found Bedfordshire most tainted of any part of the diocese, and in particular Mr. Bulkeley is sent to the High Commission for Nonconformity." f The first of the two visitors here referred to by the Archbishop was Dr. Farmery, chancellor of the diocese of Lincoln, who in July, 1634, reported to him as follows : " That sort of people that run from their own parishes after afiected preachers are the most troublesome part of the ecclesiastical inquisition in Buckingham and Bedfordshires, where they found great abettors in this their disorder. The new recorder of Bedford questioned at a sessions one of my apparitors for troubling, as * Petition to King James, Nov. 30th, 1604. Addl. MSS. 8978. t Laud's Annual Reports of his Province to the King, 1633, 1634. Lambeth MSS. 943, p. 251. 10 JOBN B UNYAN. [chap. i. he said, these godly men, and then delivered publicly that if men were thus troubled for going to hear a sermon when their minister at home did not preach, it would breed a scab in the kingdom." * It was at this time that Archbishop Laud revived the long disused claim to Metropolitical Visitation, sending his Vicar- General, Sir Nathaniel Brent, to report upon the ecclesiastical condition of the whole of the diocese of Lincoln. The month after Dr. Farmery's report had been received, Sir Nathaniel set forth, beginning at Lincoln and working his way south- ward. He unearthed strange doings and met with curious experiences. Ale-houses, hounds, and swine were kept in churchyards ; copes and vestments had been embezzled ; clan- destine marriages were celebrated by the clergy ; and both clergy and laity were much given to drunkenness. At Saxby, Lord Castleton's bailiff was found melting in the middle aisle of the church the lead he had stripped from the roof. At Brigstock, the Court had to deal with a clergyman who was charged with ensuring an audience to the end of his discourses by the simple expedient of locking the church door upon his congregation, keeping them there till it was quite dark. After this we come upon a different class of offenders. " At Hun- tingdon, divers ministers in that division were suspected for Puritanisme, but being questioned they professed abso- lute conformitie." Brent reached Bedford on the 26th of August, of which he reports : " Mr. Peter Bulkeley, rector of Odell, suspected for Puritanisme, was suspended for absence. He came to me to Aylesburie, where he confessed he never used the surplisse or the crosse in baptisme. He is to appear in the High Commission Court the first court day in November if he reform not before. Divers ministers in Bedford, espe- cially Mr. Smith, are suspected for Nonconformitie." f This Peter Bulkeley thus singled out by the Vicar -General, had succeeded his father. Dr. Edward Bulkeley, as rector of Odell, in 1620. His sister was the wife of Sir Oliver St. John, of Keysoe, and therefore the mother of that Oliver Sc. John, who was afterwards Cromwell's Lord Chief Justice. Educated at * state Papers, Dom., Chas. I., 1634, July 14th. t Ibid., 1634, vol. cclxxiv., 12. 1634-5.] EARLY CEURCH LIFE IN BEDFORDSEIRE. 11 St. John's College, Cambridge, Peter Bulkeley was fellow of his college at an early age, and is spoken of by those who knew him as eminent for scholarship. He was equally eminent for his godly life. Cotton Mather says of him that he was " full of those devotions which accompany a conversation in heaven," and no neighbour could talk with him, but " he would let fall some holy, serious, divine, and useful sentences ere they parted.** He was in the full career of his usefulness when silenced by Brent. The summons to the Yicar-Generars court reached him, says Mather, "at the time his ministry had a notable success in the conversion of many unto God." Finding after his appearance at Aylesbury he could not, with a good conscience, retain his ministry, he took sorrowful leave of the good people of Odell, and accompanied by Zachary Symmes, minister of the Priory Church of Dunstable, sailed for New England, where he joined the Pilgrim Fathers in 1635. Resting for a time at Boston, he subsequently pursued his way "thro' unknowne woods " to the banks of the Musketaquid river, where he founded the town of Concord, the first inland plantation of the Massa- chusetts colony. It may be interesting to mention that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord's best known citizen, sprang from Peter Bulkeley, whose granddaughter was married to the Rev. John Emerson in 1665.* While thus dealing with the two Pilgrim Fathers who went from Bedfordshire, Sir Nathaniel Brent still went on his tour of search. From Ampthill, where he was on the 30th of August, he reports to Laud that " great complainte was made of the inconformitie of Mr. Shirley, the vicar of Hawnes, Mr. Holmes, the vicar of Whipsnade, and many others whom I questioned for inconformitie." Of Bow Brickhill, where he was on the 2nd of September, he says : " The people thereabouts, and indeed in all the south part of this diocese, are much addicted to leave their parish churches to go to hear affected preachers elsewhere. The country much complayneth of the Court at Leyton and those of the Court, of Puritanisme. Much complayning, but no proving." With which words Sir Nathaniel took his leave. * The Bulkeley Family, or the Descendants of the Rev. Peter Bulkeley , by F. "W. Chapman. Hartford, Conn., 1875. 12 JOHN BUNTAN. [chap. i. When the Yicar-General was gone the officers of the local Ecclesiastical Courts still zealously carried out the policy of driv- ing conscientious men into those ways of conformity so dear to the ecclesiastical mind. Among the MSS. in the House of Lords, calendared in recent years by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, there are numerous petitions, interesting to the local historian, which throw light on the course steadily pur- sued. In one petition, for example, John James of Olney complains that, though nothing had been proved against him, he had been compelled to pay a fine of 10 towards the build- ing of St. Paul's, in London, the ordinary fees, and 16 to the Court. He had also, he says, to give a beaver to Sir John Lambe, Dean of Arches, "which cost your petitioner 4 more." His own minister being suspended, and no preaching going on in his own parish church, he went to hear a sermon elsewhere, and, though this sermon was preached in a parish church, and not in a conventicle, he was for this offence excommunicated. To obtain absolution from this sentence cost him the ordinary fees and a fine of 24 more. John James has further sorrows to recount, *' all which unjust proceedings have caused your petitioner to sell his inheritance, and to spend above 100, and tend greatly to his undoing."* It would seem that many of the clergy fared no better than the laity. Another petition is from Daniel Clarke, vicar of Steventon, and others, and complains that Walter Walker, the commissary of the Court at Bedford, ** hath, by virtue of his office, tyrannized over the clergy of sett purpose to ingratiate himself with the Archbishop of Canterburie." In apportioning the tax laid upon the clergy for the King's expedition to Scot- land, he had made excessive assessments, " threatening to sus- pend them, and to return their names if they did not comply." From Clarke he had demanded 5 instead of forty-six shillings, and from Thomas Wells, the rector of Carlton, 6. " This was greatly too much, and because he did not pay he cited Mr. Wells (though a hundred years olde) to Bedford Courte, being five miles from his living ; and because he did not appear he suspended him, and called him an old owle, and would not dis- miss him till he paid the 6." The petition, which was evi- House of Lords MSS., Feb. 9th, 1640, 1641. Petition of John James. 1641.] EARLY CEURCH LIFE IN BEDFORLSniRE. 13 dently a combined expression of grievances, goes on to describe how " the said commissarie did suspend the curate of Bromham for referring to the Government in his sermon/' and did " ex- hibit articles against the rector of Stondon for reading divine service once without a surplice, though it was proved by wit- nesses that at that time his surplice was at the washers ; " how *' he suspended the vicar of Cardington for once omitting to weare the surplice in the afternoon, though he had worne it in the morning ; " and how he declared he would make Richard Kifford, the churchwarden of Cockayne Hatley, stand in three market towns barefooted and bareheaded, or pay a fine of 13 6s. 8d., for not presenting that the font was in decay.* In another section the same petition complains of a change of procedure forced upon the parishioners of St. Paul's, in Bedford, in the manner of observing the Communion of the Lord's Supper. From the time of the Reformation and the abolition of the mass there had been no rails round the com- munion-table. As to whether it was a table or an altar, whether its right place was in the body of the church or chancel, or altarwise at the east end, controversy had been briskly waged. But, practically, a compromise, favourable to the Puritans, had been come to in Elizabeth's time, which was substantially adopted in the canons of 1603. According to this the table should stand in the church where the altar stood before the Eeformation, except at the celebration of the Coinmunion, at which time it was to be brought out and placed where the communi- cants could most conveniently see and hear the minister, and then to be returned to its former place when the service was over. The Eighty- Second Canon distinctly enjoins a moveable Communion-table, so that a fixed altar with altar-rails and kneeling communicants thereat were unlawful innovations introduced into the Church of England by Archbishop Laud. In his endeavour to change the practice thus established Laud was met by stout resistance. In 1636 he reported to the King that in Bedfordshire there was great opposition both to the erection of altar-rails and to the kneeling before them. He says, ** The people in some places refuse to do so. His lord- * Blouse of Lords MSS., August 5th, 1641. Petition of Daniel Clarke, vicar of Steventon, &c. 14 JOBN B UNYAN. [chap. i. ship [the Bishop of Lincoln] desires direction, as this is not regulated by any canon of the Church." On the margin of this report there is, in the well-known handwriting of the King, the following note : " C. R. Try your way for some time."* Immediately after, as the petition referred to complains, the commissary " ordered steppes to be raised at the upper end of the chancel of St. Paul's in Bedford, and gave strict orders that the communion-table be sett there north and south." This was done, yet, in spite thereof, both minister and people still retained the mode of administration to which they had been long accustomed. The petition then relates, that in 1639 Walter Walker " gave orders to John Bradshaw, vicar of St. Paul's in Bedford, to keep within the railes at the administration of the communion, and because he did not, but came down to the communicants, he complained against him. He gave orders to the communicants of St. Paul's to come up to the railes about the communion-table, and first went up thither himself to show them how. Those that failed he cited, and threatened to make them make public confession in the church." t The commissary was a resolute man, but the men with whom he had to deal were resolute also. A year later, in October, 1 640, the vicar of St. Paul's was cited before the High Com- mission Court, and asked plain questions as to his mode of administering the communion. He replied that he knew of no canon forbidding him to administer the sacrament to them that did not come up to the rails. + In this attitude he was sustained by his leading parishioners, among whom were John Eston, his churchwarden of the previous year, John Grewe, and Anthony Harrington, three men whom we shall meet with ag lin as the founders of the church to which Bunyan afterwards belonged. What the Court of High Commission did with John Brad- shaw there remain no records to show. For before long both that court and those who inspired its proceedings had more urgent duty on their hands than that of looking after him. A storm was gathering, before the fury of which great heads were soon to bend low, and within a few months there was * Laud's Reports to the King, 1636. Lambeth MSS., 943, p. 267. t House of Lords MSS., Aug. 6th, 1641. J State Papers, Dom., Charles I., Oct. 7th, 1640, vol. cccclxix., 52, 1641.] EARLY CEURCE LIFE IN BEDFORD SLCIRE. 15 summoned that Long Parliament wliicli was to change so many- things before its work was done. To this ever- memorable assembly Bedfordshire sent up three parliamentarians, Sir Beauchamp St. John of Bletsoe, Sir Oliver Luke, and his son, Sir Samuel of Cople Wood End, and the royalist Lord "Went- worth of Todyngton. Within a month Lord Wentworth was raised to the Upper House in his own right, and Sir John Bur- goyne, a parliamentarian, took his place. By this change the county in its representation came to be wholly on the side of Pym and Hampden in the impending struggle. The feeling of the time was electric, both as to hopes and fears. Parliament met in November, and in January those of " the nobility, knights, gentrie, ministers, freeholders, and inhabi- tants of the county of Bedford'' who were for Laud and the King sent up a petition desiring to " manifest their affection to the Book of Common Prayer, which was with such care and sinceritie refined from the dross of Romish intermixture, with so much pietie reduced to its present purity ; " and they pray that the present form of Church government may be continued, and the statutes concerning offenders against the same be put into execution.* Parliament received this petition, but not with the same sympathetic attention they bestowed upon another document sent up from Bedfordshire on the 13th of the same month. This was a petition and articles from John Harvey of Carding- ton against Dr. Pocklington, rector of Yelden, "as a chiefe author and ringleader in all those innovations which have of late flowed into the Church of England." Hugh Beeve also, of Ampthill, another Bedfordshire clergyman of like proclivities, was ordered to be arrested by the Sergeant-at-Arms for his popish practices, and in the early months of 1641 petitions from aggrieved parishioners went up from all sides, like leaves before the storm. Nor did the men of Bedfordshire content themselves with seeking redress of local and private wrongs. On Tuesday, the 16th of March, a petition was presented to Parliament by Sir John Burgoyne, who was accomparied by some two thousand persons, "the high sheriff, knights, esquires, gentlemen, ministers, freeholders, and others, inhabitants of the county of * State Fapers, Bom., Charles I., 1640, 1641 [Jan.], No. 110. 16 JOEN BUNYAN. [chap. i. Bedford.*' They first express their gratitude to Parliament for what in so short a space had already been accomplished ; for the pious care which had removed scandalous and super- stitious innovations in religion ; for the reassembling of Parlia- ment, the removal of illegal taxes ; for the abolition of the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, and for the tak- ing away of bishops' votes in Parliament. With an obvious reference to Strafford and Laud, who were then in the Tower awaiting their trial, the petition asks for the displacement of all evil councillors and the punishment of all delinquents, and for the complete removal of all burdensome and scandalous ceremonies, and of all corrupt and scandalous ministers. They desire also that a learned, pious, and conscientious ministry may be pro- vided for and maintained, especially in market towns and populous places ; that the pious and painful divines who for unjust and frivolous causes had been deprived by the bishops and their officers, might receive ample reparation, and that there might be *'a faithfull magistracie as well as a painfull ministrie.'* * Such was the tenor of the petition subscribed so numerously and presented to Parliament so impressively by the people of Bedfordshire. In the then prevailing temper of the House of Commons, both the petition and the demonstration were right welcome at Westminster. It was ordered that Mr. Speaker, in the name of the House, shall take particular notice, and give the gentlemen of Bedfordshire thanks for their petition. It was no ordinary occasion, no common display of the feeling of the country, and even London was stirred at the sight. For these men from the Midlands rode four abreast through the city on their way to Westminster. " I myself," says Nehemiah Wallington, " did see above two thousand of these men come riding from Finsbury Fields, four in a rank, with their protes- tations in their hats.'' t Broadside, Printed by a true copy with the petitioners' approbation, at the charge of John Chambers, 1641. t Historical Notices, II. 31. ELSTOW AND THE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW. If, as is not improbable, any considerable portion of the two thousand petitioners from Bedfordshire started from the county town, Bunyan, who was then a lad of twelve, may have stood and with wistful eyes watched this significant cavalcade as it passed through his native village, along the main street of which then lay the high road to London. Elstow, a little more than a mile to the south-west of Bedford, is a quaint, quietly nestling place, with an old-world look upon it, scarcel}^ touched by the movements of our modern life. Fronting c 18 JOKN B UNYAN. [chap. ii. the road-side, witli overhanging storeys and gabled dormers, are half-timbered cottages, some of which, judging from the oaken rafters and staircases of their interiors, have seen better days. The long building in the centre of the village, and now turned into cottages, with projecting upper chambers and central overhanging gateway, still retains much of the external appearance it presented as a hostelry for pilgrims in pre- Reformation times. Opposite to the gate of this hostelry is the opening to the village green, on the north side of which stands what we may call the Moot Hall of the parish, a pic- turesque building of timber and brick, which, with its oaken beams bearing traces of Perpendicular carving and its ruddy tiles touched here and there with many-tinted lichen, presents to the eye in the summer sun-light a pleasant combination of colour and form. This curious structure of fifteenth century work, furnishing a somewhat fine example of the domestic architecture of the period, was probably originally erected to serve as the hospitium for travellers, and while not far from the road was yet within the hallium or outer court of Elstow Abbey.* At a later time, when the manorial rights passed from the Abbess to the Crown, there were held in the upper chamber those courts of the lord of the manor with View of Frankpledge, of which Bunyan's ancestors had some experience in the century before his birth. It was the scene, also, of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of village life. To the west of this building, on what was probably once the centre of a much larger green, rises the pedestal and broken stem of the ancient market cross round which were held those famous fairs of Elstow, possible suggestions of Vanity Fair, which had been a great village institution ever since the days of Henry II. It was on the green sward stretching this way and that round the cross that Bunyan played his Sunday games and heard those mysterious voices which changed for him the current of his life. The elm-trees by the churchyard wall have, for safety's sake, been shorn of their upper branches, and the Church, of stern necessity, but with loving, heedful care, has been extensively * Architectural Notes, by M. J. C. Buckley, 1885. 1641.] ELSTOW AND THE BUNYANS OF EL STOW. 19 restored ; but tlie churcli tower, standing apart and, like the towers of Blyth, Shrewsbury, and Christchurch, of later date than the main building, remains the same as when Bunj^an leaned against its doorway and delighted to ring the bells in the chamber overhead. The massive buttresses, the time- West View of Elstow Church. worn oaken door, " the roughly pavei floor trodden with the hob-nailed boots of generations of ringers," the very bells themselves are unchanged by the two hundred years which have come and gone since he was there. Passing through the church, or round it, on the south side we come upon a park-like meadow, with its handsome trees and colony of rooks, once part of the monastic enclosure; c 2 20 JORN BUNYAN [chap. ii. upon the delightful little chamber, with its groined roof and central pillar of Purbeck marble, sometimes, though erroneously, called the chapter house, sometimes the nuns' choir, but the actual use of which, standing as it does west of the church, it is not so easy to determine. We come also upon the fish ponds of the abbey, now choked with weeds, and upon the old mansion of the Hillersdons, whose stately doorway, and ruined walls, and mullioned windows strong shoots of ivy have covered with a mantle of green. Elstow, or Helenstow, the dow or stockaded place of St. Helen, a name cognate to such forms as Bridestow and Mor- wenstow, was so called because of the dedication of the old Saxon church to Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. In 1078 there was founded in the place, by Judith, the niece of the Conqueror, a Benedictine nunnery, which remained the central feature of Elstow life till the surrender of the monasteries at the Reformation. In 1553 a grant was made by the Crown to Sir Humphrey Radcliffe, of " the whole demesne and site of the late Monastery or Abbey of Elenstowe, in our County of Bedford, dissolved." And while the abbey with its surroundings was thus handed over to the grantee, the church was dismantled, the materials being probably used in the construction of the mansion-house hard by ; the nave was shortened by two bays ; the central tower beyond, and the transepts, chancel, and Lady Chapel were taken down ; a beauti- ful Norman doorway was removed from the east end, to form the present north-west entrance ; and the church tower now standing by itself was constructed to hold the bells, which had been removed from the central tower. Sir Humphrey Radclifie died in 1566, his widow surviving him at Elstow till 1594. In 1616 his son, Sir Edward, sold the Elstow estate to Sir Thomas Hillersdon, who, in the days of James I., built at least a part of the house now in ruins to the south-west of the church. The Hillersdon arms are to be seen over the very graceful porch, which is in the best style of the English Renaissance. Of this part of the building Mr. Buckley says : " The harmony of its proportions and the grace of its details show this little edifice to have been the work of a master hand ; in the masques and arabesques 1616.] :ELST0W AND TEE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW. 21 which decorate the intrados of the arch, as well as the panels in the pediments of the pilasters, are traces of Italian taste ; and from the general style of the work there seems every reason to believe that Inigo Jones planned and added this elegant porch to the old manor-house." * Standing back a little way from the high road, its carriage-drive leading up to this finely sculptured entrance, the manor-house was at its best in Bunyan's HiLLERSDON PoRCH. Elstow days, and may have suggested to him the conception of that " very stately palace the name of which was Beautiful, which stood just by the highway side." Turning now from the surroundings of Bunyan's native village to his family antecedents, we find that his ancestors were in Bedfordshire as early at least as 1199. From the fact that in 1219 the form of the name was Buignon, really an old * Architectural Notes, p. 205. In support of the opinion here expressed, it may be mentioned that Inigo Jones is known to have been on a visit to Bed- fordshire about the time this porch was built. 22 . JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. ii. French word equivalent to the modern heignetf^' It is more than probable that the Bunyans sprang from those Northmen who came to ns through Normandy. At all events, the name was found on the other side of the Channel as well as on this, for in the time of Henry YIII, the authorities of Dieppe com- plained to the deputy of Calais that the Flemings had taken prisoners Jehan Bunon and Collin AUais.t The earliest settlement of the Bunyans in Bedfordshire seems to have been at Pulloxhill {Polochessele), a village about nine miles from Elstow. When Norman nobles quartered them- selves upon English lands they gathered round them retainers and domestics from across the sea. In this way probably the Bunyans came to be the feudal tenants of Nigel de Albini, the ancestor of the Earls of Arundel, whose son Henry established himself at Cainhoe Castle, and to whom Pulloxhill, and eleven other neighbouring manors, belonged. In the Dunstable Chronicle we find the following record made by prior Richard de Morin in 1219 : "In this year the aforesaid Justiciaries were at Bedford in presence of whom we obtained our return against Henry Bunyun for the land of John Travayle."^: The * Grodefroy gives this quotation from an early Soissons MS. : *' Et bone char et granz buignons." Dictionnaire de VAncienne Langue Frangaise et de tous ses Bialectes du ix au xv* Siecle. The word signifies a little raised pattie with fruit in the middle, and came to be applied to any round knob or bunch [Ital. bngnon) ; any small elevation or convexity {Icelandic bunga) . Thus we get bun and hunch and curiously enough the ordinary bunion, a raised swelling on the feet. Vide Skeat's Etymol. Diet. It may be mentioned that as the surname of the Bedfordshire family the word has been spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways, thus : In the Assize Bolls of 1 John and 3 Henry III. it was spelt Bingnon, Buingnon, and Buniun ; in the Dunstable Chronicle of the same century : Boinun, Boynun, and Bunyun; in the Subsidy liolls of a century later : Bonionn, Boynon, Boynonn and Boynun ; in the JSook of the Luton Guild of 1518 : Bonean and Boynyon; in the Court-^Roll of the manor of Elstow (1542 1550), and in the Chalgrave Register (1539 1628): Bonyon; in the Transcript Registers irom Elstow (1603 1640) : Bonion, Bonionn, Boniun, Bonnion, Bonnionn, Bonniun, Bonoyon, Bonyon, Bonyonn, Boonyon, Bunen, Bunian, Bunion, Bunnion, Bunnionn, Bunyin, Bunyan, Bunyon, Bynyon ; and finally in the record of Bed- fordshire Administrations it is twice spelt Binyan and once Binnyan. Bun- yan's grandfather signed himself Bonyon ; his father seems to have been the first to give the name the form it has since retained. t Letters and Papers, Henry VIII., vol. iii. part 3, 1521. X Annales Monastici, edited by H. K. Luard, M.A., 1866, vol. iii., 64. 1219.] ELSTOW AND TEE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW. 23 Assize E-oU of Bedfordshire for that year has preserved no record of this case, which may, however, have been on a missing membrane, but it shows that at the same Assize there were presentments made by commissioners of Henry Buignon by Simon son of Robert, and of John Buingnon by Roger son of "Walter.* In the Dunstable Chronicle f there are three other references by a subsequent prior, showing the relation of the family to Almaric St. Amand, the descendant of de Albini. They are as follows : " In the same year (1257), after the feast of St. Martin, we bought of Almaric St. Amand land which he had of John Boynun at PuUokeshille for forty -three marks and a half." Three pages later the entry is repeated, with the addition that the purchase made from St. Amand was land which he had " of the gift of John Boinun.'* It would appear that this John Boynun or Boinun was a freeman of St. Amand's, for on the death of the latter in 1286 the then prior of Dunstable tells us that scutage was paid to St. Amand's executors, and that " for the fee of John Boynun who made service for half a knight,'' a certain payment was made. This is some clue to his social position, for the prior had previously said that a knight's service was for five hides of land, so that Boynun held some two hundred and twenty acres on condition of furnishing military service to the extent of half a knight. This scutage fee paid on the death of his chief amounted to about 80 of present value. From PuUoxhill the family of the Bunyans moved, one part of them to the south, in the direction of Chalgrave and Dun- stable, the other branch to the north in the direction of Elstow. Of those who moved to the south there sprang one concerning whom there remains this dark and evil record in the Assize Roll of 1219 : "In the half-hundred of Stanburgh. A certain clerk unknown was found killed in the fields of Toternhoe. William Turviter was the first person who found him, but he is not suspected ; Ralph Buingnon of Dunstable, who was hanged for that death, acknowledged that he killed him, and on account of that death was arrested. Let. enquiry be made at Dunstable for his chattels. The Englishry was not * Assize Rolls, Bedfordshire, 3 Henry III. t Annales Monasticij vol. iii., pp. 43, 204, 207. 24 JOEN BUNTAJSr. [chap. ii. presented, therefore tlie crime was murder/'* The meaning of this being, of course, that the Normans, living in the midst of the hostile population they had conquered, for their own defence enacted and kept in force till 1340, the law known as the Presentment of Englishry, in accordance with which an unknown man found slain was presumed to be a Norman, unless the hundred in which he was found could prove that he was an Englishman. If they could not a fine was levied on the hundred, and in this case towards the payment of the fine for the murder of this unknown priest the murderer's own chattels were to be inquired for. Leaving this Ealph Buingnon, who came to an end so tragic in the south of the county, we turn now to that portion of the Bunyan family with whom we are more immediately con- cerned, and who, at least twenty years earlier, had moved in the direction of Elstow. The earliest reference we have to the name relates to these. In 1199 William Buniun pleaded against the abbess of Elstow in the Court of King's Bench that William of Wilsamstede had sued him in respect of half a vir- gate of land which he held in that place.j* The meaning of the plea probably being that this was a friendly suit to determine the title to the land to settle, in fact, whether Buniun was the tenant of the abbess or of the aforesaid William. The point of interest for us in the case, of course, is that as early as 1199 there was a Buniun holding land at Wilstead, only a mile away from Elstow. The next document is even more interesting still, inasmuch as it shows that not only had the Bunyans come to Wilstead, but that a William Boynon, probably a descendant of the William of 1199, was living in 1327 on the very spot in the fields by Harrowden and Elstow, on which, three hundred years later, John Bunyan was born. This document, again, relates to an agreement made at Westminster, on the morrow of All Souls, in which Simon, son of Bobert atte Felde, of Elnestowe, and William de Maydenbury Peleter were the plaintifi's, and Wm. Boynon, of Harewedon, and Matilda his wife were deforciants of a messuage and an acre of land with the appurtenances in * Assize Rolls, Bedfordshire, 3 Henry III., memb. 14. + Rot. Cur. Reg., 1 John (20th June, 1199), I., 417. 1542.] ELSTOW AND THE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW. 25 Elnestowe. A certain covenant was made ; " and for this acknowledgment, warranty, fine, and agreement the said Simon and William gave to the aforesaid William Boynon and Matilda one hundred shillings of silver." * It is a long interval between this document of 1327 and the year 1542, yet between these two dates no references to the Bunyan family of any kind have reached us. There has been preserved in the Augmentation Office the Court Roll of the Moot Hall on Elstow Green, the Court-house of the Manor. manor of Elstow, embracing the years between 1542 and 1550, which presents several points of interest. The earlier records of the manor appear to have been lost with the rest of the documents in the possession of the Abbess of Elstow. During these years, which were those between the surrender of the monastery and the grant to Sir Humphrey Radcliffe, the manor was vested in the Crown, and there was held each spring and autumn a Court of the Manor, with View of Frankpledge. That is to say, at these Courts the socmen, or juratores, or * Fines, Bedford, 20 Edward II. (1327), No. 2. 26 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. ii. homagers, as they were variously termed, the men who held lands under the manor did fealty for those lands, or paid fines on renewal or relief in socage, which was a kind of succession duty to the lord of the manor. Besides transacting such busi- ness as this, these Courts also exercised jurisdiction over the general affairs of the village, marking delinquencies, settling disputes, redressing grievances, and punishing offenders. The first Court of which the Eoll makes mention was held on the 13th of April, 1542, and among the homagers present was Thomas Bony on. After the record of other business transacted, there is the following entry : '* At this Court it is witnessed by the homage that William Bonyon who held freely of the lord the King as of his manor of Elnestow a messuage and a pightell with the appurtenances in Elnestow. And nine acres of land particularly and severally lying in the fields of Elnestow by fealty, suit of court, and rent by the year of three shillings and one halfpenny from which last Court he died. And that Thomas Bonyon is the son and next heir of the aforesaid WiUiam Bonyon and is of the age of forty years and more, whereupon there falls to the lord the king of relief in socage iij^ 0^*^ which said Thomas Bonyon acknowledges that he holds the aforesaid messuage, pightell, and nine acres of land by the rent and service aforesaid. And that the aforesaid messuage and pightell are situate together and lie in Elnestow aforesaid between the messuage and close of Thomas Whytebred on the west part and the highway there on the east part." In the record of the Court held six years later, on 30th of April, 1548, there is the following entry, which is interest- ing as describing yet more accurately the identical spot, with its surroundings, on which, eighty years afterwards, Bunyan was born. It relates to the sale of three roods of the land which had belonged to the Bonyons, and the subsequent readjust- ment of the small quit rent payable to the lord of the manor : "Elnestow View of Frankpledge with Court, 30th April, 38 Henry YIII. Fealty. To this court came Eobert Corteys and acknowledged that he held freely of the said lord the king as of the manor aforesaid by fealty suit of court and rent of a penny and a halfpenny by the year three roods of arable land together lying in the east field of Elnestow upon the furlong called Pesselynton, 1548.] ELSTOW ANB THE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW. 27 between the land of John Gascoign, knight, on either side, and abuts on the north head npon Cardyngton broke and the south head upon the close called Bony on' s End, which he had of the gift of Thomas Bonyon of Elnestowe, in the county of Bedford, labourer, as by the charter of the said Thomas bearing date the 18th day of the month of April in the 37th year of the said lord the king is fully clear, which said three roods were late parcel of a messuage and cer- tain lands late of William Bonyon, father of the aforesaid Thomas Bunyon, and which said messuage and lands were charged to the said lord the king with one whole yearly rent of three shillings and fourpenee. And the aforesaid three roods were apportioned at the aforesaid rent of a penny and a halfpenny by the year. And the aforesaid Thomas Bonyon is discharged of the same yearly rent of a penny and a halfpenny.""^ Thomas Bonyon was evidently going down in the world, and selling piece by piece his ancestral land. For a year later came John Lynwood to the Court, acknowledging '' that he held freely of the lord the king as of his manor there by fealty, suit of Court and rent of 2d. by the year, three acres and a rood of land particularly and severally lying in Harodon Sharpe-fold, in the parish of Cardyngton, which were formerly of Thomas Bonyon.'' There were sixteen Courts of the manor of Elstow of which we have knowledge at the end of the reign of Henry YIII. and the beginning of that of Edward YI., and at all of them but one Thomas Bonyon appears among the dozen or so of juratores or homagers. Besides the sale, first of three roods and then of three acres and a rood of his land, there are signs that either he or his wife was in trouble at tw^elve out of the sixteen of these Courts. She is described in one place as " a common brewer of beer ; '' and in another as " a common baker of human bread " human bread, we may presume, as dis- tinguished from horse-bread ; and eleven times over she was fined for breaking the assize of beer and bread that is, for asking higher prices than those fixed by the Court of the manor. In the days of the Abbess she would have been sent to the cucking-stool for her repeated ofiences ; but in the more lenient days on which she had fallen, she was * Exchequer Court of Augmentations, Court EollSf portfolio 2d., No. 22. 28 . JOHN BUNYAN. [chap ii. simply amerced seven times at a penny and four times at two- pence. In 1547 Thomas Bonyon himself and not his wife appeared before the Court as the offending brewer of beer, and was fined a penny. This, however, did not prevent his being chosen, in the autumn of the same year, along with Thomas Crowley, as parish constable, to which office he was duly sworn. Seven years later this ancestor of Bunyan, who seems to have been the keeper of a small roadside inn on the way to Med- bury, was called before a much more august tribunal than that of the Court of the manor. In 1554, for some reason not given, he was summoned to appear before the Privy Council at West- minster. In the register of the Council there is a minute under date November 18th, ordering " certain persons to attende upon the lorde Cobham at Rochester at the commyng in of the lorde Cardynall Pole, and from thence to Gravesend." Two days later another meeting of Council was held, when letters of appearance were addressed from their lordships to '* baylief Williams, George Walton, gent., Bunyon, victualler, all of EUstowe, in the Countie of Bedford," with seven other persons from the same parish, whose names were also given.* The mention of Cardinal Pole at this time is suggestive of the returning tide of Papal power in England. Was it for his Protestantism that Bunyon the victualler was summoned before the Privy Council of Queen Mary ? The Court Roll of the manor, interesting as it is in itself, is interesting also as furnishing incidental confirma- tion of the tradition among the people of Elstow as to the exact spot which was Bunyan's birthplace. There is a cottage shown in the village street as Bunyan's cottage, in which there is no doubt he lived for some time after his marriage ; but the ancients of the place have always main- tained that he was born in the eastern fields of the parish, and close to the hamlet of Harrowden. That extremity of the parish they called Bunyan's End the name by which, as we have seen, it was known eighty years before Bunyan was born, and probably for centuries earlier. A pathway in the fields was spoken of as Bunyan's Walk ; two fields on the slope beyond the southern stream still go by the name of " Bunyans" * Frivy Council Register, 16531558, p. 189. 1554 ] ULSTOW AND TEE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW. 29 and " farther Bunyans " among the labourers on the farm ; and finally, with the persistence of English village names, the piece of land between the two streams is still known as " the furlong called Pesselynton," as the E-oU shows it was in the days of Henry YIII. When, in addition, we remember that a small farmer named John Rogers, who died in the village of Elstow in 1859, at the advanced age of ninety-two, and whose great-grandfather, living in the next house to the Map of Bedford and Elstow, showixg Bunyan's Birthplace. Scale One inch to a mile. Bunyans, was John Bunyan's playfellow, frequently pointed out to his neighbours as the dreamer's birthplace the piece of land south of " Cardyngton broke " described by the EoU of the manor as Bonyon's End, we feel at once that State document and popular tradition combine to give us certainty as to the site. Before passing from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth, there is one point of literary interest on which for a moment 30 JOKN BTINYAN. [chap. ii. we are tempted to linger. The Court Roll, it will be remera- bered, describes Bonyon's End as having on both sides o it the land of John Gascoign, knight. Sir John was at that time living at Cardington, the adjacent parish, where his son George was born about 1525. So that George Gascoigne, our earliest English satirist, and John Bunj^an, our greatest religious allegorist, were born within a mile of each other, and on ancestral lands which interlaced. Gascoigne, with not a little original genius and freshness of thought, was one of the earliest of our strictly vernacular poets. It is said that Shakespeare's Winter's Tale was partly suggested by the joint version of the Phenissae by Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh.* He had certainly not a few quaint touches and homely thrusts such as Bunyan himself might have written ; as when he says that " he who will throw a stone at everie dogge which barketh had neede of a great satchell or pocket ;" or when, in after years, regretting his wanton, wasted youth, he says : "I have loytred, I confesse, when the sunne did shine, and now I strive al in vaine to loade the cart when it raineth. I regarded not my comelynes in the May-moone of my youth, and yet now I stand prinking me in the glasse, when the crowes foote is growen under mine eye." Gascoigne's Steele Glas, Shakespeare's mirror held up to Nature before Shakespeare's time, was " a glasse wherein each man may see within his mind what canckred vices be." A priest " more saucie than the rest " asks when he may leave off pray- ing for people that do amiss, to whom the poet makes reply : " T tel thee (priest) when shoomakers make shoes, That are wel sowed, with never a stitch amisse, When taylors steale no stuffe from gentlemen, When tinkers make no more holes than they f ounde, When thatchers thinke their wages worth their workc, When Davie Diker diggs and dallies not, When smiths shoo horses as they would be shod, When millers toll not with a golden thumbe, When weavers weight is found in housewives' web : When al these things are ordered as they ought, And see themselves within my glasse of Steele, Even then (my priests) may you make holy day, And pray no more but ordinarie prayers." * The Complete Poems of George Gascoigne : Collected and edited for the Rox- burghe Library, by W. C. Hazlitt, 18G9. Two vols. 4to. 1602-17.] ELBTOW AND TEE BUNT AN S OF ELSTOW. 31 There is sometliing in these lines from Thomas Bunyan's racy neighbour at Cardington which seems to remind us of his own descendant, and having thus connected the two for a moment in our minds, we may now return once more to the Bunyans themselves. Of them, after the Court Eoll, of 1550, and the Privy Council minute of 1554, we know nothing more till 1603, when the Transcript Registers commence. The Parish Register of Elstow for the period earlier than 1641 has long been lost, but fortunately the returns sent year by year to the Registry, in accordance with the canon of 1603, come to our assistance. Almost the first entry we find in the first return from Elstow is that of the baptism of John Bunyan's father, which is recorded thus : 1602-3 : " Thomas the Sonne of Thomas Bunyon the xxiiij*'' days of fiebr." The mother of the child then baptized may have died in giv- ing him birth, for towards the end of the same year Thomas Bunyon, the father, was again married at Elstow Church to Elizabeth Leigh. This Thomas, the elder, the grandfather of John, lived on till 1641, and describes himself in his will as a " pettie chapman," or small village trader. Like his grandson after him he appears not to have been quite so submissive to the authorities of the time as they could have desired. Two, and only two time-worn Act-Books of the Archdeaconry of Bedford relating to the times of James I. have been preserved. From one of these we find that at the Court held at Ampthill, October 21st, 1617, two of the Elstow parishioners were pre- sented by the churchwardens before the commissary. One of these was Thomas Cranfield, who was charged with " refusing to sit in a seat of the church where the churchwardens placed him ;" the other was Thomas Bonion, who was presented for telling the churchwardens they were " forsworne men.' * Feeling was evidently running high just then, and indeed that year matters ecclesiastical were altogether in a bad way in Elstow, for three months later the vicar of the parish himself, Henry Bird, was presented at the same court for neglecting his cure ; " on Sonday was a fortnight there was noe service," and on another occasion '' Rose Ravens of Elstowe was cited for churching herself, the minister being at home." 32 JORN BUNYAJSr. [chap. ii. Seven other children were born to the elder Thomas Bonion after the birth of Banyan's father, four of whom died in infancy. He himself surviving till 1641, made his will on the 25th of November in that year, in which he describes himself as, " I Thomas Bonyon of the parish of Elstowe in the countie of Bedford, Pettie Chapman, being sicke of bodie but of perfect remembrance, thanks be given to Almightie God, doe make and ordayne this my last Will and Testament in manner and forme following That is to say First I give and bequeath my soule into the handes of Almightie God my Creator assuringe myselfe by the death and passion of my blessed Saviour Jesus Christ to receive pardon and remission for all my sinnes and that my soule shall be received into his heavenly kingdome ther to rest with him for ever And my bodie to the earth whereof it IS made to be buried in Christian buriall at the discreson of my executrix hereafter named And for the worldly goods that God hath blessed me withall I doe dispose of as followeth Item I give and bequeath to Anne Bonyon my wife [his third wife] after my decease the Cottage or Tenement where- in I doe now dwell with the appurtenances during the tearme of her naturall life And after the decease of Anne Bonyon my said wife I give and bequeath the said Cottage or Tenement with the appurtenances unto my Two Sonnes Thomas Bonyon and Edward Bonyon and their Heires for ever to be equally parted and devided between them after the decease of my said wiffe." He further leaves the sum of 5 to his daughter, Elizabeth Watson, the wife of Thomas Watson, and to his grandchildren, of whom, of course John Bunyan was one, " sixe pence a peece toe bee paied them when they accomplish their severale ages of one and twentie yeares.'* Everything else he leaves to Anne Bonyon, his loveing wife, whom he makes whole and sole executrix, concluding thus : *' I doe further make and ordayne Thomas Carter of Kempston in the said countie of Bedford, gentleman, my loveinge and Kind Friend, overseer of this my last Will and Testament And do give him Twelve pence in remembrance for his paines to be taken in seeinge this my last Will and Testament duly and truly executed."* The document was signed with a cross in the Bedfordshire Wills, 1641. No. 202. 16271 ELSTOW AJSTD THE BUNTAJSrS OF EL8T0W. 33 presence of Henry Latham and Walter Cooper, and was proved before Walter Walker on the 14th of December, 1641. Thomas Bonyon, the son of this man and the father of John, was first married to Anne Pinney, at Elstow Church, on the 10th of January, 1623, when he was in his twentieth year. In 1627 Anne died, and so far as the register shows, died childless. The same year he came again to Elstow Church to be married, this time to the wife who was to be the mother of his illustrious son. As we did not, till the recent search among the Tran- script Registers, know the maiden name of the mother of the Dreamer, it may be well to give the entry in full, which is as follows : ' 1627. *' Thomas Bonnionn, Junr., and Margaret Bentley were married the three and twentieth of May." We who, in the course of modern thought, have come to attach so much importance to hereditary transmission, would have been glad to know more than we do of the character and personality of the parents of one who occupies so prominent a place in English literature, and who was so unmistakably a child of genius. Unfortunately, their son, while telling so much about his own inward experiences, tells us but little concerning his father and mother. Even the little he does tell seems as if it ought to be qualified. When we remember that the wills of his father and grandfather, and of his maternal grandmother have been preserved in the Registry of the District Court of Probate from a time when the poorest of the poor never made any wills at all, and that the house in which he was born had been the property of his ancestors from time immemorial, it would seem as if Bunyan in his humility had depreciated the social position of his family more than he had need. He says, " For my descent then, it was, as is well known by many, of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land.'* That these expressions ought not to carry the full force they carry to-day is shown by the fact he proceeds to state. "But yet, notwithstanding the meanness and incon- siderableness of my parents, it pleased God to put it into their hearts to put me to school to learn both to read and write, the D 34 JOHN BUNYAK [chap. ii. whicli I also attained according to the rate of other poor men's children.'* Still, when all fair deductions are made, Bunyan's parents were poor enough no doubt, and the struggle of life with them keen enough. It need scarcely be said, however, that he was not the man to give forth unmanly wailings about the lowliness of his position or the hardships of his lot. In his own hearty religious fashion he sums up the question by saying : *' Though I have not here, as others, to boast of noble blood or of a high-born state according to the flesh, all things considered I magnify the heavenly Majesty for that by this door he brought me into this world, to partake of the grace and life that is in Christ by the Gospel." Thomas Bunyan, his father, usually spoken of as a tinker, described himself in his will as a *' braseyer/' * Working at his forge by the cottage in the fields, repairing the tools and utensils of his neighbours at Elstow or Harrowden, or wandering for the purposes of his trade from one lonely farmhouse to another, he would be neither better nor worse than the rest of the craftsmen of the hammer and the forge. We may perhaps regard this tinker of Elstow as the counterpart of the tinker of Turvey, a well-known character of those times, who lived some half-dozen miles away across the fields, and who is supposed, in the year of grace 1630, to have "hammered out an epistle to all strolling Tinckers and all brave mettle-men that travel on the Hoofe." In this production of his he boasts of the country he has be- stridden, the towns he has traversed, and of the fairs in which he has been drunk. He claims that " all music first came from the hammer," that " the tincker is a rare fellow," for that "he is a scholler and was of Brazen-nose CoUedge in Oxford, an excellent carpenter, for he builded Coppersmith's Hall." f Thomas Bunyan may not have been to the full the roystering blade this brother " mettle-man" was, but in the course of his rounds he would meet with him and the like of him, and under the trees of the village green or on the settle of the village inn could probably tell as good a story and perhaps drink as deep. * In the tooks of the Norwich Freemen the "brasyers " included pewterers, plomers, and belyaters, or bell- founders. Rye's History of Norfolk. 1885. t The Tinker of Turvey, or Canterbury Tales, London, 1630. Edited by J. 0. HaUiweU, F.R.S. 1632. J ELSTOW AND THE BUNYANS OF ELSTOW 35 Margaret Bunyan, the tinker's wife, and the Dreamer's mother, like her husband, was a native of Elstow, being born there in the same year in which he was born, as the following entry from the Transcript Register shows : 1603. ''Margarett Bentley, daughter of Wm. Bentley, was C. [christened] the xiij of November." Though her parents, William Bentley and Mary Goodwin were married, in 1601, at St. Paul's Church, in Bedford, we may infer that since Mary Bentley, her grandmother, died in Elstow, as a widow, in 1613, the Bentleys, like the Bunyans, had been long resident in the parish. Their names do not occur in the Court Boll of Elstow between 1542 and 1550, but are found in the earliest Transcript Begister. In any case, as they were both born in Elstow in the same year, Margaret Bentley had known Thomas Bunyan all her life, when in 1627, at the age of twenty-four, she was married to him in Elstow Church, her sister Bose being also married to his brother Edward the following year. Her mother died as a widow in 1632, though in what year her father died the register omits to state. Her mother's will, drawn up in the neat, scholarly handwriting of John Kellie, the vicar of Elstow, giving as it does some idea of the social condition of John Bunyan's mother before her marriage, as well as a Dutch-like picture of an Elstow cottage interior of two hundred and fifty years ago, may in part at least be worth recording. It was on the 27th of June, 1632, that " Mary Bentley, of Elnestoe in the countie of Bedford, widow," after bequeathing her soul to Almighty God her Maker in whom she hopes to be saved through Jesus Christ her Saviour, and her body to be buried in the churchyard at Elnestoe, goes on to say : " Item I give and bequeath to John Bentley my sonne one brasse pott, one little table and all the painted deaths about the house and the standing Bed in the loft. Item I give to my daughter Mar- garet the joined stoole in the chamber and my little case. Item I give to my daughter Bosse the Joined forme in the chamber and a Hogshead and the dumbe flake. Item I give to my daughter Elizabeth the lesser kettle and the biggest plater, a flaxen sheet and a flaxen pillowbere, a trumell bed and a d2 36 JOHN BUN7AN. [chap. ii. coffer in the cliamber and tlie table sheet. Item I give to my daughter Anie my best hatt, my best cuffe, my gowne, my best petticoate, the presse in the chamber, the best boulster and blankett, the coffe above, the skillet and a pewter platter, and the other trummle bed, a harder sheet and a pillo where." All else she gives and bequeaths to her daughter Mary, whom she makes sole executrix, and whom she charges to see her " honestly buried " and her " burlall discharged." The will was attested by John Kellie, the vicar of Elstow, and Margerie Jaques, a widow, and was proved in the October following. The cottage equipments, and the way they are described, seem to indicate that Margaret Bunyan came not of the very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet decent and worthy in their ways, and took an honourable pride in the simple belongings of their village home. Scanty as are the references which Bunyan makes to his father, those to his mother are scantier still. This may arise partly from the fact that she died before he reached the age of sixteen, and his remembrance of her may have been dim and distant when two and twenty years later he wrote that story of his life which we find in the " Grace Abounding." It is of course useless to speculate much where we know so little, yet we are tempted to think that the mother of a child so much above the common kind must herself have been a woman of more than common power. We should not be surprised to be told that she was one of those strongly-marked personalities sometimes met with in English village life a woman of racy, ready wit, and of picturesque power of expression, who, Mrs. Poyser-like, had a very distinct individuality of her own, and the capacity of making a very distinct impression upon those around her. Unfortunately to us she is little more than a name, and we recall her for a moment from the nameless crowd and from the midst of her " homely joys and destiny obscure " because of the one great event of her life, the birth of her distinguished son, her first-born. The record of that event quietly takes its place in the list of the nineteen christenings of that year, at Elstow Church, in the following form : 1628. '' John the sonne of Thomas Bonnionn, Junr. the 30th of Novemb." 1628.] ELSTOW AND THE BUNT AN S OF ELSTOW. 37 The return is signed by Jolrn Kellie, minister, and Antbouy Manley and William AUerson, churchwardens. The entry is commonplace enough, and made in the same routine fashion as were hundreds more, yet as we read, the record becomes more than usually suggestive of the simple beginnings of a great, strong life. Once again we seem to see the wondrous babe carried on that last of the chill days of the November of 1628 to Elstow Church. Rude was the little cradle out of which he was lifted, and common-place the cottage, with its grimy forge, out of which he was carried. Looking at all his unpromising surroundings, there comes into our minds a rustic story told about the father of this child by quaint old Thomas Archer, the rector of Houghton Conquest, parish next neighbour to Elstow itself. The delightful old man kept a sort 38 JOKN BTJNYAN. [chap. ii. of chronicon mirahile of the little rural world in which, king's chaplain as he was, his tranquil days were spent, and in his record, as a curiosity of natural history, he sets down this : " Memorandum. That in Anno 1625 one Bonion of Elsto clyminge of Rookes neasts in the Bery wood ffound 3 Rookes in a nest, all white as milke and not a blacke fether on them." Yividly the whole scene comes back to us. This " Bonion of Elsto,'' the father of the Dreamer, wandering in vacant mood in the Ellensbury Wood, looks and wonders at the three milk-white birds in the black rook's nest. And as we watch him, the surprise on his face becomes symbol and presage of a wider world's wonder than his, the wonder with which men find in the rude nest of his own tinker's cottage a child all lustrous with the gifts of genius, a life memorable in the literature of the great world stretching far away beyond Elstow Green, and memorable, too, in the spiritual history and experience of many souls in many nations through the centuries to come. III. THE CIVIL WARS. The cottage at Banyan's End in wHcli Bunyan was born lias long since disappeared. Portions of it were still remaining at tlie close of last century, but the site was shortly after ploughed up, and, with the nine acres of land once belonging to it, was added to the neighbouring farm. It stood at the foot of a gently sloping hill, and between two streams which, after enclosing "the furlong called Pesselynton," met a little farther on in the hamlet of Harrowden. One of these streams flowed close past the cottage, and after heavy rains turned the field behind, as the land still shows, into a veritable Slough of Despond, into which whosoever wandered stuck fast in miry perplexity. Thomas Bunyan's family, living only a few yards within the Elstow parish boundary, were almost as near to Bedford town as to Elstow Church, the spire of St. Paul's seen through the elm- trees from the top of the grassy slope to the south, being only about a mile away. A bridle-road from Wilstead through Medbury, passing near the front of the cottage, took the line of the willow-trees still to be seen in the hedgerow and joining the main road at the leper house of St. Leonard, went into the town by the ancient hospital of St. John. If Bunyan was sent to Bedford to school rather than to Elstow village, this would be the path he took. In the *' Scriptural Poems," published as his in his collected works,* there are these lines : " For I'm no poet, nor a poet's son, But a mechanic guided by no rule But what I gained in a grammar school, In my minority." If these lines were really Bunyan's own, they would settle the * Oflfor's Edition, 1862, II., 390. 40 JOBN B UNYAN. . [chap. m. point that he was educated at Bedford on the foundation of Sir William Harpur ; but, to say the least, their genuineness is very doubtful. No one seems to have heard of these poems till twelve years after Bunyan's death. Charles Doe, who saw in the possession of his eldest son John, all the unprinted MSS. Bunyan left behind him, makes no mention of them either in the catalogue of 1692, or in the one still more carefully drawn up in 1698. And when we look at the poems themselves there is certainly but little to remind us of Bunyan's special vein. It may readily be granted that his attempts at poetry do not show him at his best, that his muse "is clad in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks along the level Bedfordshire roads," yet even in his rudest rhymes there is pith and power, occasionally a dash of genius, and a certain sparkle of soul nowhere to be found in these *' Scriptural Poems " set forth under his name for the first time in 1700.* The line about the grammar school, therefore, must be counted for little. That he did go to school, however, Bunyan tells us himself. Poor as his parents were, " it pleased God to put it iuto their hearts to put me to school to learn both to read and write." The scholarship thus acquired was of course of the slenderest, " according to the rate of other poor men's chil- dren," and the little he learned was soon lost, " even almost utterly." If he went to Elstow, school inspectors had not yet Scriptural Foems, Sec, by Jolin Bunyan. London, printed for J. Blare, at the Looking Glass on London Bridge, 1700. The doubtfulness of this work is increased by the name of the publisher. As early as 1688, Blare had published in Bunyan's name a spurious book entitled The Saints' Triumph. In 1705 also he issued a shameless book under the title of The Progress of the Christian Pilgrim, which was the Pilgrim's Progress merely latinized, but on the title page of which there was no mention of Bunyan's name. The veil under which the book was disguised was the most transparent possible : Christian became Christianus ; Pliable, Easie ; Worldly Wiseman, Politick Worldly ; and so on. This man who carried on the business at the " Looking Glass " on London Bridge, was a repeated oflFender against the laws of honest dealing, and he is almost certainly one of the men to whom Nathaniel Ponder referred in 1688, when on the reverse of the title of Bunyan's One Thing is Needful, he printed the following : * ' Advertisement This author having published many books which have gone off very well : there are certain ballad -sellers about Newgate and on London Bridge, who have put the two first letters of this author's name and his eflBgies to their rimes and ridiculous books, suggesting to the world as if they were his." 1644.] THE CIVIL WARS. 41 risen above the village horizon, and even the endowed founda- tions in the neighbourhood had fallen upon evil days. The Free School of Sir Francis Clarke, in the neighbouring parish of Houghton Conquest, had its master, Christopher Hills, dis- placed by the master and fellows of Sidney Sussex College, in 1645, "for his wilful neglect and forsaking of the schools contrary to our trust reposed in him." * And the then modest foundation of Sir William Harpur at Bedford in those days fared no better. A petition referring to the time when Bunyan was between nine and twelve years of age complains that William Yarney, the schoolmaster, had not only charged fees which he had no right to do, but had also " grossly neglected the school by frequent absence from it, by night- walking and mis- spending his time in taverns and ale-houses, and is also very cruel when present to the boys." f In any case, school- days were few% if not evil, for the tinker's son. The education he received was mainly that given in the great school of human life where so many other sturdy natures have received such effective training. " I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato," says he, "but was brought up at my father's house in a very mean condition, among a company of poor countrymen." In the cottage by the stream bread-eaters must as soon as possible become bread-winners, and Bunyan passed quickly enough from the bench of his master to the forge of his father, necessity, if not choice, indicating that he must be a " braseyer " too. The growing lad had been at work some time when there came to him, in his sixteenth year, the first great sorrow of his life; for in the June days of 1644 his mother sickened and died, and within another month his sister Margaret also, the play- mate of his childhood, was carried across the fields to the same quiet grave in Elstow Churchyard. Nor was this all. Before yet another month had gone by over this twice- opened grave, his father had brought home another wife to take the vacant place. This indignity to his mother's memory, which the lad was old enough to understand and affectionate enough keenly to resent, must have estranged him from his father and his home. The removal of the gentler influence of mother and * Harl. MS8.y 4115, 79. t S:ouse of Lords MSS. 42 JOBN BUNT AN, [chap. m. sister at tlie formative period of life, and the revulsion of feel- ing created by the indecent haste with which his father married again, may have had not a little to do with those wild and wilful ways of the next few years, which he lived to describe so vividly and to repent so bitterly. It was probably about six or eight months after his mother's death that Bunyan entered the Army, and had those experiences of a soldier's life to which he makes brief reference in the " Grace Abounding." Earlier it could not have been, for it was not till November, 1644, that he had reached the then Army regulation age of sixteen. And it is not probable that his military life was prolonged beyond a few months ; for in the month of June, 1645, the battle of Naseby practically ended the first Civil War, leaving only the fag end to wear itself out in the West. The side on which Bunyan was arrayed in the great civil conflict of the seventeenth century. Parliamentarian or Royalist, has long been matter of dispute. Lord Macaulay says that " he enlisted in the Parliamentary army, and served during the decisive campaign of 1645." The reason for this opinion is probably given in the further statement that " his Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain Credence are evidently portraits, of which originals were among those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army."* On the other hand, Mr. Froude says that " probability is on the side of his having been with the Royalists," giving as the reason for this opinion that his father was of " the national religion," and that John Gifibrd, the minister at Bedford, had been a Royalist. f Whatever weight may be attached to his father's sympathies and there is no doubt about these, for he had a son christened Charles on the 30th of May, 1645 the reference to Gifibrd is out of all historical perspective. Certainly his opinions can have had very little to do with the side Bunyan took in the Civil Wars, seeing that Gifford did not become minister at Bedford till 1650, and that these two men did not even know of each other's existence till years after the Civil Wars were over. Perhaps a brief consideration of the course of events in Bedfordshire during those days of storm and stress may help us to a probable conclusion on the point at issue, and * Biographies^ pp. 30, 31. t English Men of Letters. Bunyan. p. 12. 1645.] TEE CIVIL WARS. 43 at the same time serve to make more vivid the surroundings of Bunyan's life. There is no doubt as to the side which Bedfordshire took as a county. With the shires of Huntingdon, Cam- bridge, Herts, Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk, it formed the Associated Counties from which Parliament drew its main strength and supplies. Clarendon says that the king had not in Bedfordshire " any visible party, nor one fixed quarter.'' There were several loyalists in the county, of course, but they do not seem to have been sufficiently numerous to organize themselves into anything like effective shape. The Earl of Cleaveland, of Toddington, spent life and fortune in the King's service, but chiefly with the Royal forces at a distance. William Gery of Bushmeade raised a troop of horse in the county of Huntingdon, and his brother George was with the King, and was taken prisoner at the battle of Naseby ; the two brothers, William and Richard Taylor of Clapham, also were in active service, and surrendered as prisoners of war, the one at Nantwich and the other at Truro. Among those who joined the king at Oxford and surrendered under the Articles when the city was taken, were Henry, Earl of Peterborough, of Turvey, who was a minor and who after- wards withdrew to France ; Spencer Potts of Chalgrave ; Thomas Joyce, the vicar of Hawnes ; Sir Francis Crawley of Luton ; Edward Russell, the brother of the Earl of Bedford ; Sir William Palmer of Warden, and the widow and son of John Wingate of Harlington. Besides those who surrendered at Oxford, other Bedfordshire Royalists took up arms, though it is not known in what engagements, if any, they took part. Of these. Sir Peter Osborn of Chicksand went beyond seas to escape the consequences of his delinquency ; Richard Conquest of Houghton Conquest was a prisoner in the King's Bench ; Robert Spencer, also, of Eaton Socon, was for some time a prisoner of war. Besides these, there were Robert Audley of Northill, a youth of seventeen ; Michael Gri gg of Dunstable ; John Russell, a younger brother of the Earl of Bedford ; Thomas Foster, a yeoman of Elstow, and Richard Cooke of Cranfield. With the exception of those who were excused under >^ 44 JOBN BUNT AN. [chap. in. tlie Articles of Oxford, the Royalists who remained in the county made their submission to Parliament, took the Solemn League and Covenant and the Negative Oath, and com- pounded for their estates at Goldsmiths' Hall. Among those who thus compounded were several who, though they did not take up arms, in some way or other declared their sympathies. These were Lord Capelle of Warden ; Sir George Bynnion of Eaton Socon ; Sir Edward Ashton of Wymington ; Sir Thomas Leigh of Leigh ton ; Sir Robert Napier of Luton ; Charles Yentriss of Shefford ; Sir John Huet of Thurley ; Sir Lodovick Dier of Colmworth ; Charles Upton of Tempsford ; Humphrey Freemonger of Stanbridge ; Mr. Simley of Wootton ; Mr. Watson of Ampthill ; Mr. Yarway, and Mr. Browne of Kempston ; and Owen Brett of Southill. Some of these com- pounded at one-tenth of the value of their estates, and others at one-sixth. The annual value of the sequestrations in houses, lands, and woods in the town and county of Bedford was 11,700. The entire amount sent up by the sequestrators of the county to the public treasurer at Guildhall between 1644 and 1647 was 9,659 3s. 8d. Of this a very small portion indeed came from the town of Bedford, which appears to have gone almost entirely one way. In 1648, Francis Bannister, the mayor, writes officially : " We have not had any seques- tered in our Towne but a Barber, and little could be had from him ; and two little prebends, yielding 13 6s. Od." * By far the most resolute and conspicuous Royalist in Bed- fordshire was Sir Lewis Dyve of Bromham. Whatever organization there may have been, centred in him ; but in * The authorities for the details here given are (1) The Royalist Compositim Papers Bedfordshire, in the Record Office, and (2) The Original Accounts of Estates of Delinquents seized hy Parliament, in the British Museum Addl. MSS., 5494, Beds., Nos. 1 27. It may be well to say that the Royalist Composition Papers are in two series. The First Series consists of 7,300 sets of papers hound in 113 vols, folio, arranged in counties and comprising the corre- spondence and orders of the commissioners for sequestration and sale. The Second Series contains 3,034 sets of papers, and is bound in 54 vols, folio. This series not being arranged in counties is more difficult to search, but for purposes of local history is especially valuable as containing original particulars given in on oath of the estates and personal property of those Royalists who were per- mitted to compound on payment of fine, with the amount of fine. Cf. Selby's Lancashire and Cheshire Records, Record Society, 1882. 1645.] TKE CIVIL WARS. 45 July, 1642, lie had to flee for his life, narrowly escaping arrest by swimming the Ouse where it flows past Bromham Hall. The following year he was defeated at Newport Pagnel, after which he appears to have abandoned all farther hope of success in Bedfordshire, and proceeded to active service with the main body of the Royal forces in the west. The great military leader in the county on the other side, against Sir Lewis Dyve, was Sir Samuel Luke of Cople Wood End, who was a tower of strength for what he called " the good old cause." He was one of the Members for Bedford in the Long Parliament, scout-master to the Army, and governor of the garrison of Newport Pagnel. He is said to have been the original of Butler's "Hudibras" and the special object of his satira If this be so, the picture there given of Sir Samuel will scarcely be accepted as a picture from the life by those who have gathered their impressions of this knight of Cople from his own Letter Book during the three years he was governor of Newport. This consists of four MS. volumes* and con- tains letters to him from Cromwell, Fairfax, and other great leaders and officials of the Government, and from him to them and also to his father. Sir Oliver Luke, to his son and his son's tutor, to his neighbours in the county, to his brother officers and others. In all these he leaves the impression upon us of a man of shrewd observation, of unquestionable valour, of godly life, and, what we should not have gathered from Butler's caricature, of considerable breadth of humour and human- ness. He is certainly far from conforming to the conventional idea of a narrow and ascetic Puritan. We find him writing to his son at Geneva, where he is travelling with his tutor, and while urging him to keep the fear of God before his eyes, he wishes him to *' strive to perfect his Italian hand, to follow his mathematics, fPencing, vaulting and exercise both of Picke and musket." Writing to Pelham Moore, one of the Secretaries of State, he is not too much concerned about war supplies to forget to ask, "If there bee any new wynes come over y* are excellent good pray send mee down a Teirce or two half hogs- heads upon y lees of best Claritt." The wine was sent, but not the war supplies, and Sir Samuel rallies "fibrgetM Mr. Moore" * Egerton MSS., 785, 786, 787. Ashbumham MSS. Stowe Collection, 229. 46 JOHN BUNYAN, [chap. m. upon the long time he is in sending him the needful " shovells, spades, mattockes, Iron Crowes, Drums, CuUors and Halberds," and thinks he must be " a kinn or some greate acquaintance of that Sir Thomas Bayers who wore his Cloaths five yeare in his head before hee putt them to the making." He adds : " Your Claritt wine is starke naught both in the eye and mouth." Therefore Mr. Moore, who has just come away from the pre- sence of Cromwell, whom he has left " well and merry," tells his friend : *' Coming thence by Boate I saw a Salmon taken in the Tames which I present to y"" Honour hoping the tast thereof will meliorate my wine." That Sir Samuel could appre- ciate the good things of life as well as the best cavalier is seen in the message he sent to his father, Sir Oliver, who is in Par- liament, where " wee satt in the House till six at night and fought the Babbell stoutly." Sir Samuel, to fortify his stout- hearted father for battle with the Parliamentary obstructives of his day sends him a " Eed Deer Pie, with which you shall receive three brace of Phesants, two Couple of Tayle, six Cockes, two brace of Partridges and two dozen of Snipes." That he had some regard also to the pomps and vanities is seen from the order he gives to his father's confidential ser- vant, Edward Bynion, who, there is reason to believe, was John Bunyan's uncle his father's brother Edward, who also married his mother's sister Rose. Bynion has found, " in Mr. Cubberd's shop French Scarlett " for Sir Samuel's cloake at two guineas a yard, as good as any in London. " To tryme the Cloake will require eight and a half dozens of Buttons and Loopes which, if they be rich will cost forty shillings a dozen," so that " cloake and tryming will come to 30." Remembering how much this sum meant in those days, it would not seem that the Presbyterian soldier whom Butler styles Sir Hudibras, erred on the side of parsimony or Puritan sadness. As this is probably the man under whom John Bunyan served his brief soldier life, we are interested in catching these few glimpses of him. He appears to have been a man of keen in- sight and strong common sense ; his personal valour was as unquestioned as his military skill, and it was probably easier for Butler, after living under his roof, to lampoon him at a safe 1645.] TEE CIVIL WARS. 47 distance in his "Hudibras" than it was for the enemy to meet him in the fair encounter of an open field. Royalist ridicule of men who had grave and anxious duties to discharge in defending the ancient constitutional liberties of England may be very amusing to read, but it is not history, and must not be mistaken for it.* Bedfordshire, through its representatives in Parliament as well as by its military action, pronounced strongly against the unconstitutional policy of Charles. There were only three counties in England all of whose members for county and borough alike were on the side of Hampden and Pym, and Bedfordshire was one of the three. In the Upper House the Earl of Bedford was, at the beginning of the struggle, on the same side, as was the Earl of Bolingbroke and also Lord St. John of Bletsoe, who lost his life at the battle of Edgehill. Henry, Earl of Kent, who succeeded his father at Wrest Park in 1643, was also a Parliamentarian, as was the Earl of Manchester, whose seat was only a mile or two over the county border, and who, as Lord Kimbolton, had resisted the King in Parliament, as he did afterwards in the field. In addition to the leaders there were resolute men in all parts of the county, and in all ranks of life, whose sympathies were actively on the same side. The stream being thus mainly one way, Bedfordshire did not sufier within its own borders from the consequences of civil war, to the same extent as some other counties. There were hardships endured from the free quartering of the soldiery, and there were occasional raids and skirmishes, of course. In the autumn of 1643 Sir Lewis Dyve rode into Ampthill with a party of horse, and carried off as prisoners to Oxford "divers of the well-affected gentry and freeholders, who were met as a committee appointed by Parliament." f In the following June the King, passing through HockHffe, on a Sunday, towards Bedford, plundered * It WQuld seem that Oliver Cromwell's eldest and most promising son served under Sir Samuel Luke, and died in Newport garrison, while he was governor. In the " Parliament Scout" for March 15th 22nd, 1643-4, there is the following entry : " Cromwell hath lost his eldest son, who is dead of the small pox in Newport [Pagnel], a civil young gentleman and the joy of his father." t Wallington's historical Notices, II., 73. 48 JOEN BUNYAN. [chap. itt. Leighton by the way, and also sent another party to Dunstable, who, finding the people at church, began to cut and wound right and left, " and shot a case of pistols at the minister, but missed him, yet afterwards abused him almost as bad as death." * Rushworth also tells us that in October, 1643, Colonel Urrey and Sir Lewis Dyve, with a great party of horse, entered Bed- ford, took Sir John Norris and others prisoners there, and routed three hundred of their horse, and sufficiently plundered the town and other parts of that country." f On the other hand, the Royalists also used to tell how they had suffered from the quartering of soldiers upon them, and from the loss of cattle and sheep for the army ; bow that Mrs. Orlebar's coachman at Harrold lost his life from refusing to deliver up his horses to CromwelFs party without the leave of his mistress ; and how, while Mr. Gery was away with the King at Oxford, the Parlia- mentary forces fired into the windows at Bushmead Priory, his wife fleeing from room to room with her children till she was able to take refuge with a tenant, as the soldiers plundered the house. There is, too, a touch of human pathos, and a vivid glimpse into the sorrows of those days, in a petition found among the Poyalist Composition Papers, from a youth of seventeen, the son of Sir Henry Cayson of Dungey Wood. The lad asks that his father's estate may not be altogether taken away for his delinquency, for that while Sir Henry and his lady had left " his own house in the Parliamentary quarters, and gone to visit his wife's friends in Bristol, while it was the King's garrison, they both dyed there, one shortly after the other, leaving nine children, all infants of tender yeares, fatherlesse and motherlesse." We can easily conceive also that Bedford town was all astir as one Sunday evening in August Lord St. John's troopers rode up to St. Cuthbert's Church and arrested the rector, Giles Thorne, at the close of the service, because he was in the habit of praying publicly for the King, and defying from his pulpit the authority of Parliament. + Naturally enough, incidents like these occurred here and there, but they were few and inconsiderable when contrasted with the sufierings which were endured nearer to the scenes of conflict. They were only * Perfect Biurnall, No. 48. f Historical Collections, VI., 61. I Mercurius Husticus, Ed. 1685, p. 45. 1645.] TRB CIVIL WARS. 49 incidental consequences of a war which, as civil wars always do, roused the bitterest passions of the human breast. Having regard, then, to all the local circumstances of the case, to the fact that there was a strong set of the stream in the Parliamentary direction ; that Bunyan was a mere lad of sixteen ; that he listened at Elstow church to the preaching of Christopher Hall, a vicar who so far went with the prevail- ing current as to preach against Sunday sports, and to christen his son with Cromweirs name of Oliver ; it seems scarcely likely that he would think his way to independent conclusions so wide apart from those of his neighbours, break through all the carefully kept lines of the Parliamentary forces west of the county, and join the Royalist army with the King. It is much more probable that as soon as he had reached the regulation age of sixteen he was included in one of the levies made by Parliament upon the villages of Bedfordshire, and without any choice of his own in the matter, was sent with others of his neighbours to the important garrison of Newport, " geome- trically situate,'' as a Parliamentary ordinance describes it, between the associated counties on the east and the Royalist district to the west. The same ordinance of Parliament, which constituted New- port garrison, provided also "that the county of Bedford, within fourteen days, shall send into it 225 able and armed men for souldiers." And if we come to the few months during which alone Bunyan could have served, we find, from entries in the governor's letter-book, that these and subsequent orders were complied with. Bunyan was sixteen, and therefore old enough to serve in the early part of November, 1644. On the 28th of that month the governor writes : "Wee have now about 800 in the Towne, and noe pay .... Bedfordshire men make a fay re show, and tell them strange things." Again, on the 17th January, there is the following letter to the committee at Bedford from Richard Cockayne : " Since my last unto you yesterday I have received order from Sir S. Luke concerning the sending out of the 300 men, which he desires may be done with all expedition that may be." Once more, under date April 13th, the governor, writing to the Earl of Northumber- land, says, " Bedfordshire has sent in some prest men ; " and E 50 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. hi. we happen to know, from other letters, that two of these " prest men " came, the one from "Wootton and the other from Gotten End, villages close to Elstow. It is not unlikely, therefore, under these circumstances, that Bunyan also was one of the men drafted to Newport for service. He says, "When I was a soldier I with others were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it." This would very well accord with the experience of the men under Sir Samuel Luke, who were often called out for service elsewhere. The day before the Christmas of 1643, for example, a large siege party left the garrison, and stormed and took Grafton House, in Northamptonshire. The following month Captain Abercrombie set out from Newport with a hundred men of the new levies and took Hillesdon House ; later in the same year Captain Ennis, sent out by Sir S. Luke, surprised and captured a party of Royalists near Bicester. In 1645 also, at the time Bunyan was in the army. Captain Bladwell received orders to march, with three hundred men of the Newport garrison, to Aylesbury, and thence to Farnham, there to await farther instructions. Probably as one of some such party Bunyan had been sent on some military operation on the occasion when, as he tells us, " once I fell into a creek of the sea, and hardly escaped drowning.'^ The nearest creek of the sea to a midland county like Bedfordshire was a long way off, and it is probable that this deliverance from the sea, like that from the musket- ball, was one of the experiences of his soldier life. It has been frequently stated, though Bunyan himself does not mention the fact, that he was at the siege of Leicester in the summer of 1645. The statement rests upon the authority of two writers, each of whom published a short sketch of Bun- yan's life after his death. The first of these is simply worth- less. It is entitled *' An Account of the Life and Actions of Mr. John Bunyan, from his Cradle to his Grave.'* It was first printed at the end of the spurious third part of the Pilgrim's Progress, and is evidently a mere piece of literary hack-work, made up from the Grace Abounding. "Where the writer is original he is manifestly wrong. He tells us, for example, that at the siege of Leicester the town was " vigorously de- fended by the King's forces against the Parliamentarians," the 1645.] THE CIVIL WARS. 61 case, of course, being precisely the reverse. Then, by way of explaining how Bunyan came to be in the army, he says, *' When the unnatural civil war came on, finding little or nothing to do to support himself and small family y he, as many thousands did, betook himself to arms." As at the time of the siege of Leicester Bunyan was sixteen years and seven months old, it is clear the writer knew very little either of Bunyan's " small family " or of Bunyan himself. Eventually this sketch was, for some reason, withdrawn, and another account of Bun- yan's life, to which reference has been made, took its place in 1700. It professes to be written by a personal friend. The writer says that Bunyan, * being a soldier in the Parliament's army at the siege of Leicester in 1645, he was drawn out to stand centinel, but another soldier voluntarily desiring to go in his room," was shot dead. He has evidently confused two separate stories, as he might easily do, writing some fifty years after the event. Bunyan himself says, " When I was a soldier I with others were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it ; but when I was just ready to go one of the company desired to go in my room, to which, when I had consented, he took my place ; and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel he was shot into the head with a musket-bullet, and died." Either, therefore, this account does not refer to the siege of Leicester, or Bunyan was not at that siege, for, wherever it was, he distinctly says that, though he was drawn to go, he did not actually go, because another man went in his place. Yet, though this personal friend of Bunyan's has thus confused two separate things, he was evidently quite sure in his own mind that Bunyan was at the siege of Leicester, and probably had it from his own lips. It is certain that there were soldiers from IN'ewport garrison present at that siege, defending the town against the assault of the Royal forces. We know that these men from Newport, under Major Ennis, were placed in charge of that portion of the fortifications of Leicester called *' the Newarke" or "new worke," on the south side of the town, near an old stone wall, against which Prince Rupert had directed the King's artillery to be planted. In this wall a large breach had been made, but was repaired and defended by Ennis, who twice drove back the enemy with great loss. For three hours after e2 52 JOHN BUNYAJSr. [chap. m. the rest of the town was taken Major Ennis and his JSTewport men maintained their position, and obtained good terms of capitulation, when they were surrounded, and had at last to surrender. The stirring scenes and incidents of these soldier days, the many-phased aspects of life and contrasts of character presented on every side, would, of course, do much to widen the mind of the impressible lad from Elstow. It must have been a curious school of experience to be among these fighting, preaching, praying majors and captains, who could one day storm and take Grafton or Hillesdon House, and the next preach to edification in New- port church. Eagerly taking in this new world, all so vivid to him, he marches, it may be, with Captain Bladwell to Ayles- bury and the Surrey Downs, or stands with the men in Lath- bury Field to hear Captain Hobson preach, or gives military salute in Newport garrison to Sir Samuel Luke, or along with Major Ennis fights amidst the rain of death on Leicester walls. The memories of these days came back in after years, making more intensely real to him the fight with Apollj^on, the expe- dition of Greatheart, or the winning back of Mansoul for Emmanuel, Bunyan's Cottage at Elstow. {His place of abode after his Marriage, 1649 1655.) IV. SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. On the disbanding of the army in 1646, Bunyan returned to his tinkering life at Elstow, and two or three years later took to himself a wife. Who she was and where he found her we have now no means of knowing. There is no entry of the marriage iu the register at Elstow, which may arise from the fact that he found her at a distance, or that they were, accord- ing to the custom of the Commonwealth, married before some justice of the peace whose registers are lost. Apparently she was an orphan and a native of some other place than Elstow, for she used to talk to Bunyan about her father as though they were unknown to each other, telling him " what a godly man 54 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. ly. he was and how he would reprove and correct vice both in his House and amongst his neighbours ; what a strict and holy life he lived in his Days both in Word and Deed." We know not who she was, we do not even know her Christian name, but we do know that her advent brought to Bunj^an what he had not had since his mother's death, a real home brightened by the presence of love. It was not brightened by much else. " This woman and I," says he, " came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both.'* It was an unpromising beginning, but many that are more promising turn out worse. It may be that where there are health and hope and honest industry, mutual love and trust can better supply the lack of dish and spoon than an abundance of dishes and spoons can supply the lack of love. Though the young wife brought no dower of wealth to her husband, she brought to him that which wealth cannot buy saintly memories of a godly home and trained instincts for good ; and, as we have seen, she would beguile their summer evening walks and their fireside winter talks by memories of the good man, her father, who had gone to heaven. She brought with her also two books which had been his, the one, " The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," by Arthur Dent, the parish minister of Shoebury in Essex, and the other, " The Practice of Piety," by Lewis Bayly, a bishop of Bangor, in King James' time. "In these," says Bunyan, "I should sometimes read with her, wherein I also found some things that were somewhat pleasing to me." These two books which he thus thought worthy of special mention had, both of them, an unusual run of popularity. *' The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven " * was a little square, vellum-bound, black-letter book of about four hundred pages, which was first published in 1601, and in 1637 had reached the twenty-fourth edition. It is in the form of a * The Plaine MarCs Fath-way to Heauen : Wherin euery man may cleerly see whether he shall he saued or damned. Set foorth Dialogue- wise, for the hatter understanding of the simple. By Arthur Dent, Preacher of the word of God at Soiith Shoohury in Essex. The 1 1th impression. London : Printed by Mel- chisedeck Bradwood for Edw. Bishop, and are to hee soldo in Paul's Churchyard, at the syne of the Brasen Serpent. 1609. 1650.] SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. 55 dialogue between four persons, who appear as a divine, a plain honest man, an ignorant man, and a caviller, and who having a long May day on their hands, repair by common consent " to yonder oke-tree, where there is a goodly arbour and handsome seats, and where they may all sit in the shadow and conferre of heavenly matters." The book seems to have filtered into Bunyan's mind and to have remained with him. In the " Life and Death of Mr. Badman," which he published more than thirty years later, we shall see hereafter the traces of its influ- ence. Dent's book is long, and for the most part wearisomely heavy and theologically narrow, but there are in it racy say- ings and intensely English forms of expression, some of which remind us even of Bunyan himself We come, for instance, upon such proverbial sayings as, " Who is so bold as blind e Baynard?'' " He that never doubted never believed;" ''Soft fire maketh sweet mault ;" "A fool's bolt is soon shot ; " and "Sweet meat will have sour sauce." Speaking of pride, the writer is satirical upon those who spend " a good part of the day in tricking and trimming, pricking and pinning, pranking and pouncing, girding and lacing and braving up themselves in most exquisite manner ; " he likes not " these doubled and redoubled ruffes, these strouting fardingales, long locks, and foretufts ; " and he thinks " it was never a good world since starching and steeling, buskes and whalebones, supporters and rebatoes, full moones and hobby horses came into use." " Even plain country folk," he says, " will flaunt it like courtiers, and the old proverb is verified, * Everie Jacke w411 be a gentleman, and Joane is as good as my lady.' " The divine of the dialogue, speaking of oaths, objects even to men swearing by Cocke or Pie, or Mousefoot; whereupon the caviller says, "It seemeth you are an Anabaptist, you condemn all swearing;" from which we may infer that the Baptists of England were specially conspic- uous for their simple yea, yea, and nay, nay, even before George Fox and the Quakers were born. It is further said that drunkenness is the " metropolitane Citie of all the Province of vices," and that the many "lazy lozels and luskish youths which doe nothing all the day long," forget that we must one day " give an account of our Baily-wicke." At the close of the dialogue the ignorant man of the party comes under deep con- 56 JOHN BJJNYAN. [chap. iv. corn about his moral state; whereupon the caviller asks him to go home with him and he can give him " a speedie remedie, for he has many pleasant and merry bookes, * Bevis of South- ampton/ * Ellen of Rummin ; ' * The Merrie Jest of the Frier and the Boy ; ' ' The Pleasant Story of Clem of the Clough/ * Adam Bell and William of Cloudesley ; ' ' The odde tale of William, Richard, and Humfrey ; ' * The Pretie Conceit of John Splinter's last Will and Testament : ' which all are excellent and singular bookes against heart qualmes." The other book in which Bunyan read with his wife, was *'The Practice of Piety." It was first published in 1612 by Lewis Bayly of Evesham, afterwards bishop of Bangor, and by 1673 had been printed above fifty times in English, besides many times in Welsh, French, Hungarian, Polish, and other Conti- nental languages. Notwithstanding its distinctly ecclesiastical tone, the book was a great favourite with the Puritans. The mother of Symon Patrick was brought up by its rules, Joseph Alleine received from it consolation on his deathbed, and James Frazer, of Brea, the minister of Culross, one of the Scottish confessors, tells us that he came to a Christian life after read- ing it one Sunday afternoon. So wide was its renown that it became the subject of satire on the part of men not much given to reading it. It was to be found on the desk of the Justice of the Peace along with his Dalton's " Duties of a Magistrate." Peter Hansted, in 1644, satirizes a * Justice Parler on whose cushion ly A Dalton and ' Practice of Piety.' " The book was introduced into Congreve's " Old Bachelor," and in 1788, Peter Pindar makes George III. say to Mr. Whitbread, who was the member for Bedford at that time "I'm told that you send Bibles to your votes, Pray'r books instead of cash to buy them coats Bunyans and ' Practices of Piety.' " Reading the book now, it is difficult to account for its wide- spread popularity. Men used to read it, however, because in the language of the times it struck home at the central verities of the reKgious life on which aU Christians are agreed ; it was, as the 1650.] SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. 57 writer said, " an endeavour to extract out of the chaos of end- less controversies the old practice of true piety which flourished before these controversies were hatched." It was a book to be read when men read books, not many but much.* The effect of these books upon Bunyan's mind and heart was pleasing pleasing only as yet not convincing, not striking right home and giving him that despairing sense of sin through which he more than most men had to make his way to the better life. There was no cry from the depths as yet, but there were good desires coming up, and under their influence he went " to church twice a day, and that with the foremost." When there the natural reverence of his soul took forms not always elevating. The vine without trellis work to lift it up trails on the ground, and Bunyan's deeply religious nature not yet having found its healthful nutriment in eternal verities, expended itself in superstitious awe over sacred places and ecclesiastical persons. The high place in Elstow Church seemed to his vivid imagination like a piece of heaven brought down to earth, and the vicar, as he stood in the rude pulpit of former days, like a being of some supernal sphere ; even that not very sublime personage the parish clerk, came in for a share of ador- ation. " So overcome was I with the spirit of superstition that I adored, and that with great devotion, even all things (both the high place, priest, clerk, vestment-service, and what else) belonging to the church." It has been assumed that the form of service at Elstow Church during the Commonwealth was Presbyterian, but this description of the worship that Bunyan attended there between 1649 and 1652, does not seem much like it. A Presbyterianism that had " high place, priest, clerk, vestment-service, and what else," must have had services strangely like those of Episcopacy. Moreover, Christopher Hall, the vicar, was certainly an Episcopalian, for he entered upon the living in 1639, when Archbishop Laud was supreme ; he remained there all through the Commonwealth period, and he certainly continued vicar of Elstow for four years after the Restoration, and therefore two years after the Act of Unifor- * Practice of Piety, with biographical preface by Grace AVebster, London, 1842. Bishop Lewis Bayly and his Practice of Piety, by J. E. Bailey, F.S.A., " Manchester Quarterly Keview," July, 1883. 58 JOHN BUNYAK [chap. iv. mity, signing the returns from the register in 1664. Either, therefore, Bunyan's spiritual guide in his Elstow days was a wonderfully pliant man, a veritable '' vicar of Bray," or, there was considerably more tolerance for Nonconforming Episco- palians under Cromwell than there was for Nonconforming Quakers and Presbyterians under Charles. The services and officials familiar to Bunyan in Elstow Church, and his Sunday tipcat experiences on Elstow Green would seem to suggest that neither the law of 1645 against liturgical forms, nor the law of 1644 against Sunday sports was very rigidly enforced in the remoter rural parishes of the land. The four years of Bunyan's life which followed his marriage were those in which he went through the intense spiritual experiences he has described for us as with pen of fire in the " Grace Abounding." It was an awful time, yet it had its com- pensations. It gave him that mighty hold of men's hearts which more than most writers and preachers he has always had. He knew it himself. " For this reason I lay so long at Sinai, to see the fire and the cloud and the darkness, that I might fear the Lord all the days of my life upon earth, and tell of His wondrous works to my children." As he entered into the struggle of those fearful years he was overwhelmed with a sense of his own evil ; he paints his moral condition in the darkest colours. Many writers think the colours too dark, the shadows more sombre than the truth required. Lord Macaulay, for example, may be taken as the type of a class who have undertaken to vindicate Bunyan's character against the charges of Bunyan himself. We must not, he thinks, lay too much stress on the man's description of himself. He merely caught up the language of his time, and the worst that can be laid to his charge is, " that he had a great liking for some diversions quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived and for whom he had a great respect." Indeed, some men would not have hesitated to commend rather than condemn. "A rector of the school of Laud would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model." * We cannot read these easy-going utter- ances alongside Bunyan's burning words without feeling that * Macaulay's Biographies. John Bunyan, p. 30. 1650.] SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. 59 these two men had gone through incommensurahle experiences. Probably Macaulay's natural temperament and his career of unruffled prosperity led him to take a somewhat complacent view both of this world and the next. Bunyan, on the con- trary, had battled with the storm. He had looked down shudderingly into yawning depths and yearningly up to lofty heights, which when a man has once seen he can be complacent no more. There are those who would probably consider any passionate agitation concerning the spiritual world as somewhat unreal and affected. They may be estimable neighbours and useful citizens, but, as Froude says of them, '' be their talents what they may, they could not write a * Pilgrim's Progress,' or ever reach the delectable mountains, or even be conscious that such mountains exist." There are two ways of looking at sin ; an easy-going way and a way that is more earnest. The more earnest way, which was Bunyan's, is that which looks upon sin in the light of the supreme anguish endured on Calvary for its expiation, and which sees in the sinner one of whom it is always true that he knows not what he does. This intenser way may seem to some to be overstrained, but it is in harmony with the whole literature of penitence from the Book of Psalms down to the latest utterance of the Christian ages ; it is the outcome of a living spirit which cannot be destroyed without destroying also all that is noblest in aspiration and most glorious in achievement in the moral history of the race. In estimating the sinfulness of Bunyan's early life it must be remembered that sin may take a spiritual as well as a sensual form. The sins for which he reproached himself were not specially those of the flesh. He was never a drunkard, and in after years, when the occasion called for it, he passionately denied that he had ever been unchaste. But a man's weak- ness is often the reaction from his strength ; and he who of all men afterwards sought for reality and stood with worshipping awe before the sanctities of spiritual things was guilty of violent outrage against reverence and truth. The marvellous force which in after years displayed itself in vividness of spiritual vision and burning power of expression ran riot in weird blasphemies which made even blasphemers tremble. 60 JOEJ}^ BUNYAJS". [chap. iv. " Even as a child/' lie says, *' I had few equals in cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God." The wickedness begun thus early lasted long. He was a grown man, when one who was " herself a loose and ungodly wretch," and therefore not over-nice, " protested that it made her tremble to hear him, that he was the ungodliest fellow for swearing ever she heard in all her life, and that it was enough to spoil all the youth in the whole town." Sins like these will be variously estimated. There is no ready gauge of outward consequence to measure their inward evil as in the case of drunkenness and impurity. Yet spiritual sins may be even more deadly than sensual in their moral recoil, laying waste the powers of the soul. It is not improbable that the spiritual condition induced by persistent lying and profane blasphemy had much to do with the prolonged and terrible struggles of Bunyan's after years. The intensity of these struggles was, of course, largely due to the intensity of tl^e spiritual nature in which they took place. As the storm sweeps most wildly and makes its dole- fullest moaning through the tops of the tallest trees, the great- ness of the man contributed to the greatness of his sufferings. They were intensified also by his ignorance and lack of spiri- tual guidance. Many of the shapes with which he wrestled in deepest anguish were the phantoms of his own heated imagina- tion, the result of his own misinterpretation of the book of God. The battle which he was fighting was, of course, no phantom ; it is the one battle of the ages for all who in a world of sin are seeking for the life of God ; yet it might have been shortened and simplified by enlightened friendly aid. But it was Bun- yan's misfortune to be surrounded by men who, either from want of sympathy or lack of light, could help him very little till his fiercest battle was fought out and ended. As in the case of his great contemporary, George Fox, men " spake not to his condition," but, and it was perhaps well, he was all the more thrown back upon God, and in the end, as always, God was faithful to His own. In following this story of spiritual struggle as he has recorded it for us with his own burning pen, we seem at first to be look- ing upon shifting masses of cloud driven now east, now west, 1650.] SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. 61 by opposing winds, mere movement without progress. But closer observation reveals a spiritual order under the seeming spiritual chaos. The swimmer battling for the shore is driven back again and again till our very hearts ache for him, but he gains a little each time, and reaches land at last. There are some natures to whom the great spiritual world of the unseen is always present as the background of life. It was so with Shakespeare. It was so also with Bunyan, though in a different way. Even when he was a child, the wrong thino-s of the daj'- were fol- lowed by the remorse, and fears, and dread dreams of the night. But the real struggle began later, when after his marriage and the reading of his wife's books, he was seen "going to church twice a day, and that with the foremost." He had not done this long before there arose a fight with his conscience about Sunday sports, in the course of which there came the weird voices that seemed to be shouted into his ear on Elstow Green. Somewhere on the sward round the broken pillar of the old Market Cross he was one Sunday in the midst of a game of cat. He had struck it one blow from the hole and was about to strike it the second time, when, as he says, "A voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said. Wilt thou 62 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap, i v. leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell ? At this I was put to an exceeding maze. Wherefore, leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to heaven, and was as if I had with the eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as being very hotly dis- pleased with me." Thus conscience-stricken he afterwards made a desperate fling to be rid of conscience altogether, only to find, as other men have, that its grip was tighter than he thought. Then he swung round again and fell to some outward reformation, gave up swearing, took to read- ing the historical parts of the Bible, and set about keeping the commandments, which he flattered himself he did pretty well; so that in those days he thought he pleased God as well as any man in England. His neighbours were struck with the change, and wondered much to see Mad Tom of Bethlem become a sober man. Their exclamations of surprise flattered his vanity, he became proud of his godliness, and laid himself out for more and more of this kind of incense for about a twelvemonth or more. When a man comes under the dominion of conscience, and is a stranger to love, conscience is apt to become somewhat of a tyrant ; a false standard is set up, and things right enough in themselves seem to become wrong to the man. Bunyan had hitherto taken pleasure in the somewhat laborious diversion of ringing the bells in the tower of Elstow Church. He began to think this was wrong, one does not quite see why ; still, having this misgiving about it, he gave up his bell-ringing. But not the love of it. This seems to have lingered with him through life. Years afterwards, when he brings his pilgrims near to the Celestial City, he makes all the bells therein give them a peal of welcome, and when they pass within, leaving him without, he heard in his dream that " all the bells in the city rang again for joy.'' One can easily understand that in these Elstow days it was with many a pang and with reluctant step he turned from the belfry. He would come and lean against the old doorway, and look longingly while some neighbour pulled the bell-rope which he half felt to be his. Then he was afraid even to do this. How if the bells should fall ? How if even the steeple itself should come down ? About that very 1650.] SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. 63 time a flash of lightning had struck one of the village churches o-f Bedfordshire, and "passing through the porch into the belfry, tripped up his heels that was tolling the bell, and struck him stark dead." What if this should happen again ? So the bell- ringing went. Then there was the dancing with his neigh- Belfby Doob, Elstow. hours in the old Moot Hall, or on the village green. If it was hard to give up the ringing, it was harder still to give up the dancing. It was a full year before he could quite leave that, but at last he did, and then thought he to himself, " God can- not choose but be pleased with me now.'* But if it is distressinsr to feel discontent with one's self, it is 64 JO HJSr B UNYAJSr. [CHAP. iv. dangerous to feel content ; aspiration and not self-complacency is the law of healthful life ; and He who was leading Bunyan by a way that he knew not, mercifully shook him out of this unwholesome self-satisfaction. It came about in this way. Going one day into Bedford, to work at his trade as a tinker, he saw, as everybody has heard, three or four poor women holding godly talk together as they sat at a door in the sun- shine. He had by this time become somewhat of a brisk talker on religion himself; he therefore drew near and listened. He soon found, however, that their talk was above him, and he had to remain silent. They moved in a world of which he knew nothing ; they spoke of a holy discontent with themselves and of a new birth from above ; they told how God had visited their souls with His love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and strengthened ; they " spake as if joy did make them speak,'* with such " pleasantness of Scripture language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said," that they seemed to him to have found a new world to which he was altogether a stranger. He was humbled yet fascinated, drawn again and again into their company, and the more he went the more did he question his condition, the more there came over him a " great softness and tenderness of Heart, and a great Bending in his mind " towards godly meditation. So free from self- consciousness is true life that he in whom faith was beginning to work mightily, now began to wonder whether he had any faith at all. How can he find out ? Shall he put it to the test of miracle on the rain pools in the Elstow road ? If they should dry up at his word then there would be no doubt. But if not ! would not that be proof positive that he "had no Faith but was a castaway and lost?" It is a great risk to run, too great, "nay, thought I, if it be so, I will never try yet, but will stay a little longer." Then blossomed into shape his wonderful power of dreaming waking dreams. There were these good people at Bedford sitting on the sunny side of a mountain, while he was separated from them by a wall all about, and shivering in the cold. Round and round that wall he goes to see if there be no open- ing, be it ever so narrow, and at last he finds one. But it is 1650-52.] SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. 65 narrow, indeed so narrow that none can get through but those who are in downright earnest, and who leave the wicked world behind them. There is just room for body and soul, but not for body and soul and sin. It must be a strait gate through which a man gets rid of self; but by dint of sidling and striving he first gets in his head, then his shoulders, and then his whole body, at which he is exceeding glad, for now too he is in the sunshine and is comforted. But as yet this is only in a dream, and dreams tarry not. Before long he is out of sun- shine into storm again. This man who was an elect soul, if ever there was one elect through sufiering to help other souls begins to torment himself as to whether he is elect or not. Perhaps he is not. How if the day of grace be past and gone, and he has overstood the time of mercy ? Oh, would that he had turned sooner ! would he had turned seven years ago I Words cannot tell with what longings and breakings of soul he cried to heaven to call him, little thinking that the longings and breakings themselves were the very call for which he cried. Gold 1 could this blessing be gotten for gold, what would he have not given for it ? For this the whole world would have gone ten thousand times over, if he had only had it. Mean- time that very world went on its old way. How strange that it should ; how strange that people should go hunting after perishable things with eternal things before them, that even Christian people should make so much of mere outward losses ! If his soul were only right with God, and he could but be sure that it was, he should count himself rich with nothing but bread and water. Strange alternations of gloom and glory came over him. Sometimes his soul was visited with such visions of light and hope that he could have spoken of God's love and mercy to the very crows on the ploughed land before him. He thought then that he should never forget that joy even in forty years' time. But alas ! in less than forty days the vision was all faded and gone. Worse than gone, for there now came down upon him a great storm of conflict which handled him twenty times worse than before. Star after star died out of the firmament of his hope ; darkness seized upon him, and to his amazement and confusion a whole flood of doubts and blasphemies poured in F 66 JOKN BUJSTTAJSr. [chap. iv. upon his spirit. They seemed to be coming in from morning to night, and to be carrying him away as with a mighty whirl- wind. Yet even in that dark time of despair there was this redeem- ing gleam of hope, that while dreadful things were pouring into his soul, there was something within him that refused to tolerate them. If he is borne along, he goes struggling and crying for deliverance, like the child some gipsy is carrying off by force and fraud from friend and country. A man is safe so long as the citadel of his own will is kept. There is the turn - ing point of destiny the centre of lifers mystery. And all was right there. Floods of temptation came dashing against the outworks, but within he had, he says, great yearnings after God, and heart-affecting apprehensions of Him and His truth. So that he really was making way, getting out of himself more and on to the solid ground of divine fact. There began to come to him such words as these, '* If God be for us, who can be against us ? " and these, '' He hath made peace by the blood of His cross." Fortunately too for him, some time before this the good people at Bedford had taken him to hear Mr. Gifford, their minister. Under his teaching how was his soul led on from truth to truth by the Spirit of Truth ! Even from the birth and cradle of the Son of God to His ascension and second com- ing, he was " orderly led " into the gospel story ; and so vivid was everything that it seemed to him as if he had actually seen Christ born and grow up, seen Him walk through the world from the cradle to the cross, had actually leaped at the grave's mouth for joy that Christ was risen again, had actually, in spirit, seen Him at the right hand of the Father, and that on his behalf. At this stage of his experience also it was his hap to light upon an old book, a book so old that it was ready to fall to pieces in his hand if he did but turn it over. Yet never was gold more precious. For he found his own condition so largely and profoundly handled in it, as if it had been written out of his own heart. It was a copy of the ' Commentary on the Galatians," by Martin Luther, perhaps the one man of all the centuries most fitted to walk with Bunyan along that part of his journey which lay through the valley of the shadow of death. 1650-52.] SPIRITUAL CONFLICT. 67 Bunyan, like his own Christian, " thought he heard the voice of a man as going before him/' Grateful indeed was he for that. " This, methinks, I must let fall before all men. I do prefer this book of Martin Luther (excepting the Holy Bible) before all books that ever I have seen as most fit for a wounded conscience.'* One temptation loomed large in his experience. He was urged, as he thought, by the tempter " to sell and part with the blessed Christ, to exchange Him for the things of this life for anything." Day and night almost for a whole year it was with him, so that he could not so much as " stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast his eye to look on anything," without the whisper coming into his soul, " Sell Christ for this, or sell Christ for that ; sell Him sell Him." His mental agitation would show itself in bodily movement. He would thrust forth his hands or elbows in deprecation, and as fast as the destroyer said, " Sell Him," he would say back to him, " I will not, I will not ; no, not for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds." So he held out and held on, but at length one morning, as he lay in his bed under unusually fierce temptation, he felt the thought pass through his mind, " ' Let Him go if He will ! ' Now was the battle won and down fell I, as a bird that is shot from the top of a tree, into great guilt and fearful despair." The great guilt was of course a great delusion, the mere outcome of a vivid brain giving concrete shape to its own creations. But though the sin of which he accused himself was imaginary, very far from imaginary was the inward misery it occasioned. No sin, thought he, was like his ; it was point-blank against his Saviour. With all his picturesque power he puts his case in imagery the most varied. He is, he says, like a broken vessel, driven as with the winds; as those that jostle against the rocks, more broken, scattered, and rent ; he is as a house whose foundations are destroyed ; as a drowning child in a mill-pond ; or he seems to himself to be standing at the gate of the City of Refuge, trembling for deliverance and with the avenger of blood close at his heels. He remembered long years afterwards how at this dark time he went one day into Bedford and, spent and weary, sat down upon a settle in the street. It seemed to him then as if the f2 68- JOHN B UNYAN. [chap. iy. very sun in the heavens did grudge to give him light, as if the A'^ery stones in the street and the tiles upon the houses did bend themselves against him. " how happy now was every crea- ture over I was ! for they stood and kept fast their station, but I was gone and lost." The worst, however, was now past, and daylight was near. As if in echo to his own self-reproaches a voice seemed to say to him, " This sin is not unto death.'* He wondered at the fitness and the unexpectedness of the sentence thus shot into his soul. The " power and sweetness and light and glory that came with it also were marvellous." Then again one night as he retired to rest there came to him the quieting assurance : " I have loved thee with an everlasting love," and next morning it was still fresh upon his soul. Again when doubts came as to whether the blood of Christ was sufficient to save him, there came also the words, " He is able." "Me- thought this word ahle was spoke loud unto me it showed a great word, it seemed to be writ in great letters." One day as he was passing into the field, still with some fears in his heart, suddenly this sentence fell into his soul, " ' Thy righteousness is in heaven ; ' and methought withal I saw with the eye of my soul, Jesus Christ at God's right hand. I saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse ; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Now did my chains fall from my legs indeed ; I was loosed from my afilictions and irons. Oh, methought, Christ ! Christ ! there was nothing but Christ that was before my eyes ! I could look from myself to Him and should reckon that all those graces of God that now were green on me, were yet but like those crack-groats and fourpence halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunks at home ! Oh, I saw my gold was in my trunk at home ! In Christ my Lord and Saviour ! Now Christ was all ; all my wisdom, all my righteousness, all my sanctification, and all my redemption ! " THE CHURCH AT BEDFORD. The three or four godly women whom Bunyan heard talking together in the summer sunshine about their experiences of a diviner life, introduced him, he tells us, to their minister, Mr. Gifford, and to the little Christian community of which they were members. This simple brotherhood of believers is interest- ing to us for its own sake, as furnishing one of the phases of religious life during the English Commonwealth ; and interesting also for the sake of Bunyan himself, who for the next five-and- thirty years of his life was closely associated with its history, first as a private member, and afterwards as its pastor. It may be worth while, therefore, to go back over the years between 1640 and 1650, and see how this Church at Bedford came to be founded, and how it took the shape it did. The Long Parliament having, in the early part of 1641, received the address of the two thousand petitioners from Bed- fordshire, of which we have spoken, and similar addresses from other parts of the country, set forth in earnest on the work of ecclesiastical reform. Commissioners were ordered to be sent into the various counties for *'the defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or tables turned altar- wise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments, and relics of idolatry out of all churches and chapels." This raid upon what was regarded as popery in disguise, though determined on then, was not actually carried out till a year or two later, and was simply intended as preliminary to a still more search- ing reform of the entire constitution of the Church of England. As to what that reform should be, the House was by no means as yet agreed. Some were for retaining Episcopacy, first purifying it of its evils. Others, known as the Root-and-Branch party, 70 JORN BUNTAN. [chap. y. were for its abolition, for the annihilation of all dignities in the Church above that of simple presbyter or parish minister, and for the appropriation of ecclesiastical revenues to the uses of the State. Without having arrived at any very definite or open agreement on the matter, this party more and more aimed at the establishment in England of a Church after the Scottish Presbyterian fashion. Increasingly it began to be felt and to be said that the Churches of England and Scotland were *' embarked in the same bottom, to sink or swim together." In February, 1642, a Bill was passed for the exclusion of bishops from Parliament ; and in June of the following year an ordinance was enacted and entered on the Journals of the House of Lords, to the effect that as "the present Church government by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors, commis- saries, deans and chapters, archdeacons, and other ecclesiastical officers depending on the hierarchy is evil, and justly offensive and burdensome to the kingdom . . . the same shall be taken away, and such government settled in the Church as may be agreeable to God's Holy Word." By the same ordinance, the ecclesiastical committee known as the Westminster Assembly of Divines was appointed to confer upon such matters affecting the liturgy, discipline, and government of the Church as Par- liament should propose. This body consisted of one hundred and forty-nine persons named in the ordinance, one hundred and nineteen of these being divines fixed upon a year before. To this assembly Thomas Dillingham, the minister of Deane, and Oliver Bowles, the rector of Sutton, were called from Bedfordshire. Dillingham was too old and infirm to take his seat, and Bowles died the following year. In 1643 the Committees for dealing with Scandalous Minis- ters were followed by a Committee for Plundered Ministers these being men who, under Laud or by the Royalist army, had been ejected from their livings. As the plundered were in many cases put in the place of the scandalous, the latter com- mittee dealt with both. There was a central committee in London, and smaller committees in the counties, the latter subordinate to the former, and both to Parliament ; and under these the work of judging ministers who were scandalous in life, or erroneous in doctrine, who had deserted their cures. 1644-47.] THE CHURCH AT BEDFORD. 71 or assisted the forces raised against Parliament, proceeded in the most orderly and business-like fashion. How far the clergy of Bedfordshire were affected by these proceedings may be very fairly gathered from the minutes of the central committee in London which have been preserved. Walker, writing of the sufferings of the clergy during the Civil Wars, when speaking of this county is both inaccurate and incomplete. He mentions the following ministers of parishes as being sequestered from their livings : In the toivn of Bedford : Giles Thome of St. Mary's and St. Cuth- bert's ; John Bradshaw of St. Paul's ; and Theodore Crowley of St. John's. In the county of Bedford : Dr. Pocklington of Yelden ; Robert Payne of Little Barford ; Edward Martin of Houghton Conquest ; Francis Walsall of Sandy ; the Vicar of Chalgrave, name unknown ; John Warren of Melchbourne ; and John Gwin of Cople.* In three cases out of these ten Walker is certainly wrong. He relates a pathetic story about John Bradshaw, to the effect that, in consequence of his sequestration, his wife and four small children were left at his death in such extreme straits as to be under the necessity of begging from a public charity. But, first. State Papers already quoted (p. 14) show that Bradshaw was persecuted, not by Parliament for being a Royalist, but by Laud for being a Puritan. The court before which he had to appear was that Court of High Commission which Parliament abolished and of which Laud was the controller and instigator. Then, too, the story of the destitution of his widow and children as arising from his sequestration is seen to be apocryphal from the follow- ing entry in the register of his own parish church : " John Bradshaw did again become vicar of St. Paul's parish May, 1666, and continued till 1670;" that is, of course, till ten years after the Restoration. Walker is incorrect also about Dr. Francis Walsall, the rector of Sandy. It is certain that Walsall went so far in his Royalist sympathies as to be with the king's army at Oxford ; it is equally certain that he was not removed from his living. The register and transcript registers of the parish show beyond doubt that he was * Sufferings of the Clergy^ by John "Walker, 1714, Bedfordshire, pp. 189, 214, 303, 326, 374, 390, 417. 72 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. v. rector of Sandy all tlirougli the Commonwealtli period, and at the Restoration sent, in his own handwriting, the return of the previous ten years to the Registry of the Archdeaconry. And as for John Gwin, the vicar of Cople, whom Walker classes among his clerical sufferers, we know that he was set aside from his living by his Majesty's Commission for causes ecclesiastical before the Civil War began, therefore before the Committee for Scandalous Ministers was even thought of. And if the miserable story of debauchery told about him in a pamphlet of 1641 be true, or at all near the truth, the pity is, not that he was set aside from the ministry, but that he was not set aside sooner. But if Walker is thus inaccurate on the one hand, on the other hand he is incomplete ; and there were sequestrations among the Bedfordshire clergy of which he seems not to have heard. The case of Hugh Eeeve, vicar of Ampthill, who was arrested by the sergeant- at- arms for popish practices as early as 1641, has been already mentioned. There were also seques- tered John Goodwin of Leighton Buzzard, the vicar of Luton ; Edward Marten of Houghton Conquest ; Dr. Archer of Mepershall ; Mr. Carr, the curate of Millbrook ; Edward Savage of Tilbrook ; John Bird of Hawnes ; William Parreter of Carlton ; Francis Kines of Tilsworth ; Anthony Waters and Oliver Thorowgood, the vicar and curate of Bromham; William Ramsay of Flitton ; William Witton of Tingrith ; William Lake of Little Staughton ; Nathaniel Hill of Renhold ; Giles Kinge of Tempsford; and George Speeres of Potton.* In addition to these cases. Dr. Hammond, and Gilbert Sheldon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, were detained in a kind of honourable captivity at Clapham, near Bedford, in the house of Sir Philip Warwick, Dr. Hammond often preaching in the parish church, " the poverty of the place protecting the minister in his reading the Common Prayer." The sequestrations which took effect among the parish clergy of Bedfordshire, as elsewhere, were issued of course on various grounds. Some incumbents were set aside simply because they * Minutes of Committee of Flundered Ministers: Addl. MSS. 15669, 15670, 15671. These minutes are in three vols. MS., and were purchased from the executors of the Dean of Lincoln for the British Museum in 1846 1644-47.] TEE CEURCS AT BEDFORD. 73 were pluralists, John Bird, the vicar of Ilawnes, for example, being proceeded against for holding also the rectory of Bayleham, county Suffolk. Others were removed for graver reasons. Old Thomas Fuller, no prejudiced witness, says plainly that not a few of the clergy first ejected were really men of scandalous lives. JohnAilmer, the vicar of Melchbourne, is described as "a comon frequenter of Ale-houses, and tipler there, as well on the Lord's dayes as on other dayes, and a common drunkard." Oliver Thorowgood is spoken of as a scandalous curate ; and similar charges were made against "William Ilamsey, the vicar of Flitton-cum-Silsoe. Edward Marten of Houghton Conquest, like Pocklington and Eeeve, was charged with papistical inno- vations, openly praying for those in purgatory, and bowing five times before the altar each time he went up and came down the steps. He admitted also, before the committee, that he had lent money to the king for purposes of war; and his parishioners charged him with not having preached more than five times all the five years he had been parson of Houghton. Others of the clergy came under the strong hand of Parliament for assailing its authority and actively joining the Eoyalists. Nathaniel Hill of Renhold was sequestered for long absence and being in the king's army. It was charged against Savage of Tilbrook, that he had expressed " great malignancy against Parliament, calling them rogues and rascals, and inveighing against them with fearful curses ; " while Witton of Tingrith "published the king's proclamation from his pulpit," at the same time "proclaiming the Earl of Essex and all his adherents tray tors, refusing to publish the declarations of Parliament, and otherwise expressing great malignancy." These clerical partisans of the Royalist cause, who were at no pains to conceal their convictions, suffered of coarse, as men expect to suffer who actively espouse the unsuccessful side in the bitterest of all conflicts, that of civil war. But the Committees for Ministers certainly professed care and leniency in determining who should be set aside. The mere existence of adverse opinions, apart from active hostility, was not sufficient to procure sequestration. William Lindall, for instance, was described by Bunyan in 1660 as that " old enemy to the truth, Dr. Lindall;" yet all through the Com- 74 , JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. v. monwealtli time lie remained vicar of Harlington. Two- thirds of the Episcopal clergy of the county remained un- disturbed in their livings, while in the case of the seques- trated, one- fifth of the income of every ejected minister of a parish church was reserved for the maintenance of his family. In some cases, as in the village of Clapham, the Book of Common Prayer continued to be used in public worship ; and it would seem as if there was some kind of ofiicial position still retained by archdeacons of the Episcopal Church. The follow- ing extract from the parish register of Sundon is interesting as bearing on this point, and as relating to people of whom we shall hear again in the course of this narrative : ** 1653. Wil- liam fi'oster, of Bedford, gent., and Anne Wingate, the daughter of John Wingate, Esq., deceased, of Harlington, gent., were married Septemb. 22 by John [qy. William ?] Lindall, Doctr. of Divinity, by vertue of a license from the Archdeacon." * Perhaps next to Dr. Pocklington, Giles Thorne, Rector of St. Mary's and St. Cuthbert's, in Bedford, was the most con- spicuous sufierer on the Episcopal side. Both these men, as officials of the Commissary's Court, had been prominent in enforcing the exactions made upon the clergy by the king for the purposes of the Scottish expedition, and they had also sup- ported up to the hilt the reactionary policy of Laud. ]N'aturally, therefore, they were marked for reprisals when the fortunes of the king were eclipsed. Thorne was a high-handed ecclesiastic, against whose proceedings there was earnest protest on the part of his parishioners even before the day of the Long Parliament had dawned. There is among the State Papers a petition to Archbishop Laud against him from Thomas and Dinah Margetts, who lived in his parish of St. Mary's, and whom he had harassed and all but ruined in the Commissary's Court and the Court of Arches for saying that " he maintained ill vices or unlawful recreations, as Whitsun ales, maypoles, and dancings." They plead with the Archbishop that they have '*nyne small children and nothing but their daily labour to sustain them, and they humbly beseech His Grrace (of his godly inclinacon to love and peace) to call the said Mr. Thorne before * Bedfordshire Notes and Queries. Exti'acts from the Farish Registers of Sundon, p. 233. 1644-47.] THE CEURCS AT BEDFORD. 75 him." This petition of theirs had annexed to it a petition in support of its prayer from eighty or ninety of the leading inhabitants of the town, including the mayor, in which Thorne was further charged with harassing a gentlewoman of his parish for going to a christening in another parish, and a poor old woman of eighty for " going out of the parish on Saboth dales to take her dynner and supper of her owne children by charity." * All this was before the turn of the tide ; and when the turn had come Thorne was naturally one of the first to feel the change. In the month of August, 1642, articles were lodged against him in the House of Lords, in which he was charged with saying in St. Mary's church, " that Confession to a priest was as ancient as Religion, as the Scriptures, yea, as ancient as God Himselfe " " a high blasphemy," say the petitioners, " and point-blank papistery." With sublime unconsciousness of the reflexive application of his words to himself, he also said in his sermon that, " though delivered by the mouth of Balaam's Asse, and though the minister have as little witt as Balaam's Asse, yet the Word is the Word, and the King's Proclamation is his proclamation, though delivered by the mouth of a Traitor." He was further charged with preaching against Parliament, and in reproof and discouragement of the raising of volunteers for the defence of the kingdom. It was, however, mainly upon political grounds that he was, as already stated, arrested by Lord St. John's troopers as he left the pulpit of St. Cuthbert's church one Sunday evening, and carried prisoner to the Swan. Summoned afterwards to the bar of the House of Lords, he was remanded first to the Fleet and then to Ely House, being detained about five years, and released in 1647. In some few cases the clergy resisted their displacement by means of physical force. Giles King of Tempsford, for example, refused to yield his rectory to his successor, and was summoned for contempt. As he would neither yield nor appear, it was ordered (July 20th, 1647), " that the Serjeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons or his deputie doe bring the said Mr. King in safe custodie before this Committee to answer his said con- State FaperSf Dom.y 1640 (?). Vol. cccclxxiv. 40. 76 JOHN BUNYAN. [chap. v. tempt." George Speeres also, who was succeeded by another Mr. Kinge, "intruded himself into the Yicarage house, being violent upon the said Mr. Kinge, his wife and servant." * When the recalcitrant clergy had been subdued, and the old system of government by bishops set aside, then came the anxious question as to what form the new State Church should take. In London and Lancashire Presbyterianism, duly orga- nized and established, had taken the place of Episcopalianism. It was not altogether a new thing in the country ; for as early as 1572 a Presbytery had been set up at "Wandsworth, in Surrey, and under the direction of the celebrated Thomas Cart- wright, Presbyterianism attained such dimensions that between 1580 and 1590 there were no fewer than five hundred bene- ficed clergy of the Church of England, most of them Cambridge men, who were pledged to the revised form of the AYandsworth Directory of Discipline. The movement was especially strong in the counties of Essex, Cambridge, Northampton, Leicester, Butland and Warwick. " Classes " were held secretly at the Bull, at Northampton, under the presidency of Edward Snape, curate of St. Peter's in that town, and attended by the clergy of Higham Ferrars, Wellingborough, and eight or nine other neighbouring towns. This movement was not without signifi- cance, and though it was put down by Archbishop Whitgift, it still lingered, a silent thought, in the hearts of many all through the reigns of James and Charles. As soon, therefore, as the Long Parliament had dispensed with bishops there was once more a Presbyterian movement in England. For about two years it seemed as if it were about to carry all before it. In 1643 the Solemn League and Covenant, which, by the way, must not be confounded with the Scottish National Covenant of 1638, was ordered to be subscribed and sworn to by the whole English realm. The Houses of Parliament set the example in St. Margaret's Church, and in the country the signing went on for months, the Covenant becoming the watch- word of party and the test paramount of the citizen. In every parish church it was read aloud to the congregation, who were called upon to swear to it with uplifted hands, and afterwards to sign it with name or mark, all refusals being duly reported. * Minutes, vol. iii. 1644.] THE CHURCH AT BEDFORD. 77 Governors of towns and garrisons were required to impose it upon their soldiers. No subject could practise in the courts of law, or become a common council-man, or hold office of trust till he had pledged himself. Copies of the Covenant, having attached to them the names of all parishioners above the age of eighteen, are still to be found among corporation records and in parish archives. In the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, there is a copy which was found a few years ago in the roof of the old rectory of Swyneshed, to the north of Bedfordshire, and bearing the signatures of Thomas Whitehand, the minister, and fifty of his parishioners. He had evidently not liked to destroy it, even after the Restora- tion came in. He had seen Episcopacy displaced by Presby- terianism, and then again Presbyterianism by Episcopacy ; and in this uncertain world who could say what might happen again ? The coil of parchment, therefore, was not shrivelled in flame, but hidden away in the old rectory roof, where it came to light in this generation, bearing the names of the parishioners who had signed it in the summer months of 1644. The following January saw the climax of Presbyterianism in England, for on the 4th of that month an Ordinance of the Commons passed the Lords, abolishing the use of the Prayer Book and adopting the New Westminster Directory, a subse- quent Act of Parliament decreeing that England as well as Scotland should he Presbyterianised. But it is one thing to pass an Act of Parliament and quite another to secure the religious assent of a nation. From various causes the work hung fire. Even in London and Lancashire the system was not organized till the following year, and the rest of the country was less eager still. The Episcopalians were naturally averse, and at the opposite pole of thought were many who were favourable to a Congregational form of polity, and held that the early churches were separate brotherhoods of be- lievers. Ever since the days of Elizabeth there had been voluntary associations based on this principle in Norfolk, Sufiblk, Essex, and London. Some of their leaders perished on the scafibld, but their convictions did not perish with them. The principle they laid down was that " the magistrate is not to meddle with religion or matter of conscience, nor compel 78 JOHN B UNYAN. [chap. y. men to fhis or that form of religion, because Christ is King and Lawgiver of the Church and Conscience." These convictions lived on, obtaining wider lodgment in the hearts of Christian men, and, through the lips of Philip I^ye, the vicar of Kimbolton, and four others, found expression even in the Westminster Assembly itself. Many were beginning to think that the Presbyterianism of that time was not as wide and tolerant as it might be, and that there was little use in merely exchanging one form of yoke for another. These opinions found strong support in Bedfordshire at a very early stage in the national conflict. It so happened that there was in the county at that time, as rector of one of its parishes, a man of considerable intellectual force and strong individuality of character, with whom we shall find Bunyan in close personal relations at a later period, and who did more than most men in furthering these views both in the army and in the nation. This was William Dell, the rector of Yelden. He was a native of Bedfordshire, having been born near Maulden or Westoning, was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and had been episcopally ordained. When Dr. Pocklington was sequestrated in 1642, Dell succeeded him in the rectory of Yelden, and as his parish was near to Melchbourne Park, he was brought into frequent intercourse with the Earl of Bolingbroke, who with the Countess attended his ministry, which they seem greatly to have valued. Through this connection Dell was brought into intimate relation with all the great Commonwealth leaders. In 1645-6 he was chaplain to the army under General Fairfax, and was the person appointed to bring the articles of the sur- render of Oxford to Parliament. In 1649, on the sequestra- tion of Thomas Batcher oft, he was made master of Gonville and Caius College, still retaining his Bedfordshire rectory, and was one of the commissioners sent to attend Charles I. before his execution. His position while with the army gave him great influence and many opportunities of spreading his opinions among the leaders of the time, and his sermons both before the House of Commons and in the country were matter of frequent debate in Parliament and of entries in the Journals of both Houses. He strenuously resisted the establishment of any national form of religion. He held strong views on the 1645-50.] TEE CHURCH AT BEDFORD. 79 spirituality of the Church of Christ, and was averse to all stereotyped uniformity in its organization and worship. ''In nature," says he, *'is no external uniformity; variety of form in the world is the beauty of the world. Even in earthly governments there is no sameness : York is not governed as Hull, nor Hull as Halifax. In Godmanchester the youngest son inherits, and across the bridge at Huntingdon the eldest. And what tyranny it would be to compel a man every day in the week to a uniformity of life, using the same positions, speaking the same words, or sitting, standing, or walking at the same set times. But how much more evil is it to insist upon uniformity in the life of a Christian, and of the Churches of Christ, taking away all freedom of the Spirit of God, who, being one with God, works in the freedom of God." *' God hath not set up any company of men or synod in the world to shine to a whole nation so that all people shall be constrained to follow their judgment and to walk in their light. If two or three Christians in the country, being met in the name of Christ, have Christ Himself with His Word and Spirit among them, they need not ride many miles to London to know what to do." " What wild and woful work do men make when they wiU have the Church of God thus and thus, and get the power of the magistrate to back theirs, as if the new heavens wherein the Lord will dwell must be the work of their own fingers, or as if the New Jerusalem must of necessity come out of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster." '' It is a great dishonour done to God and His Word when we can- not trust His Word to do its work, but must be caUing in the power of the world. But if the power of the Word will not reform men, aU the power of the world will never do it. Luther said well when he said, ' I will preach, and teach, and write, but I will constrain nobody.' " Dell plainly said he did not see what was gained by knocking down an establishment of Episcopacy only to set up an establishment of Presbyterianism. "For what," asks he, "is a National Assembly but an Archbishop multi- plied, and what a Provincial Assembly but a Bishop multi- plied ? and a Classical but a Dean and Archdeacon multiplied ? Thus, the former lords being removed, the Church would swarm with other lords, and Christ's own kingdom would never be suffered to return to Christ's own lordship and dominion." In the true Church of Christ, Dell goes on to say, there are no 80 JOKN B TINY AN. [chap v. distinctions nor differences of persons, no clergy or laity, all are as Peter says, " A chosen generation, a royal priesthood/' Presbyters and bishops differ only in office, not in character, from the rest of the Church, and that office they receive from the Church, as an alderman or common council-man differs from the rest of the citizens, not in themselves, but only by the city's choice. " And all Churches are equal as well as all Christians, all being sisters of one mother, beams of one sun, branches of one vine, streams of one fountain, members of one body, branches of one golden candlestick, and so equal in all things." * Such were the opinions of William Dell of Yelden, opinions which greatly influenced the course of Free Church life in the neighbouring town of Bedford. There would seem to have been a separate congregation founded about 1643, which, how- ever, appears to have been of no long continuance. All that we know of it is that its minister was Benjamin Coxe. He was the son of a bishop, was himself a graduate of one of the Universities, and a man of learning. Formerly a beneficed clergyman in the county of Devon, he had been a zealous up- holder of Laud's opinions. But in the conflicts of the time a change came over his views ; he was led to embrace Congrega- tional principles, and published a little quarto volume setting forth "the unlawfulness of giving the name of church to a house made of lime and stone, and the name of churches to parochiall congregations." How he found his way into Bedford- shire we have no means of knowing. He is described as " for some time minister of Bedford," and as being " an antient minister and of good reputation both for piety and learning." Richard Baxter tells us that in 1643 Coxe was sent for from Bedford to conduct a controversy in Coventry, which ended in his being sent to Coventry gaol. He appears not to have returned to Bedford, for three years later we find him in prison in London, for distributing to the members of Parliament a Confession of the Faith held by himself and his brethren on the questions of the time. Seven years after the brief ministry of Benjamin Coxe had ended, a Free Church was founded in Bedford in 1650, which * Select Works of William Dell, London, 1773. 1648.] THE CHURCH AT BEDFORD. 81 was destined to be more permanent, to last, indeed, down to our own times. This was the Church with which for five-and- thirty years Bunyan's religious life was so closely identified. The records of this church have fortunately been preserved, presenting a vivid picture of the reality and earnestness of the majority of those who first composed its fellowship. The earliest of these records, those embracing the years between 1656 and 1672, appear to have been copied from an earlier book by a professional scrivener, presenting an unusually beau- tiful example of the writing of the period. Prefixed to the minutes of the acts of the church there is a short historical sketch, commencing thus : *' In this Towne of Bedford and the places adjacent, there hath of a long time bene persons godly, who in former times (even while they remained without all forme and order as to visible Church Communion according to y Testament of Christ) were very zealous according to their light, not onely to edify themselves but also to propagate the Gospell and help it forward, both by purse and pre- sence, keeping alwayes a door open and a table furnished, and free for all such ministers and Christians who shewed their zeale for and love to the Gospell of Christ. Among these that reverend man, Mr. John Grew, was chief, also Mr. John Eston, sen., and brother Anthony Harrington, with others ; Men that in those times were enabled of God to adventure farre in shewing their detestation of y^ bishops and their superstitions. But as I saide, these persons with many more neither were, nor yet desired to be, embodied into fellowship according to y order of the Gospell ; onely they had in some measure separated themselves from the prelaticall superstitions, and had agreed to search after the non-conforming men, such as in those dayes did beare the name of Puritanes. But when it pleased God (who had before appointed that holy ordinance of the Com- munion of Saintes) to shew His mercy to this people, He placed Mr. John GifPord among them for their minister in Christ Jesus, and to be their pastor and bishop, and the steward of God to com- municate unto them the knowledge of His will in the holy misteryes of the Gospell." This man who is thus introduced to us as the founder of the Bedford Church, and who left upon it so powerfully the impress of his own individuality, was as little likely at one time to do this kind of work as was Saul of Tarsus to become 82 JOHN BUN Y AN. [chap. v. Paul the Apostle. He was a Kentish man, and at the outbreak of the Civil War a Royalist and a major in the King's army. In 1648 there was made in that county one more desperate struggle to win back the country for the king. The rising was begun by the Kentish people themselves, but the Earl of Norwich came down to place himself at their head, and was j oined by the well-known Bedfordshire Royalist, Lord Cleve- land, of Toddington. Canterbury, Dover, Sandwich, and the castles of Walmer and Deal had been already won back from the Parliament when, towards the end of May, some ten or twelve thousand of the men of Kent were marching for London, with drums and banners. At Rochester they were met by the Parliamentary forces under the Lord General Fairfax ; but it was at Maidstone there came on the fiercest of the fight. The struggle first began about a mile from the town, at seven o'clock in the evening, the forces of Fairfax driving the Royalists from thicket and fence, from hedge to hedge, till the town was reached. There, too, the battle was waged as hotly as ever. Street by street, turning by turning, house by house, Maidstone was fought for to the death. That Thursday night was long remembered as one of the most awful times in the whole history of the war. All the time the fight was raging the rain came down in torrents while eight pieces of cannon, ming- ling with the storm, were fired at close range upon the mass of struggling men fighting with each other, in the streets, for life and death. It was not till between twelve and one o'clock in the morning that victory declared for Fairfax, the insurgents leaving 300 of their number dead in the streets. In addition to these, 1,400 Royalists surrendered as prisoners, some of them being taken in the early morning as they were hiding in the woods, hop-gardens, and fields round the town. Among these prisoners was John Giffbrd. From the leading part he had taken and the resolute spirit he had shown he was marked out for signal punishment, for while the great body of the prisoners were afterwards released this man and eleven others were adjudged to the gallows.* * Letter from Lord General Fairfax to Speaker Lenthall, dated Rochester, June 6th, 1648. Newesfrom Bowe, Rochester, June 4th, 1648. Narrative of the Great Victo'i'y in Kent. London: Robert Ibbitson in Smithfield, 1648. Bloody New es from Kent, June, 1648. King's Famphleis, British Museum. 1649.] TILE CRURCR AT BEDFORD. 83 *'But," continues the Churcli record, " y night before he was to dye, his sister coming to visit him and finding the sentinells that kept the doore asleep, and those also his companions within heavy through drinke, she told him of the doore and the watch that stood before it, and intreated him to take the opportunity to escape and save his life, which also he did and passed through them all, there being, as it were, a deep sleep from the Lord upon them, and made his escape into y field, and, creeping into the bottom of a ditch, lay there about three dayes, till the great search for him was over, and then by the help of his friends he came disguised to London, where he abode not long, but was convayed downe into this country, where he also lay hid from his enemyes in y houses of certaine great persons who were of like mind with himseK. And after a while he came to Bedford and there, being utterly a stranger, he professed and practised physicke, but abode still very vile and debauched in life, being a great drinker, gamester, swearer, &c. But in his gaming, so it was that he usually came off by the losse, which would sometimes put him into some dumpish and discon- tented fitts and resolutions to leave y practise : but these resolutions were but like the chaines on the man mentioned in the Grospell which would not hold when the fit to be vile was upon him, where- fore he went on and broke them still. But one night having lost, as I take it, about 15li-, it put him into a rage and he thought many desperate thoughts against Grod. But while he was looking into one of Mr. Bolton's bookes something therein took hold upon him and brought him into a great sense of sin, wherein he continued for y^ space of a moneth or above. But at last God did so plenti- fully discover to him by His word the forgiveness of his sins for the sake of Christ, that (as he hath by severall of the brethren bene heard to say) all his life after, which was about y^ space of five yeares, he lost not the light of Grod's countenance no, not for an houre, save only about two dayes before he dyed." This man, thus brought through strange experiences, no sooner found the new life stirring within him than he sought the companionship of those who were in Christ before him. But, as in the case of the convert more illustrious than he, the brethren were afraid of him and " would not at first believe that he was a disciple." Yet, " being naturally bold," he minded not their shyness but *' would inquire after their meet - ings, and would thrust himself againe and againe into their company both together and apart." Still they held them- g2 84 JOHN BUNTAN. [chap. v. selves aloof; they were doubtful of a convert who "had indeed been a very vile man, who had done wild things in the town of public notoriety, and who often had thought to kill bro : Harrington, meerly from that great antipathy that was in his heart against the people of God and the holynes of the Gospell." '' But so it was that in little time he was much in his heart put upon it to preach, but yet would not without he advised first with the godly ; but they being at a stand in the case he first offered his gift before them in private, and afterwards in an open way before the world ; whose word God so blessed that even at the first he was made through grace a father to some through the Gospell, ffor instance, sister Cooper, a woman whose memory is yet precious among us, was converted by the first sermon he preached in publicke. " Now, having continued preaching awhile and receiving some light in the Congregationall way, after some acquaintance also with other ministers, he attempted to gather into Gospell fellowship the saintes and brethren in and about the towne ; but the more antient professors being used to live, as some other good men of those times, without regard to such separate and close communion, were not at first so ready to fall into that godly order. "Wherefore many dayes were by him and them set apart for prayer to seeke of God light and counsaile therein ; they also con- ferred with members of other societyes ; and at last by the mercy and goodness of God they began to come to some blessed resolution therein. And first they consulted after they had determined to walke together in the fellowship of the Gospell, and so to build an house for the name of our God, who were most expedient to begin to be laide in this building as foundation stones. And at length twelve of the holy brethren and sisters began this holy worke, viz. : Mr. John Grew and his wife, Mr. John Eston, the elder, Anthony Harrington and his wife, Mr. John Giff'ord, sister Coventon, sister Bosworth, sister Munnes, sister fi'enne, and sister Norton, and sister Spencer ; all antient and grave Christians well knowne one to another, sister Norton being the youngest. "The manner of their putting themselves into the state of a Church of Christ was : After much prayer and waiting upon God and consulting one with another by the word, they, upon the day appointed for this solemne worke, being met after prayer and seek- ing God as before with one consent they joyntly first gave them- selves to the Lord and one to another by the will of God. " This done, they with one mouth made choyce of brother Gifford 1650.] THE CHURCH AT BEDFORD. 85 to be their pastor, or Elder, to minister to them the things of the kingdome of Christ, to whom they had given themselves before ; wherefore brother Giiford accepted of the charge and gave himselfe up to the Lord and to His people, to waike with them, watch over them, and dispense the misteryes of the Grospell among them under that consideration by which he was chosen of them. *' Now the principle upon which they thus entered into fellow- ship one with another, and upon which they did afterwards receive those that were added to their body and fellowship, was ffaith in Christ and Holiness of life, without respect to this or that circum- stance or opinion in outward and circumstantiall things. By which meanes grace and faith was incouraged, Love and Amity maintained, disputings and occasion to j anglings and unprofitable questions avoyded, and many that were weake in the faith confirmed in the blessing of eternall life." The Bedford Church thus founded upon this large and catholic basis was apostolic in numbers as well as in simplicity of spirit, consisting at first of twelve believing souls. "We have already met with some of them ; for among these twelve were the three or four poor women whose talk at some door in a Bedford street made a new era in the life of the listening tinker from Elstow. The brethren who were among the " foundation stones " of this new spiritual house were men of character and influence. Gifford, formerly a major, was now practising as a physician in the town, for which he may have been prepared before the wars came on. That there was room just then for a new medical practitioner in Bedford there is the follow- ing entry in the corporation records to show : " Bequest was made by Mr. Dr. Banister, Dr. of Physic, to the Council, for an Act of Ease to be passed for him in regard of his great age and debilitie of bodie." The request was granted, and the doctor freed from all liability to public office or appearance " at anie Councell Court or other Assemblie of this town." There waa, therefore, clearly room for a successor in the healing art, and, qualified or unqualified, John Gifford took the place. Then next we come upon the name of ^' that reverend man, John Grew." He had been mayor of the town in 1646 ; he was again mayor in 1655 ; he was one of the churchwardens of St. Paul's Church in 1635 ; his name appears in the list of Justices of the Peace 86 JOHN BUNT AN. [chap. v. for Michaelmas term 1650 ; and by an order of the Council of State of December 2nd of the same year he was made one of the Commissioners of Militia for the county of Bedford. In his will, executed in 1661, he is described as a gentleman, and he appoints as his executors his " beloved friends Wm. Whit- bread, of Cardington, Esq., and John Whitman, of the same place, yeoman." Anthony Harrington again, though only a tradesman of the town, a cooper, seems to have been a man in fair position and repute, as we judge from the fact that he was one of the Common Councilmen in 1659 ; and his prominent standing among the Christian men of the town had singled him out for the especial hatred of John Gifford in the old bad days of his ungodly life. In the after days of persecution of 1669, when the flame waxed fiercest, Harrington in his old age was forced to flee from his home to a place of hiding. Thither a letter was addressed to him by the Church, in which they speak to him in much afiection and say : " We are com- forted in the remembrance of thee, brother, while we consider that notwithstanding thy naturall infirmity yet thou prizest good conscience above thine own enjoyments ; and since thou couldest not with quiet injoy it at home thou hast left thy concerns in this world (though in much hazzard and danger) that thou mayest keep it abroad." But of the first members of the Church perhaps John Eston was locally the most eminent. He was an elderly man in 1650, when the Church w^as formed ; for, as the register of St. Paul's shows, he had a son born to him in 1611, and his wife, Susanna Eston, had died, leaving him a widower in 1640. He was one of the Estons of Holme, in Bedfordshire, and his grandfather appears in the Visitation of the county in 1566. He himself was thrice mayor of Bedford, being mayor the year the Church was formed ; he was also in the commission of the peace. His son after him was high sheriff of the county and a justice of the peace, both for the county and borough. It will be remem- bered, also, that John Eston was one of the churchwardens of St. Paul's in 1629, and again in 1689, the latter being the year in which Laud's agent in Bedford, Walter Walker, was compelling John Bradshaw, the vicar, and the parishioners of St. Paul's to erect altar-rails and to celebrate the communion ICol.] TJTE CHURCH AT BEDFORD. 87 kneeling, a mode which they regarded as superstitious and papistical. Two of these early members of the Bedford Church seem to have striven for that Puritan simplicity in the council chamber of the town, which they preferred in their religion, as the following entry in the corporation records remains to show : "At a common council held in the Guildhall Chamber by Robert Bell, mayor, on Monday, the 15th day of March, 1651, Mr. Francis Banister, Doctor of Physic, Mr. John Eston the elder, Mr. John Grew, and Mr. John Hancock, Aldermen, appeared at this Councill without their Gownes, contrary to the ordinance made in that behalf, wherefore each of them hath forfeited, according to that ordinance, two shillings." The following Monday Banister and Eston again appeared without their gowns, and in September it is noted that Alder- men Eston and Grew repeated the offence. Their persistence was successful in the end, and in 1652 it was " ordained that an Act of the 16th August, 1650, enjoining appearance at the town assemblies in a certain garb shall (as touching appearance in gownes at the Common Council) be henceforth voyd, and all forfeitures in that respect be discharged.'' * These particulars^ trifling enough in themselves, have yet a sort of interest for us as descriptive of the men with whom Bunyan came into closest relations of brotherhood in the Christian Church at a formative period of his life. The records of this Church were not formally kept till 1656, or six years after its formation. We have no means now of knowing where was their place of meeting during the first three years of their church-life. It appears, however, from the town records and the register of St, John's church that in 1653 the little community, while continuing in all other respects to conduct its ajffairs on Congregational principles, became part of the State Church of the Commonwealth. The fact is interest- ing as an illustration of the comprehensive character of the Cromwellian settlement of religion ; and it came about in the following way. In 1280 one Robert Parys, or De Parys, founded on the south side of the town of Bedford what was called the Hospital * Minutes of Bedford Corporation. 88 JOHN B UNYAN. [chap. v. of St. Julin tlie Baptist. It was provided by the foundation that one master and one chaplain should *' pray for the souls of the said Eobert and Henry Saynt John and John his son, his nephews, and of all those who should give lands for the Hos- pitall," and that relief should be given to "such poor folk as chance to be dwellers in the town of Bedford." Even before the Reformation the church of the hospital had become the church of the parish, and the master its rector, the parish being but small, and containing, in 1546, no more than " 87 houselinge people." At what time the right of presenta- tion to the living was vested in the mayor and corporation of the town is uncertain ; but it had been in their hands for centuries when, in 1653, Theodore Crowley, the then master and rector, for some cause unknown to us, was sequestered. It so happened that at that time Puritan and Parliamentarian influence was predominant in the council, and the corporation presented John Gifford to the living, in the place of Theodore Crowley. To us, whose conception of a State Church has grown up after the establishment for more than two centuries of one exclu- sive form of ecclesiastical polity, the Episcopal, it is strange to see a Congregational community in possession of the parish church, and its pastor installed there as rector. This could not, of course, have happened at any other time than between the years 1653 and 1660. During these seven years Crom- well's Broad Church was really broad broader than anything ever known in this country either before or since, for it recog- nised and comprised the various forms of religious conviction to be found in the nation. Abstractly considered, of course, there is no substantial reason why only one form of Church polity, and that confessedly not the earliest, should have place in a national settlement. There are grave objections to any State system of religion ; but if there is to be one at all, Cromwell certainly hit upon the fairest that has yet been tried. Even that was not altogether fair no State Church can keep quite clear of injustice for Roman Catholics were disabled from voting and disqualified for election, and all such infidels and heretics as attacked the Christian faith were deprived of the electoral franchise. But 1653.] THE CRURCH AT BEDFORD. 89 taking into account simply the various sections of Protestant Christians in the country, there was literally no Act of Uni- formity. The rights of patrons were not to be interfered with by the Commissioners. These remained as before, and we find, for example in Bedfordshire, Thomas Power admitted to the vicarage of Southill, upon the presentation of Thomas Snagg, Esq., patron ; John Wigfall, and subsequently James Mabbison, to the vicarage of E,oxton, upon the certificate of the patrons, the Master, Fellows, and Scholars of Trinity College, Cambridge ; and John Power, to the vicarage of Thurleigh, on the presentation of the patron, Oliver, Earl of' Bolingbroke, just as in the old Episcopal days.* A certificate was required from some responsible persons to whom the presented minister was known, simply testifying that he was a worthy man and a fit person to take the cure of souls. This was all. No articles of faith were prescribed, no subscription was enforced, and no mention made by name either of Episcopacy, Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, or of the question of baptism. If the Commissioners conserved the rights of patrons, they were not limited by any other statutory conditions, and were guided by no creed, statute, canon, or established usage. Those appointed for Bedfordshire in 1657 were called the *' Commissioners for the publique fiaith/' and included the two leading members of the Bedford Church. The entire list for the county was as follows : John Hervy, John Cockayne of Cardington ; Pichard Wagstafie of Ravensden ; Samuel Bedford of Henlow ; Edward Cater of Kempston ; and John Grew and John Eston, described as aldermen of Bed- ford. It may be noted by the way that the day when they were appointed by the council of the Commonwealth was the day also when Pichard Cromwell emerged into public life. At the same meeting at Whitehall, " the Lord President reports his Highness* consent to the Order that Lord Pichard Crom- well be one of his Highness' Counsell. Ordered that a Letter be written to y Lord Pichard Cromwell to attend his High- ness and y Counsell in order thereunto.'* t Taking the country through, the commission for the different * Lambeth Jf