John Bunyan, the author of the book which has probably passed through
more editions, had a greater number of readers, and been translated into
more languages than any other book in the English tongue, was born in the
parish of Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in the latter part of the year 1628,
and was baptized in the parish church of the village on the last day of
November of that year.
The year of John Bunyan's birth was a momentous one both for the nation
and for the Church of England. Charles I., by the extorted assent to the
Petition of Right, had begun reluctantly to strip himself of the
irresponsible authority he had claimed, and had taken the first step in
the struggle between King and Parliament which ended in the House of
Commons seating itself in the place of the Sovereign. Wentworth (better
known as Lord Strafford) had finally left the Commons, baffled in his
nobly-conceived but vain hope of reconciling the monarch and his people,
and having accepted a peerage and the promise of the Presidency of the
Council of the North, was foreshadowing his policy of "Thorough," which
was destined to bring both his own head and that of his weak master to
the block. The Remonstrance of Parliament against the toleration of
Roman Catholics and the growth of Arminianism, had been presented to the
indignant king, who, wilfully blinded, had replied to it by the promotion
to high and lucrative posts in the Church of the very men against whom it
was chiefly directed. The most outrageous upholders of the royal
prerogative and the irresponsible power of the sovereign, Montagu and
Mainwaring, had been presented, the one to the see of Chichester, the
other--the impeached and condemned of the Commons--to the rich living
Montagu's consecration had vacated. Montaigne, the licenser of
Mainwaring's incriminated sermon, was raised to the Archbishopric of
York, while Neile and Laud, who were openly named in the Remonstrance as
the "troublers of the English Israel," were rewarded respectively with
the rich see of Durham and the important and deeply-dyed Puritan diocese
of London. Charles was steadily sowing the wind, and destined to reap
the whirlwind which was to sweep him from his throne, and involve the
monarchy and the Church in the same overthrow. Three months before
Bunyan's birth Buckingham, on the eve of his departure for the
beleaguered and famine-stricken city of Rochelle, sanguinely hoping to
conclude a peace with the French king beneath its walls, had been struck
down by the knife of a fanatic, to the undisguised joy of the majority of
the nation, bequeathing a legacy of failure and disgrace in the fall of
the Protestant stronghold on which the eyes of Europe had been so long
anxiously fixed.
The year was closing gloomily, with ominous forecasts of the coming
hurricane, when the babe who was destined to leave so imperishable a name
in English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottage in an
obscure Bedfordshire village. His father, Thomas Bunyan, though styling
himself in his will by the more dignified title of "brazier," was more
properly what is known as a "tinker"; "a mender of pots and kettles,"
according to Bunyan's contemporary biographer, Charles Doe. He was not,
however, a mere tramp or vagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually
are still, much less a disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare's
Christopher Sly, but a man with a recognized calling, having a settled
home and an acknowledged position in the village community of Elstow. The
family was of long standing there, but had for some generations been
going down in the world. Bunyan's grandfather, Thomas Bunyan, as we
learn from his still extant will, carried on the occupation of a "petty
chapman," or small retail dealer, in his own freehold cottage, which he
bequeathed, "with its appurtenances," to his second wife, Ann, to
descend, after her death, to her stepson, his namesake, Thomas, and her
own son Edward, in equal shares. This cottage, which was probably John
Bunyan's birthplace, persistent tradition, confirmed by the testimony of
local names, warrants us in placing near the hamlet of Harrowden, a mile
to the east of the village of Elstow, at a place long called "Bunyan's
End," where two fields are still called by the name of "Bunyans" and
"Further Bunyans." This small freehold appears to have been all that
remained, at the death of John Bunyan's grandfather, of a property once
considerable enough to have given the name of its possessor to the whole
locality.
The family of Buingnon, Bunyun, Buniun, Boynon, Bonyon, or Binyan (the
name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways, of which
the now-established form, Bunyan, is almost the least frequent) is one
that had established itself in Bedfordshire from very early times. The
first place in connection with which the name appears is Pulloxhill,
about nine miles from Elstow. In 1199, the year of King John's
accession, the Bunyans had approached still nearer to that parish. One
William Bunion held land at Wilstead, not more than a mile off. In 1327,
the first year of Edward III., one of the same name, probably his
descendant, William Boynon, is found actually living at Harrowden, close
to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan's birthplace,
and was the owner of property there. We have no further notices of the
Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century. We then find them greatly
fallen. Their ancestral property seems little by little to have passed
into other hands, until in 1542 nothing was left but "a messuage and
pightell {1} with the appurtenances, and nine acres of land." This small
residue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have been still further
diminished by sale. The field already referred to, known as "Bonyon's
End," was sold by "Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow, labourer," son of William
Bonyon, the said Thomas and his wife being the keepers of a small
roadside inn, at which their overcharges for their home-baked bread and
home-brewed beer were continually bringing them into trouble with the
petty local courts of the day. Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan's father, was
born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February 24, 1603,
exactly a month before the great queen passed away. The mother of the
immortal Dreamer was one Margaret Bentley, who, like her husband, was a
native of Elstow and only a few months his junior. The details of her
mother's will, which is still extant, drawn up by the vicar of Elstow,
prove that, like her husband, she did not, in the words of Bunyan's
latest and most complete biographer, the Rev. Dr. Brown, "come of the
very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet
decent and worthy in their ways." John Bunyan's mother was his father's
second wife. The Bunyans were given to marrying early, and speedily
consoled themselves on the loss of one wife with the companionship of a
successor. Bunyan's grandmother cannot have died before February 24,
1603, the date of his father's baptism. But before the year was out his
grandfather had married again. His father, too, had not completed his
twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, January 10,
1623. She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving children, and
before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May,
he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley. At the end of
seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within two
months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a
third wife. Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when
he married. We have no particulars of the death of his first wife. But
he had been married two years to his noble-minded second wife at the time
of the assizes in 1661, and the ages of his children by his first wife
would indicate that no long interval elapsed between his being left a
widower and his second marriage.
Elstow, which, as the birthplace of the author of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," has gained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet little village,
which, though not much more than a mile from the populous and busy town
of Bedford, yet, lying aside from the main stream of modern life,
preserves its old-world look to an unusual degree. Its name in its
original form of "Helen-stow," or "Ellen-stow," the _stow_ or stockaded
place of St. Helena, is derived from a Benedictine nunnery founded in
1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, the traitorous wife of
the judicially murdered Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, in honour of the
mother of the Emperor Constantine. The parish church, so intimately
connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment of the church of
the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or "steeple-house," built to
contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of
the conventual church. Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow.
The old half-timbered cottages with overhanging storeys, peaked dormers,
and gabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, must be much
what they were in Bunyan's days. A village street, with detached
cottages standing in gardens gay with the homely flowers John Bunyan knew
and loved, leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in
the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at
the upper end of the old "Moot Hall," a quaint brick and timber building,
with a projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic
architecture of the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten-
Hall of the adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor
when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses--"the scene," writes Dr. Brown
"of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of
village life." The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little
altered from the time when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of
the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it
so hard to give up, and in "tip-cat," and the other innocent games which
his diseased conscience afterwards regarded as "ungodly practices." One
may almost see the hole from which he was going to strike his "cat" that
memorable Sunday afternoon when he silenced the inward voice which
rebuked him for his sins, and "returned desperately to his sport again."
On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the church, a
fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapel of the nunnery curtailed
at both ends, of Norman and Early English date, which, with its detached
bell tower, was the scene of some of the fierce spiritual conflicts so
vividly depicted by Bunyan in his "Grace Abounding." On entering every
object speaks of Bunyan. The pulpit--if it has survived the recent
restoration--is the same from which Christopher Hall, the then "Parson"
of Elstow, preached the sermon which first awoke his sleeping conscience.
The font is that in which he was baptized, as were also his father and
mother and remoter progenitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly-
loved blind child, on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth,
on April 14, 1654. An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of
thousands of visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the
tinker of Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy
when he "went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost
counting all things holy that were therein contained." The five bells
which hang in the belfry are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted,
the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was used to ring. The
rough flagged floor, "all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of
generations of ringers," remains undisturbed. One cannot see the door,
set in its solid masonry, without recalling the figure of Bunyan standing
in it, after conscience, "beginning to be tender," told him that "such
practice was but vain," but yet unable to deny himself the pleasure of
seeing others ring, hoping that, "if a bell should fall," he could "slip
out" safely "behind the thick walls," and so "be preserved
notwithstanding." Behind the church, on the south side, stand some
picturesque ivy-clad remains of the once stately mansion of the
Hillersdons, erected on the site of the nunnery buildings in the early
part of the seventeenth century, with a porch attributed to Inigo Jones,
which may have given Bunyan the first idea of "the very stately Palace,
the name of which was Beautiful."
The cottage where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in the fields
at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the knowledge of its
site has passed away. That in which he lived for six years (1649-1655)
after his first marriage, and where his children were born, is still
standing in the village street, but modern reparations have robbed it of
all interest.
From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed the
earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the
subject of our biography himself. The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy
descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which
has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other
side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless. Even if
Bunyan's inquiry of his father "whether the family was of Israelitish
descent or no," which has been so strangely pressed into the service of
the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the matter, the
decided negative with which his question was met--"he told me, 'No, we
were not'"--would, one would have thought, have settled the point. But
some fictions die hard. However low the family had sunk, so that in his
own words, "his father's house was of that rank that is meanest and most
despised of all the families in the land," "of a low and inconsiderable
generation," the name, as we have seen, was one of long standing in
Bunyan's native county, and had once taken far higher rank in it. And
his parents, though poor, were evidently worthy people, of good repute
among their village neighbours. Bunyan seems to be describing his own
father and his wandering life when he speaks of "an honest poor labouring
man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the world to get his bread in,
and was very careful to maintain his family." He and his wife were also
careful with a higher care that their children should be properly
educated. "Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my
parents," writes Bunyan, "it pleased God to put it into their hearts to
put me to school, to learn both to read and write." If we accept the
evidence of the "Scriptural Poems," published for the first time twelve
years after his death, the genuineness of which, though questioned by Dr.
Brown, there seems no sufficient reason to doubt, the little education he
had was "gained in a grammar school." This would have been that founded
by Sir William Harpur in Queen Mary's reign in the neighbouring town of
Bedford. Thither we may picture the little lad trudging day by day along
the mile and a half of footpath and road from his father's cottage by the
brookside, often, no doubt, wet and miry enough, not, as he says, to "go
to school to Aristotle or Plato," but to be taught "according to the rate
of other poor men's children." The Bedford schoolmaster about this time,
William Barnes by name, was a negligent sot, charged with "night-walking"
and haunting "taverns and alehouses," and other evil practices, as well
as with treating the poor boys "when present" with a cruelty which must
have made them wish that his absences, long as they were, had been more
protracted. Whether this man was his master or no, it was little that
Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses with shame he soon
lost "almost utterly." He was before long called home to help his father
at the Harrowden forge, where he says he was "brought up in a very mean
condition among a company of poor countrymen." Here, with but little to
elevate or refine his character, the boy contracted many bad habits, and
grew up what Coleridge somewhat too strongly calls "a bitter blackguard."
According to his own remorseful confession, he was "filled with all
unrighteousness," having "from a child" in his "tender years," "but few
equals both for cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of
God." Sins of this kind he declares became "a second nature to him;" he
"delighted in all transgression against the law of God," and as he
advanced in his teens he became a "notorious sinbreeder," the "very
ringleader," he says, of the village lads "in all manner of vice and
ungodliness." But the unsparing condemnation passed by Bunyan, after his
conversion, on his former self, must not mislead us into supposing him
ever, either as boy or man, to have lived a vicious life. "The
wickedness of the tinker," writes Southey, "has been greatly overrated,
and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to
pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved." The justice
of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge. "Bunyan,"
he says, "was never in our received sense of the word 'wicked.' He was
chaste, sober, and honest." He hints at youthful escapades, such,
perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older, poaching, and the
like, which might have brought him under "the stroke of the laws," and
put him to "open shame before the face of the world." But he confesses
to no crime or profligate habit. We have no reason to suppose that he
was ever drunk, and we have his own most solemn declaration that he was
never guilty of an act of unchastity. "In our days," to quote Mr.
Froude, "a rough tinker who could say as much for himself after he had
grown to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint. If in
Bedford and the neighbourhood there was no young man more vicious than
Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenth century
must have been higher than believers in progress will be pleased to
allow." How then, it may be asked, are we to explain the passionate
language in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, which would hardly
seem exaggerated in the mouth of the most profligate and licentious? We
are confident that Bunyan meant what he said. So intensely honest a
nature could not allow his words to go beyond his convictions. When he
speaks of "letting loose the reins to his lusts," and sinning "with the
greatest delight and ease," we know that however exaggerated they may
appear to us, his expressions did not seem to him overstrained. Dr.
Johnson marvelled that St. Paul could call himself "the chief of
sinners," and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly. But a highly-
strung spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called
into exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different
estimate of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral world, in
general. It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others,
as sins against infinite love--a love unto death--and in the light of the
sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while
it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned. The sinfulness of
sin--more especially their own sin--is the intensest of all possible
realities to them. No language is too strong to describe it. We may not
unreasonably ask whether this estimate, however exaggerated it may appear
to those who are strangers to these spiritual experiences, is altogether
a mistaken one?
The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan. While still a
child "but nine or ten years old," he tells us he was racked with
convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears. He was scared with
"fearful dreams," and "dreadful visions," and haunted in his sleep with
"apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits" coming to carry him away,
which made his bed a place of terrors. The thought of the Day of
Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over
his mind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble. But
though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they lasted,
they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased "as if
they had never been," and he gave himself up without restraint to the
youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature made him ever the
ringleader. The "thoughts of religion" became very grievous to him. He
could not endure even to see others read pious books; "it would be as a
prison to me." The awful realities of eternity which had once been so
crushing to his spirit were "both out of sight and mind." He said to
God, "depart from me." According to the later morbid estimate which
stigmatized as sinful what were little more than the wild acts of a
roystering dare-devil young fellow, full of animal spirits and with an
unusually active imagination, he "could sin with the greatest delight and
ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of his companions." But that the
sense of religion was not wholly dead in him even then, and that while
discarding its restraints he had an inward reverence for it, is shown by
the horror he experienced if those who had a reputation for godliness
dishonoured their profession. "Once," he says, "when I was at the height
of my vanity, hearing one to swear who was reckoned for a religious man,
it had so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart to ache."
This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providential
escapes from accidents which threatened his life--"judgments mixed with
mercy" he terms them,--which made him feel that he was not utterly
forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford
river"--the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds
having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the
Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the
Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, in his wild contempt of
danger, he tore out, while his companions looked on with admiration, what
he mistakenly supposed to be an adder's sting.
These providential deliverances bring us to that incident in his brief
career as a soldier which his anonymous biographer tells us "made so deep
an impression upon him that he would never mention it, which he often
did, without thanksgiving to God." But for this occurrence, indeed, we
should have probably never known that he had ever served in the army at
all. The story is best told in his own provokingly brief words--"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 consented, he took my place, and coming
to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket
bullet and died." Here, as is so often the case in Bunyan's
autobiography, we have reason to lament the complete absence of details.
This is characteristic of the man. The religious import of the
occurrences he records constituted their only value in his eyes; their
temporal setting, which imparts their chief interest to us, was of no
account to him. He gives us not the slightest clue to the name of the
besieged place, or even to the side on which he was engaged. The date of
the event is left equally vague. The last point however we are able to
determine with something like accuracy. November, 1644, was the earliest
period at which Bunyan could have entered the army, for it was not till
then that he reached the regulation age of sixteen. Domestic
circumstances had then recently occurred which may have tended to
estrange him from his home, and turn his thoughts to a military life. In
the previous June his mother had died, her death being followed within a
month by that of his sister Margaret. Before another month was out, his
father, as we have already said, had married again, and whether the new
wife had proved the proverbial _injusta noverca_ or not, his home must
have been sufficiently altered by the double, if we may not say triple,
calamity, to account for his leaving the dull monotony of his native
village for the more stirring career of a soldier. Which of the two
causes then distracting the nation claimed his adherence, Royalist or
Parliamentarian, can never be determined. As Mr. Froude writes, "He does
not tell us himself. His friends in after life did not care to ask him
or he to inform them, or else they thought the matter of too small
importance to be worth mentioning with exactness." The only evidence is
internal, and the deductions from it vary with the estimate of the
counter-balancing probabilities taken by Bunyan's various biographers.
Lord Macaulay, whose conclusion is ably, and, we think, convincingly
supported by Dr. Brown, decides in favour of the side of the Parliament.
Mr. Froude, on the other hand, together with the painstaking Mr. Offor,
holds that "probability is on the side of his having been with the
Royalists." Bedfordshire, however, was one of the "Associated Counties"
from which the Parliamentary army drew its main strength, and it was shut
in by a strong line of defence from any combination with the Royalist
army. In 1643 the county had received an order requiring it to furnish
"able and armed men" to the garrison at Newport Pagnel, which was then
the base of operations against the King in that part of England. All
probability therefore points to John Bunyan, the lusty young tinker of
Elstow, the leader in all manly sports and adventurous enterprises among
his mates, and probably caring very little on what side he fought, having
been drafted to Newport to serve under Sir Samuel Luke, of Cople, and
other Parliamentary commanders. The place of the siege he refers to is
equally undeterminable. A tradition current within a few years of
Bunyan's death, which Lord Macaulay rather rashly invests with the
certainty of fact, names Leicester. The only direct evidence for this is
the statement of an anonymous biographer, who professes to have been a
personal friend of Bunyan's, that he was present at the siege of
Leicester, in 1645, as a soldier in the Parliamentary army. This
statement, however, is in direct defiance of Bunyan's own words. For the
one thing certain in the matter is that wherever the siege may have been,
Bunyan was not at it. He tells us plainly that he was "drawn to go," and
that when he was just starting, he gave up his place to a comrade who
went in his room, and was shot through the head. Bunyan's presence at
the siege of Leicester, which has been so often reported that it has
almost been regarded as an historical truth, must therefore take its
place among the baseless creations of a fertile fancy.
Bunyan's military career, wherever passed and under whatever standard,
was very short. The civil war was drawing near the end of its first
stage when he enlisted. He had only been a soldier a few months when the
battle of Naseby, fatal to the royal cause, was fought, June 14, 1645.
Bristol was surrendered by Prince Rupert, Sept. 10th. Three days later
Montrose was totally defeated at Philiphaugh; and after a vain attempt to
relieve Chester, Charles shut himself up in Oxford. The royal garrisons
yielded in quick succession; in 1646 the armies on both sides were
disbanded, and the first act in the great national tragedy having come to
a close, Bunyan returned to Elstow, and resumed his tinker's work at the
paternal forge. His father, old Thomas Bunyan, it may here be mentioned,
lived all through his famous son's twelve years' imprisonment, witnessed
his growing celebrity as a preacher and a writer, and died in the early
part of 1676, just when John Bunyan was passing through his last brief
period of durance, which was to give birth to the work which has made him
immortal.