The Life of John Bunyan | Page 3

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This etext was orginally prepared from the 1888 Walter Scott edition
by David Price, email [email protected], but will not be kept in
an exact match with that edition as we make corrections/emendations.

The Life of John Bunyan

CHAPTER I
.

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