The Life of John Bunyan | Page 8

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