The Life of John Bunyan [0]
The Life of John Bunyan
by Edmund Venables, M.A.
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 extant will, carried on the occupation
of a "petty chapman," or small retail dealer, in his own freehold
cottage, which he bequeathed,