A long-standing tradition has identified Bunyan’s place of imprisonment with a little corporation lock-up-house, some fourteen feet square, picturesquely perched on one of the mid-piers of the many-arched mediÆval bridge which, previously to 1765, spanned the Ouse at Bedford, and as Mr. Froude has said, has “furnished a subject for pictures,” both of pen and pencil, “which if correct would be extremely affecting.” Unfortunately, however, for the lovers of the sensational, these pictures are not “correct,” but are based on a false assumption which grew up out of a desire to heap contumely on Bunyan’s enemies by exaggerating the severity of his protracted, but by no means harsh imprisonment. Being arrested by the warrant of a county magistrate for a county offence, Bunyan’s place of incarceration was naturally the county gaol. There he undoubtedly passed the twelve years of his captivity, and there the royal warrant for his release found him “a prisoner in the common gaol for our county of Bedford.” But though far different from the pictures which writers, desirous of exhibiting the sufferings of the Puritan confessor in the most telling form, have drawn—if not “a damp and dreary cell” into which “a narrow chink admits a few scanty rays of light to render visible the prisoner, pale and emaciated, seated on the humid earth, pursuing his daily task to earn the morsel which prolongs his existence and his confinement together,”—“the common gaol” of Bedford must have been a sufficiently strait and unwholesome abode, especially for one, like the travelling tinker, accustomed to spend the greater part of his days in the open-air in unrestricted freedom. Prisons in those days, and indeed long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places. A century later Howard found Bedford gaol, though better than some, in what would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition. One who visited Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it as “an uncomfortable and close prison.” Bunyan however himself, in the narrative of his imprisonment, makes no complaint of it, nor do we hear of his health having in any way suffered from the conditions of his confinement, as was the case with not a few of his fellow-sufferers for the sake of religion in other English gaols, some of them even unto death. Bad as it must have been to be a prisoner, as far as his own testimony goes, there is no evidence that his imprisonment, though varying in its strictness with his various gaolers, was aggravated by any special severity; and, as Mr. Froude has said, “it is unlikely that at any time he was made to suffer any greater hardships than were absolutely inevitable.”

The arrest of one whose work as a preacher had been a blessing to so many, was not at once tamely acquiesced in by the religious body to which he belonged. A few days after Bunyan’s committal to gaol, some of “the brethren” applied to Mr. Crompton, a young magistrate at Elstow, to bail him out, offering the required security for his appearance at the Quarter Sessions. The magistrate was at first disposed to accept the bail; but being a young man, new in his office, and thinking it possible that there might be more against Bunyan than the “mittimus” expressed, he was afraid of compromising himself by letting him go at large. His refusal, though it sent him back to prison, was received by Bunyan with his usual calm trust in God’s overruling providence. “I was not at all daunted, but rather glad, and saw evidently that the Lord had heard me.” Before he set out for the justice’s house, he tells us he had committed the whole event to God’s ordering, with the prayer that “if he might do more good by being at liberty than in prison,” the bail might be accepted, “but if not, that His will might be done.” In the failure of his friends’ good offices he saw an answer to his prayer, encouraging the hope that the untoward event, which deprived them of his personal ministrations, “might be an awaking to the saints in the country,” and while “the slender answer of the justice,” which sent him back to his prison, stirred something akin to contempt, his soul was full of gladness. “Verily I did meet my God sweetly again, comforting of me, and satisfying of me, that it was His will and mind that I should be there.” The sense that he was being conformed to the image of his great Master was a stay to his soul. “This word,” he continues, “did drop in upon my heart with some life, for he knew that ‘for envy they had delivered him.’”

Seven weeds after his committal, early in January, 1661, the Quarter Sessions came on, and “John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer,” was indicted in the customary form for having “devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear Divine Service,” and as “a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventions, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the kingdom.” The chairman of the bench was the brutal and blustering Sir John Keeling, the prototype of Bunyan’s Lord Hategood in Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair, who afterwards, by his base subserviency to an infamous government, climbed to the Lord Chief Justice’s seat, over the head of Sir Matthew Hale. Keeling had suffered much from the Puritans during the great Rebellion, when, according to Clarendon, he was “always in gaol,” and was by no means disposed to deal leniently with an offender of that persuasion. His brethren of the bench were country gentlemen hating Puritanism from their heart, and eager for retaliation for the wrongs it had wrought them. From such a bench, even if Bunyan had been less uncompromising, no leniency was to be anticipated. But Bunyan’s attitude forbade any leniency. As the law stood he had indisputably broken it, and he expressed his determination, respectfully but firmly, to take the first opportunity of breaking it again. “I told them that if I was let out of prison today I would preach the gospel again to-morrow by the help of God.” We may dislike the tone adopted by the magistrates towards the prisoner; we may condemn it as overbearing and contemptuous; we may smile at Keeling’s expositions of Scripture and his stock arguments against unauthorized prayer and preaching, though we may charitably believe that Bunyan misunderstood him when he makes him say that “the Book of Common Prayer had been ever since the apostles’ time”; we may think that the prisoner, in his “canting pedlar’s French,” as Keeling called it, had the better of his judges in knowledge of the Bible, in Christian charity, as well as in dignity and in common sense, and that they showed their wisdom in silencing him in court—“Let him speak no further,” said one of them, “he will do harm,”—since they could not answer him more convincingly: but his legal offence was clear. He confessed to the indictment, if not in express terms, yet virtually. He and his friends had held “many meetings together, both to pray to God and to exhort one another. I confessed myself guilty no otherwise.” Such meetings were forbidden by the law, which it was the duty of the justices to administer, and they had no choice whether they would convict or no. Perhaps they were not sorry they had no such choice. Bunyan was a most “impracticable” prisoner, and as Mr. Froude says, the “magistrates being but unregenerate mortals may be pardoned if they found him provoking.” The sentence necessarily followed. It was pronounced, not, we are sure reluctantly, by Keeling, in the terms of the Act. “He was to go back to prison for three months. If at three months’ end he still refused to go to church to hear Divine service and leave his preaching, he was to be banished the realm,”—in modern language “transported,” and if “he came back again without special royal license,” he must “stretch by the neck for it.”

“This,” said Keeling, “I tell you plainly.” Bunyan’s reply that “as to that matter he was at a point with the judge,” for “that he would repeat the offence the first time he could,” provoked a rejoinder from one of the bench, and the unseemly wrangling might have been still further prolonged, had it not been stopped by the gaoler, who “pulling him away to be gone,” had him back to prison, where he says, and “blesses the Lord Jesus Christ for it,” his heart was as “sweetly refreshed” in returning to it as it had “been during his examination. So that I find Christ’s words more than bare trifles, where He saith, He will give a mouth and wisdom, even such as all the adversaries shall not gainsay or resist. And that His peace no man can take from us.”

The magistrates, however, though not unnaturally irritated by what seemed to them Bunyan’s unreasonable obstinacy, were not desirous to push matters to extremity. The three months named in his sentence, at the expiration of which he was either to conform or be banished the realm, were fast drawing to an end, without any sign of submission on his part. As a last resort Mr. Cobb, the Clerk of the Peace, was sent to try what calm and friendly reasoning might effect. Cobb, who evidently knew Bunyan personally, did his best, as a kind-hearted, sensible man, to bring him to reason. Cobb did not profess to be “a man that could dispute,” and Bunyan had the better of him in argument. His position, however, was unassailable. The recent insurrection of Venner and his Fifth Monarchy men, he said, had shown the danger to the public peace there was in allowing fanatical gatherings to assemble unchecked. Bunyan, whose loyalty was unquestioned, must acknowledge the prudence of suppressing meetings which, however good their ostensible aim, might issue in nothing less than the ruin of the kingdom and commonwealth. Bunyan had confessed his readiness to obey the apostolic precept by submitting himself to the king as supreme. The king forbade the holding of private meetings, which, under colour of religion, might be prejudicial to the State. Why then did he not submit? This need not hinder him from doing good in a neighbourly way. He might continue to use his gifts and exhort his neighbours in private discourse, provided he did not bring people together in public assemblies. The law did not abridge him of this liberty. Why should he stand so strictly on public meetings? Or why should he not come to church and hear? Was his gift so far above that of others that he could learn of no one? If he could not be persuaded, the judges were resolved to prosecute the law against him. He would be sent away beyond the seas to Spain or Constantinople—either Cobb’s or Bunyan’s colonial geography was rather at fault here—or some other remote part of the world, and what good could he do to his friends then? “Neighbour Bunyan” had better consider these things seriously before the Quarter Session, and be ruled by good advice. The gaoler here put in his word in support of Cobb’s arguments: “Indeed, sir, I hope he will be ruled.” But all Cobb’s friendly reasonings and expostulations were ineffectual to bend Bunyan’s sturdy will. He would yield to no-one in his loyalty to his sovereign, and his readiness to obey the law. But, he said, with a hairsplitting casuistry he would have indignantly condemned in others, the law provided two ways of obeying, “one to obey actively, and if his conscience forbad that, then to obey passively; to lie down and suffer whatever they might do to him.” The Clerk of the Peace saw that it was no use to prolong the argument any further. “At this,” writes Bunyan, “he sat down, and said no more; which, when he had done, I did thank him for his civil and meek discoursing with me; and so we parted: O that we might meet in heaven!”

The Coronation which took place very soon after this interview, April 13, 1661, afforded a prospect of release without unworthy submission. The customary proclamation, which allowed prisoners under sentence for any offence short of felony to sue out a pardon for twelve months from that date, suspended the execution of the sentence of banishment and gave a hope that the prison doors might be opened for him. The local authorities taking no steps to enable him to profit by the royal clemency, by inserting his name in the list of pardonable offenders, his second wife, Elizabeth, travelled up to London,—no slight venture for a young woman not so long raised from the sick bed on which the first news of her husband’s arrest had laid her,—and with dauntless courage made her way to the House of Lords, where she presented her petition to one of the peers, whom she calls Lord Barkwood, but whom unfortunately we cannot now identify. He treated her kindly, and showed her petition to other peers, who appear to have been acquainted with the circumstances of Bunyan’s case. They replied that the matter was beyond their province, and that the question of her husband’s release was committed to the judges at the next assizes. These assizes were held at Bedford in the following August. The judges of the circuit were Twisden and Sir Matthew Hale. From the latter—the friend of Richard Baxter, who, as Burnet records, took great care to “cover the Nonconformists, whom he thought too hardly used, all he could from the seventies some designed; and discouraged those who were inclined to stretch the laws too much against them”—Bunyan’s case would be certain to meet with sympathetic consideration. But being set to administer the law, not according to his private wishes, but according to its letter and its spirit, he was powerless to relieve him. Three several times did Bunyan’s noble-hearted wife present her husband’s petition that he might be heard, and his case taken impartially into consideration. But the law forbad what Burnet calls Sir Matthew Hale’s “tender and compassionate nature” to have free exercise. He “received the petition very mildly at her hand, telling her that he would do her and her husband the best good he could; but he feared he could do none.” His brother judge’s reception of her petition was very different. Having thrown it into the coach, Twisden “snapt her up,” telling her, what after all was no more than the truth, that her husband was a convicted person, and could not be released unless he would promise to obey the law and abstain from preaching. On this the High Sheriff, Edmund Wylde, of Houghton Conquest, spoke kindly to the poor woman, and encouraged her to make a fresh application to the judges before they left the town. So she made her way, “with abashed face and trembling heart,” to the large chamber at the Old Swan Inn at the Bridge Foot, where the two judges were receiving a large number of the justices of the peace and other gentry of the county. Addressing Sir Matthew Hale she said, “My lord, I make bold to come again to your lordship to know what may be done with my husband.” Hale received her with the same gentleness as before, repeated what he had said previously, that as her husband had been legally convicted, and his conviction was recorded, unless there was something to undo that he could do her no good. Twisden, on the other hand, got violently angry, charged her brutally with making poverty her cloak, told her that her husband was a breaker of the peace, whose doctrine was the doctrine of the devil, and that he ran up and down and did harm, while he was better maintained by his preaching than by following his tinker’s craft. At last he waxed so violent that “withal she thought he would have struck her.” In the midst of all his coarse abuse, however, Twisden hit the mark when he asked: “What! you think we can do what we list?” And when we find Hale, confessedly the soundest lawyer of the time, whose sympathies were all with the prisoner, after calling for the Statute Book, thus summing up the matter: “I am sorry, woman, that I can do thee no good. Thou must do one of these three things, viz., either apply thyself to the king, or sue out his pardon, or get a writ of error,” which last, he told her, would be the cheapest course—we may feel sure that Bunyan’s Petition was not granted because it could not be granted legally. The blame of his continued imprisonment lay, if anywhere, with the law, not with its administrators. This is not always borne in mind as it ought to be. As Mr. Froude remarks, “Persons often choose to forget that judges are sworn to administer the law which they find, and rail at them as if the sentences which they are obliged by their oath to pass were their own personal acts.” It is not surprising that Elizabeth Bunyan was unable to draw this distinction, and that she left the Swan chamber in tears, not, however, so much at what she thought the judges’ “hardheartedness to her and her husband,” as at the thought of “the sad account such poor creatures would have to give” hereafter, for what she deemed their “opposition to Christ and His gospel.”

No steps seem to have been taken by Bunyan’s wife, or any of his influential friends, to carry out either of the expedients named by Hale. It may have been that the money needed was not forthcoming, or, what Southey remarks is “quite probable,”—“because it is certain that Bunyan, thinking himself in conscience bound to preach in defiance of the law, would soon have made his case worse than it then was.”

At the next assizes, which were held in January, 1662, Bunyan again made strenuous efforts to get his name put on the calendar of felons, that he might have a regular trial before the king’s judges and be able to plead his cause in person. This, however, was effectually thwarted by the unfriendly influence of the county magistrates by whom he had been committed, and the Clerk of the Peace, Mr. Cobb, who having failed in his kindly meant attempt to induce “Neighbour Bunyan” to conform, had turned bitterly against him and become one of his chief enemies. “Thus,” writes Bunyan, “was I hindered and prevented at that time also from appearing before the judge, and left in prison.” Of this prison, the county gaol of Bedford, he remained an inmate, with one, short interval in 1666, for the next twelve years, till his release by order of the Privy Council, May 17, 1672.