Our time is short, and oppositions increase, we not knowing how soon we may be called to suffer for truth.
PAUL HOBSON1
BUNYAN was accepted by the Bedford congregation in 1653. In April 1654 he took advantage of the establishment of civil registration of births to have his second daughter registered as ‘born’, not baptized in the parish church. His third and fourth children, born before 1658, do not even seem to have been registered.2 Bunyan was baptized and became a full member of the church in 1655, shortly before its founder, ‘holy Mr Gifford’, died. John Gifford had been a royalist officer during the civil war, and was converted after it. He was a powerful personality, who left his mark on the congregation. A group of godly persons had come together in Bedford before his time. They were ‘not embodied into fellowship according to the order of the Gospel; only they had in some measure separated themselves from the prelatical superstition and had agreed to search after the nonconforming men, such as in those days did bear the name of Puritans.’ Gifford insisted on ecumenism, ‘without respect to this or that circumstance or opinion in outward and circumstantial things’, and on social equality.3
In a letter which he wrote to the congregation from his deathbed Gifford exhorted them to ‘avoid all disputes which gender to strifes, as questions about externals and all doubtful disputations.’ Separation from the church because of any externals, including baptism, psalm-singing, etc., was to be avoided as a great evil. This was a point on which Bunyan was later to insist. In other respects we can see Gifford’s influence on Bunyan. Gifford urged his flock to take no truth on trust from any man (37). ‘It is very expedient that there should be heresies among us’, Bunyan wrote in 1657, ‘that thereby those which are indeed of the truth might be made manifest.’ The more truth is opposed, he agreed with Milton’s Areopagitica, ‘the more it will clear itself’. ‘Let no respect of persons be in your comings together’, Gifford wrote. ‘When you are met as a church, there’s neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, in Christ Jesus.’ Hence pews should not be rented—one of the ways in which the sects were apt to finance themselves, lacking the state church’s income from tithes and fees. But ‘the necessities of those who are in want’ must be met by the congregation: rich members must be more generous than they had been.4
Bunyan took over, perhaps from Paul Hobson, the metaphor of the church as garden. God Almighty first planted a garden, in Eden, and put Adam into it. Bunyan interpreted the Genesis story as meaning that God took the church out of the wilderness and enclosed it. To this foundation Bunyan added Gifford’s principles of fellowship and ecumenicism. In Christian Behaviour (1663) he wrote that ‘Christians are like the flowers in the garden, that stand and grow where the gardener hath planted them.’ ‘They have upon each of them the dew of heaven, which being shaken with the wind, they let fall their dew at each other’s roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of one another.’5 Mutual self-help and encouragement, especially for the frailer members of the congregation, was especially stressed in Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1684.
Bunyan insisted on the orderliness of the garden. Christians must keep their rank, relation, and station. Faith is planted by God in his garden. Presumption grows up only outside ‘where other wild notions abound’. But the garden is enclosed from ‘the wide and open field’ and ministers ‘water the plants of the Lord’. In The Pilgrim’s Progress the Interpreter explains that, although in his garden ‘the flowers are divers in stature, in quality and colour, and smell, and virtue,… where the gardener has set them, there they stand, and quarrel not one with another.’6
A small community of flowers which drop dew upon one another necessarily involved careful selection of church members. Admission came after a period of probation, and after the candidate had satisfied the congregation as to his state of grace. It was impossible to be sure on earth who were saints: some ‘creep in unawares’ by means of ‘a show of repentance and regeneration’.7 ‘Visible saints’ were those who had an appearance of grace, who were of suitable conversation, and had satisfied the church as to their soundness of doctrine by a confession of faith and repentance of their sins. This is represented in The Pilgrim’s Progress when at the Palace Beautiful ‘one of the virgins … will, if she likes your talk, bring you into the rest of the family, according to the rule of house.’ Church membership was not essential for salvation; but ‘church fellowship, rightly managed, is the glory of all the world’, as an aid to spiritual growth, Bunyan wrote in The Desire of the Righteous Granted (posthumous). He insisted, following Gifford, that baptism was not a necessary condition for admission to the church, provided the candidate gave a satisfactory account of his faith. Even preachers and pastors might fall from grace.8
Contemporaries always assumed—at least after 1660—that dissenting congregations were composed of socially inferior people. In 1669 Bunyan’s meeting was described as Anabaptist, having about thirty members of the ‘meanest sort’—shopkeepers and craftsmen, hatters, cobblers, heelmakers.9 The founding members were certainly not socially inferior, artisans though they may have been. They included two men who had been mayors of the town, John Grew and John Eston. Together with another former member of the church, Arthur Harington, they had defended their Puritan Vicar against Laud’s commissary in 1640. In 1647 Grew spoke up for the unorthodox Captain Francis Freeman, a near-Ranter, against Colonel Okey, himself an Anabaptist. In 1651 Grew and Eston had demonstratively refused to wear gowns in common court, and the rule was voided – though it came back after the restoration. They were also JPs, and Grew a militia commissioner. When he died in 1661 he was described as gentleman. Two members of the congregation were Triers for the Cromwellian state church. Richard Cooper, mayor in 1657, was also a member of the church.10
We shall see later that Bedford politics were closely linked with national politics; the congregation was deeply involved in both. In 1640 several future members of the church had supported the election of Sir Samuel Luke to what was to be the Long Parliament. In 1653 Gifford and other members of the congregation welcomed Cromwell’s forcible dissolution of the Rump of the Long Parliament, and the decision to call a nominated assembly. The signatories included Eston, Grew, Thomas Gibbs, and John Bunyan, as well as John Gibbs of Newport Pagnell and William Dell.11
The signatories suggested names of two possible members for the nominated assembly, one of whom actually sat in Barebone’s Parliament. In 1657 The Humble and Serious Testimony of many hundreds of godly and well-affected people in the county of Bedford and parts adjacent, protesting against the proposal to revive monarchy in the house of Cromwell, was circulated by Dell and the regicide Colonel Okey. We ‘still remain faithful to the Good Old Cause’, declared the signatories, who included several members of the Bedford church—Grew and Eston, Richard Cooper, and John Fenn. The practice of circulating petitions on national affairs dated from 1641; it had been extensively used by Levellers later in the 1640s, who printed their petitions. The Humble and Serious Testimony of 1657 was printed and led to arrests and to the examination of Eston and Fenn among others, as well as possibly to dissension in the Bedford congregation.12
After this petition the church set a day apart ‘to seek God about the affairs of the church, the affairs of the nation, and the work of God in the world.’ When Cromwell, under Army pressure, rejected the offer of the crown, the church held a day of praise to God for his goodness in delivering them out of their late troubles. In the ensuing six months they sought God about the affairs of the nation no less than four times. At the end of October 1659 the church set apart Guy Fawkes Day ‘to bless God for our late deliverance’ from Sir George Booth’s royalist rising against the Commonwealth. In the next six months many days were given up ‘to seek the Lord, especially upon the account of the distractions of the nation’. Just before the restoration they prayed for the nation and God’s work; just after it they prayed God to direct their governors.13 Apart from a reference in August 1661 to the increase of their troubles, they then lapsed into a prudent silence on the political matters which had hitherto so much concerned them. That was what the restoration had been about.
The English Revolution gave a new stimulus to the idea that the end of the world is approaching, that the kingdom of God is at hand. Such millenarian ideas recurred constantly in medieval heresies, peaking at times of economic or political crisis. They had been greatly encouraged by the Reformation. Protestants identified the Pope with Antichrist. There had been a convergence of scholarly opinion, based on intensive study of the prophecies of Daniel, Revelation, and elsewhere by Napier, Brightman, Mede, that the last days were to be expected in the seventeenth century, probably in the 1650s.14 Arthur Dent in 1603 thought that his was the ‘last age’, which would see the heat of the war ‘betwixt the armies of Christ … and of Antichrist’. Rome would be destroyed ‘within the age of a man’. He gave this doctrine a democratic twist when he insisted that it must be ‘made known to the common people’ among the godly. Every minister of the gospel was bound to preach this doctrine to ‘all the Lord’s people whatsoever, … men and women, young and old, rich and poor’.15 Forty years later Parliamentarian propagandists would make much of this approach. In 1643 William Prynne, no radical, declared that the Earl of Essex was ‘General of the Lord of Hosts’ to set up Christ’s kingdom. Army rumour transformed this into a claim that Essex was John the Baptist, preparing for Christ to come and destroy King Charles.16
Millenarian ideas were developed by radicals and sectaries; many believed that in the millennium the saints would rule and judge the earth.17 As Dent showed, millenarianism linked naturally with John Foxe’s evidence that the lower classes were the staunchest foes of Antichrist. ‘The voice that will come of Christ’s reigning’, proclaimed the anonymous A Glimpse of Sions Glory in 1641, ‘is like to begin from … the vulgar multitude, the common people’.18 The rule of Antichrist is maintained, said John Goodwin in 1642, ‘by doctrines and tenents excessively advancing the power of superiors over inferiors.’ It was men ‘of ordinary rank and quality’ who were to execute God’s judgments upon Antichrist and to vindicate and maintain ‘the just rights and liberties and privileges of those … under authority and subjection to others.’ ‘The vox populi’, Stephen Marshall told the House of Commons even more alarmingly in December 1641, ‘is that many of the nobles, magistrates, knights and gentlemen and persons of great quality are arrant traitors and rebels against God.’19
The Digger Winstanley carried this democratic millenarianism to its extreme by arguing that the imminent millennium will not take the form of a descent of Christ from the clouds but of Christ rising within sons and daughters. They would learn the reasonableness of co-operation and would establish a communist society. There will be no other Second Coming. For Winstanley, Antichrist was associated with the gentry.20
Fifth Monarchists and Quakers preached a less secular millenarianism, but they too linked the millennium with social justice and sometimes with social subversion. Mary Cary in 1651 expected a material heaven on earth ‘before twenty or ten or five years pass’. The saints then will join in judging ‘all the workers of iniquity’. Fox echoed Winstanley on property: a rich man is ‘the greatest thief’, since he got his wealth ‘by cozening and cheating, by lying and defrauding’. The Fifth Monarchist John Rogers attacked ‘corrupt and naughty nobles’. John Tillinghast thought that ‘the present work of God is to bring down lofty men.’ Christopher Feake saw in aristocracy ‘an enmity against Christ’; in the millennium there would be ‘no difference betwixt high and low, the greatest and the poorest beggar’. The anonymous preacher of the funeral sermon for John Simpson, Fifth Monarchist, declared that ‘the nation is more beholding to the meanest kitchen maid in it that hath in her a spirit of prayer than to a thousand of her profane and swaggering gentry’.21
Such views were widely circulated and discussed in the revolutionary decades. As Professor Greaves sagely pointed out, millenarian discourse, with its imagery of war and destruction, had potential political overtones whether or not the speaker intended them. It is not surprising that the authorities found it difficult to distinguish between passive millenarians, waiting for the Second Coming, and those who intended actively to hurry the day along. John Cook and John Milton both thought the trial and condemnation of Charles I was an anticipation of the judgment of the saints.22
Professor Greaves has recently emphasized the millenarian connections of the Bedford congregation in the 1650s and later. It was in correspondence with the Fifth-Monarchist congregation of Peter Chamberlen in London. It was close to Henry Jessey, John Simpson, and George Cokayne, all open-communion Baptists. Gifford had used millenarian language at the beginning of the Bedford church book, and on his deathbed in 1655 he urged the congregation ‘forget not your brethren in bonds’, which Roger Sharrock plausibly relates to Christopher Feake and John Rogers, then in jail.23 In 1657 a millenarian petition from Bedfordshire, hoping for ‘the full destruction of Antichrist’s kingdom’ and the advancement of the kingdom of Christ, was signed by two of Bunyan’s friends (John Fenn and Richard Cooper). In the same year John Child, a silk-weaver of Bedford, then one of Bunyan’s closest colleagues, was described as a Fifth-Monarchist agent.24 Child was one of the signatories of a Preface to Bunyan’s Vindication of Some Gospel-truths (1657).
The Bedford congregation’s agreement to set apart a day for special prayer in 1657 was part of a national campaign, instigated by the millenarian Henry Jessey. When John Child showed signs of wishing to withdraw from the congregation in 1658, it was to Jessey that its members turned for help. And when Gifford’s successor, John Burton, was ill towards the end of 1660, the church sought advice from John Simpson25 (who had been an active Fifth Monarchist at least until 1658) and from George Cokayne, a Bedfordshire man.
Cokayne, a powerful and popular preacher, had preached to the House of Commons on 29 November 1648, a week before Colonel Pride purged it. He took his text from Isaiah 65: 16–18: ‘Behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth.’ Cokayne insisted that ‘God at last will judge all the causes of the sons of men’ mediately by the saints, picking out perhaps ‘the meanest of his people’ for this duty. But he made it clear he was addressing MPs when he said, ‘the Lord is risen in you and will judge the world by you.’ He hinted unambiguously that the King should be brought to trial. ‘Think not to save yourselves by an unrighteous saving of them who are the Lord’s and the people’s known enemies.’ He anticipated the arguments of those who would flinch from such a denouement: ‘if God do not lead you to do justice upon those that have been the great actors in shedding of innocent blood, never think to gain their love by sparing of them.’ They will take vengeance if you leave them the chance. He warned too against MPs failing to do their duty ‘because of some unwonted interruptions of your proceedings’. When he wrote his Epistle Dedicatory to the Commons on 11 December, the unwonted interruption had taken place five days earlier, and Cokayne was clearly upset by it. But he insisted that what he had told them was ‘still an unchangeable truth.… Your privileges are indeed broke … but let not this lay a foundation for breach of truth.’ Cokayne was later reported to have said that Charles deserved his fate. Cokayne was a friend both of the Leveller John Wildman and of Bulstrode Whitelocke. He must often have discussed with Bunyan the great events in which he had been involved.26
Cokayne was active in Fifth-Monarchist politics in the early 1650s and again in the 1660s. But in 1661 he, like Bunyan and Henry Denne, repudiated Venner’s Fifth-Monarchist rising. Cokayne and Jessey were probably joint authors of Mirabilis Annus (1661). Cokayne may have been responsible for Mirabilis Annus Secundus. He was said to have visited Bunyan in prison in 1664, the year in which Cokayne was again arrested and his house searched for seditious literature. In the 1670s there was intercommunion between the Bedford congregation and Cokayne’s church in Southwark. In 1672 an elder of the Bedford church was licensed to preach at Cokayne’s house in Cotton End, Bedfordshire. In 1682 and again in 1683 Cokayne was fined for preaching. He wrote a Preface for Bunyan’s posthumous The Acceptable Sacrifice, and he may have preached Bunyan’s funeral sermon. John Strudwick, at whose house in London Bunyan died, was a member of Cokayne’s congregation. Cokayne may have been the author of A Continuation of Mr Bunyan’s Life.27
Millenarianism was to play a part in all Bunyan’s thinking. For him as for others writing under censorship, Antichrist became a useful, because imprecise, symbol. Antichrist can be anyone who persecutes the children of God. ‘Opposing Antichrist … in the world’ Bunyan equated with opposing Cain. This was a longstanding radical tradition. That persecution was Antichristian had been taught by Wyclif, Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, the Baptists Thomas Helwys and Leonard Bussher, John Bastwick, Roger Williams, Thomas Taylor, John Owen and other preachers of Fast Sermons to Parliament, Overton and other Levellers, Henry Denne, Edward Burrough, George Wither, and John Milton. Bunyan stated the doctrine in The Holy War. For John Goodwin, Milton, Colonel Goffe, Levellers, John Canne, John Spittlehouse, monarchy was Antichristian. The royalists in the civil war were ‘the Antichristian party’; for Coppe Antichrist’s was ‘a kingdom of gain, hire and self-interest’, just as for Milton Antichrist was ‘Mammon’s son’.28
Bunyan shared and retained much of this radical millenarianism. In The Advocateship of Jesus Christ (1688) he referred to a time when ‘I did use to be much taken with the sect of Christians’ who called Christ ‘the blessed King of Glory’. Greaves suggests that this refers to the Fifth Monarchists in the 1650s. In Some Gospel-truths (1656) Bunyan spoke of ‘the last days.… The coming of the Lord Jesus Christ’ was ‘so nigh, even at the doors’. He criticized ‘all those that mock the Second Coming, as Quakers, Ranters, drunkards and the like.’29 A Few Sighs from Hell (1658) drew to a conclusion with the words ‘God’s hand is up.… The judgment-day is at hand.’30