Unjust tribunals, under change of times.
MILTON1
God’s people are (as it hath always been, Ezra 4. 12–16) looked upon to be a turbulent, seditious and factious people.
BUNYAN2
CONTEMPORARIES saw clear social issues behind the disputes about religion and religious toleration, behind the restoration. In 1653 the great Parliamentarian preacher Stephen Marshall amused Dorothy Osborne, a Bedfordshire lady, by saying from the pulpit that ‘if there were no kings, no queens, no lords, no ladies, nor gentlemen nor gentlewomen in the world, ’twould be no loss to God Almighty.’ ‘I had the most ado’, she admitted, ‘to look soberly enough for the place I was in that ever I had in my life.’3
Dorothy Osborne and her like had no doubt of the absurdity and indeed wickedness of such democratic views. They became increasingly alarming to the well-to-do. A poem published in 1659 boasted that:
We have a people now,
Blue-apron blades-men that know how
To keep the gentry under.
That appeared in a volume entitled England’s Changeling, Or The Time Servers Laid open in their Colours.4 It is hardly surprising that, as an anonymous pamphlet of the same year tells us, ‘the old spirit of the gentry’ was ‘brought in play again’; its ‘earthly, lordly rule’ threatened ‘the growing light of the people of God’. The Buckinghamshire county election of 1659 was fought between ‘the gentlemen’ and ‘the Anabaptist party’. The gentlemen won. In February 1660 the command of the militia all over the country was taken from ‘persons of no degree and quality’ and restored to ‘the government of the nobility and principal gentry’.5
Post-restoration legislation confirmed the exclusion of ‘those of no degree and quality’. The Act of 1661 against tumultuous petitioning forbade the collection of more than twenty signatures to any petition to King or Parliament which had not been approved by three or more JPs. This put an end to the sort of political petitioning that members of the Bedford congregation had engaged in during the 1650s. The Clarendon Code (Corporation Act, 1661, Act of Uniformity, 1662, Conventicle Act, 1664, Five Mile Act, 1665) had as its object the exclusion of nonconformists from any share in central or local government. The Settlement Act of 1662 immobilized the working population, protected London and corporate towns from a surplus of labour, and left labour cheap in the countryside, where there had been many complaints of high wages in the late 1650s. It also deprived political or religious opposition of any chance of organizing. It increased the dependence of poor husbandmen.
‘None are so servilely dependant’, said Richard Baxter, as poor husbandmen ‘are on their landlords. They dare not displease them lest they turn them out of their houses or increase their rent.’ A Quaker imagined a JP saying in 1660, ‘Now we may do what we will, and who shall control us?’ Cottagers were being evicted from their holdings on the waste, as nonconformist ministers were being evicted from their livings. (We may compare Bunyan’s phrase in Mr. Badman, ‘in danger to be moved like a cottage’.)6 There was a simultaneous campaign against customary rights like wood-gathering, turf-cutting, and other means by which the poor maintained themselves; new and severe laws protected game, and there were no more pamphlets against enclosure such as had proliferated in the 1640s and 1650s. The object of the legislation was to restrict mobility, to tie men and women to their villages where they would work as wage-labourers, with all the uncertainties and risks which such employment entailed. In A Few Sighs from Hell (1658) Bunyan had denounced landlords who would eject tenants of whose religion they disapproved, ‘or pull down the house over their heads rather than not rid themselves of such tenants.’ ‘The ungodly love their dogs better than the children of God.’7
Richard Baxter in 1659 noted that ‘the rabble hate both magistrates and ministers’. A letter writer at about the same time agreed that between the gentry and the ‘ordinary sort of people’ there was ‘a natural animosity, of late years infinitely increased’. The last clause is the interesting one: it gives force to the denunciation in Venner’s Fifth-Monarchist manifesto of 1661 of the ‘old, bloody, popish, wicked gentry of the nation’. Many could accept that description without sharing Venner’s theology. The Earl of Aylesbury, James II’s agent in Bedfordshire, emphasized that ‘the commonalty hate the yeomen’ and that the latter ‘care but little for their gentlemen’.8
New taxes introduced during the Revolution gave rise to inequities which were enhanced after 1660. At the beginning of the Parliament of 1661 an observer wrote, ‘’tis the general opinion of some that this Parliament, being most of all landed men and some few traders, will never take away the excise, because their own burdens will thereupon become greater.’ (The excise was voted to Charles II in return for confirmation of the abolition of feudal tenures, from which the gentry alone benefited. The excise fell mainly on the food and drink of the poor.) ‘The acceptance in the seventeenth century of the doctrine that the poor should pay taxation’, wrote its historian, ‘is one of the landmarks in English political opinion’—the opinion of the classes whom Parliament represented, of course. ‘The nobility and gentry are the necessary if not the only support of the crown’, said Sir John Holland in 1668; ‘if they fall that must.’ He was attacking the land tax. Parliamentary elections, Sir William Petty estimated, ‘are governed by less than 2000 active men’. It is hardly surprising that in 1679 ‘the entire dissenting party’ was believed to be against ‘the gentry and their interest’. As for ‘the poorer and meaner people’, the Duke of Albemarle declared in 1671 that they ‘have no interest in the commonwealth but the use of breath. These are always dangerous to the peace of a kingdom.’9
From his adolescence until he was about 30 years old, Bunyan had never experienced organized religious persecution such as prevailed in England before 1640 and after 1660. Older men remembered Laudian times, and Quakers had suffered in the 1650s. But till the late 1650s others of the godly had existed side by side in argumentative peace. They had been free to organize, to meet for discussion, to preach. In 1658 Bunyan had observed that many would like to persecute the sectaries; and he had threatened persecutors with hell-fire.10 But he must have been emotionally unprepared for the challenge which faced him in 1660: stop preaching or go to jail.
Francis Osborne had written against toleration in 1656. ‘Will not such proceedings incline to anarchy? And that proving loathsome to all, make room for the old or some more acceptable family, if not for conquest by a foreign nation?’11 1660 proved him right. His view has won increasing acceptance from historians. The memory of Levellers (suppressed 1649), Diggers (suppressed 1650), Ranters (suppressed 1651) lived on and coloured the attitude of members of the propertied classes to Quakers. Quakers refused to doff their hats to gentlemen or magistrates; they used the familiar ‘thou’ instead of the deferential ‘you’ when addressing social superiors. This social egalitarianism was accompanied by a belligerent millenarianism and readiness to take part in political activity: pacifism and abstention from politics were adopted only after 1660. The debates on the case of the Quaker James Nayler in Parliament in 1656 show the social panic which many MPs felt when they contemplated the sudden rapid expansion of the Quaker movement. It was very loosely structured; but it had a national organization of sorts, as the Levellers and Diggers were beginning to have when they were suppressed in 1649 and 1650. And Quaker doctrines were, to alarmed conservatives, not very clearly distinguishable from those of Levellers, Diggers, or Fifth Monarchists who had revolted in London in 1657 and were to do so again in 1661.
Barry Reay has documented definitively the overwhelming desire of the men of property to suppress freedom of organization and of discussion for those below the political nation. A major objective of the restoration was the re-establishment of a single state church controlled from above, and silencing all those who did not accept it.12 Bishops and clergymen extruded during the Revolution came back with Charles II; only now the church was controlled by Parliament rather than by the King. The initiative in the persecution of the 1660s came from Parliament: Charles, for his own political reasons, would have preferred a more tolerant policy. So Bunyan’s trial and sentence to prison was less a judicial than a political act. Bunyan was no Quaker; but he was a millenarian who had Fifth-Monarchist associations. Above all, his preaching had a bias against the gentry. His mere claim to the right to preach was for them a social outrage.
R. L. Greaves’s important book, Deliver Us from Evil, establishes that after 1660 there was ‘no cessation of revolutionary thinking or activity’. He shows us an England bitterly divided, seething with discontent, in which the discontented were collecting arms and preparing for revolt. Secretary Nicholas spoke in April 1661 of ‘a general desertion in point of affection in the middle sort of people in city and country from the King’s interest.’ In 1663 the government received reports of ‘surreptitious radical activity from one end of the country to the other’, as well as from Ireland and Scotland. Nor were the plotters merely desperate fanatics, expecting divine intervention, like Venner’s men of 1661. They included ex-Army officers, clergymen, land purchasers ruined by the restoration, and men of substance in their localities like George Blackburne, the wealthy Huddersfield clothier who thought that ‘the gentry were insupportable to the people’.13
Until recently, denominational historians tended to underestimate the political and social radicalism of the precursors of post-restoration nonconformist sects. The researches of R. L. Greaves and Richard Ashcraft suggest that a similar reassessment of the attitudes of post-restoration dissenters is called for. It seems likely that more of them participated in, or were aware of, conspiracies against the government than used to be thought. Much work still remains to be done; but it is intrinsically improbable that all dissenters at once abandoned politics, even revolutionary politics, after 1660. Not even the Quakers did that.
This is the background against which the government tended to regard any illegal meeting as potentially seditious. There were those in the government, including Charles himself, who thought that toleration for genuinely pacifist nonconformists would isolate the militants; but the majority in the House of Commons and some bishops preferred a policy of mere repression.
We may ask why all this clandestine activity in the 1660s produced only one or two minor and isolated revolts? One reason is that potential rebels were united only by dislike of monarchy and bishops, divided by memories of the fierce disputes of the 1650s which had led to the downfall of the republic. Some wanted a Presbyterian discipline, others religious toleration for all protestants, others the rule of Jesus Christ through his saints; some wanted a republic, some the restoration of the house of Cromwell. Bunyan’s controversy with the Quakers illustrated these divisions, which brought persecution on all dissenters. He himself came to regret them, as Milton did.14
Secondly, the government had picked off potential leaders of revolt. The regicides and Vane had been executed; Lambert, Hutchinson, and Harrington were in jail. Others like Ludlow were in exile. The government made extensive use of informers and agents provocateurs; it was helped by divisions between and within sects as they adjusted to the new situation. A providential view of history inclined many to see the restoration of monarchy and episcopacy as a divine judgment on a sinful people, and to conclude that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world. From 1661 the Quakers adopted the peace principle and abjured political activity, though it was long before all members of the Society of Friends accepted the new line. Quakers were active in the Northern Plot of 1663, and as late as 1685 some Quakers fought for Monmouth in his rebellion against James II.
Charles II often flirted with the idea of using the royal prerogative to allow toleration for protestant dissenters, partly in order to obtain toleration for Roman Catholics as well, partly to free himself from dependence on the Church of England and the House of Commons. He was defeated in 1662, but he tried again in 1672. Most sectaries gratefully accepted his Declaration of Indulgence; the Bedford congregation registered as ‘Congregational’. But the relief was short-lived. Charles had to withdraw the Declaration.
Uncertainties in government policy led to inconsistency in execution of the laws against dissenters. When Parliament was in session they tended to be enforced more severely than when it was in recess; under the Declaration of Indulgence they were not enforced at all. Much would depend on the attitude of local JPs. But even when they wanted to enforce the laws against nonconformists, they could not do so without the co-operation of lesser officials, themselves liable to be influenced by local opinion. Where dissent was strong, blind eyes might be turned to religious meetings, or neighbourly feelings shield potential victims of persecution. Thus in Bedford in 1670, when an attempt was made to enforce the second Conventicle Act, constables refused to raid an illegal meeting. When churchwardens tried to levy fines they were pursued by a hostile crowd, who fixed a calf’s tail on the back of one of them. Porters who were supposed to carry off goods distrained from dissenters disappeared, saying ‘they would be hanged, drawn and quartered before they would assist in that work.’ Even with the help of ‘a file of soldiers’ the officials proved incapable of breaking up a meeting of the congregation, and were told to call on the help of ‘certain gentlemen of the town’. ‘Most of the traders, journeymen, labourers and servants’ either left the town or hid. With the gentry’s help the law was enforced. John Fenn, hatter, in whose house the meeting had been held, lost all his hats and his household goods. A weaver at Cotton End was fined £19, and all his possessions, including the implements of his trade, were distrained. It is a significant, if propagandist, vignette of politics in and around Bedford in 1670.15
There are many other examples of local support for dissenting congregations. ‘The country people … generally’, exclaimed a JP in 1677, ‘are so rotten that they will not complain of them [dissenters], though they see and know of these seditious meetings before their eyes daily.’ It was in areas where dissenters were heavily outnumbered that desperation led to the most dangerous conspiracies. It is hardly surprising that many nonconformists pursued a waiting policy, expecting ‘a sudden change in the state of public matters’. That was Seth Ward writing to Archbishop Sheldon in 1664. In the same year Elias Ashmole told his Presbyterian brother-in-law that ‘nonconformity could be nothing but in expectation of a change’.16
During his twelve years’ imprisonment Bunyan had to wait too. At first he was occasionally able to get out, either to go to London or to attend to his pastoral duties in and around Bedford. People could come to see him, and there were no doubt lively discussions between the prisoners. But he must have felt cut off from what was going on in his world, able to contribute only from afar to nonconformist politics.
So we need not think of Bunyan as a particularly political person to be confident that he regretted the restoration. His writings make it clear that he looked back nostalgically to the revolutionary decades. He was too prudent to say that the restoration had been a political disaster. But he suggested this more than once, cautiously, in The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Advice to Sufferers (1684) he wrote: ‘’Tis a sad sight to see a man that has been suffering for righteousness restored to his former estate, while the righteousness for which he suffered remains under locks and irons.’ His resentment was directed especially towards those who, in his view, had turned their coats in order to profit by the restoration. In Prison Meditations (1663) he wrote of:
that which our foes expect,
Namely our turning the postate
Like those of Judas’ sect ….
Good men suffer for God’s way
And bad men at them rage ….
Here we see also who turns round
Like weathercocks with wind.…
The politicians that profest
For base and worldly ends,
Do now appear to us at best
But Machivillian friends.17
The great moral example came to be Brother John Child, a leading member of the Bedford church in the 1650s, who conformed to the state church in 1660 for fear of persecution and ultimately hanged himself. He is thought to be the despairing Man in the Iron Cage in The Pilgrim’s Progress.18
Bunyan looked back, beyond the revolutionary decades, to the heretical succession to which radicals had always appealed—Lollards, ‘Hus, Bilney, Ridley, Hooper, Cranmer’. Their light and knowledge were great, but revelation is progressive, and the saints of Bunyan’s day had more of it even than the martyrs. This must have been a deeply consoling thought, particularly in view of the humbler social status of seventeenth-century English saints than that of sixteenth-century bishops. The point was put forcefully and effectively in a sermon preached to the House of Commons in November 1646 by Bunyan’s friend William Dell.19
But things seemed very different to the nervous rulers of England, who equated obstinate refusal to conform to the state church with sedition and rebellion. Jailbirds like Bunyan had to be especially careful. So we should not expect outspoken political comment in his writings; nor were politics his main concern. But circumstances forced him to think about the ecclesiastical and political organization of the society in which he lived. ‘Oftentimes when the wicked world hath raged most’ against dissenters, there had been ‘souls awakened by the Word. I could instance particulars, but I forbear’, he added prudently. In Of the Resurrection of the Dead (1665) Bunyan wrote, ‘I am this day … persecuted by … an hypocritical people [who] will persecute the power of those truths in others which themselves in words profess.’ And he spoke, less guardedly, of ‘the very heart of Cain the murderer, of Judas the traitor.’ But at last they would be judged, ‘be thou King or Keser’. In the posthumous Israel’s Hope Encouraged he spoke again of the ‘greatness’ of ‘men of a persecuting spirit’. There are plenty of hints like these if we read between the lines.20
In The Holy City (1665) Bunyan saw that ‘the saints are yet but as an army routed’. Want of light had led to ‘that crossness of judgment and persuasion that hath been found among the saints’. Bunyan expected better times; but meanwhile he had to confront those who ‘murmur and repine at God’s hand, at his dispensations, and at the judgments that overtake them, in their persons, estates, families, or relations.… A murmuring spirit is such an one as seems to correct God, and to find fault with his dispensations’, to claim to detect ‘a failure in the nature and execution of things’. The restoration had indeed given the godly grounds for questioning God’s justice, or his mercy, or both. ‘Have you not hard thoughts of God’, Colonel Okey was asked on his way to execution as a regicide, ‘for this his strange providence towards you?’ Okey proclaimed his belief that the Good Old Cause would revive;21 but the question remained unanswered.
Seventeenth-century jails were run by private enterprise, with the abuses that naturally follow. Fees had to be paid; privileges could be bought. Bunyan was not well off, and he had a wife and five surviving children (four by his first wife). The eldest of these, his ‘poor blind child, … lay nearer my heart than all I had besides.’ Elizabeth’s first child died when she was ‘smayed at the news’ of her husband’s arrest. He had to ‘tag laces’ to earn a few pennies for them. When he emerged from prison, ‘he found his temporal affairs were gone to wreck, and he had as to them to begin again’ (GA, 98, 128).
We should not forget how appalling prisons could be. Satan can make ‘a jail look like hell itself’, wrote Bunyan many years later. Insanitary conditions, lack of heating, and overcrowding, led to jail fever and other diseases. The early Quaker leadership was decimated by deaths in prison. Fox, like Bunyan, was exceptionally tough, and both survived. The plague of 1665 raged around Bedford jail, claiming forty victims. A pest-house was set up in the town.22
The severity of Bunyan’s imprisonment varied from time to time, with the political situation. At one time he ‘had by my jailor some liberty granted me more than at the first’, and even was able to follow ‘my wonted course of preaching’, visiting and exhorting ‘the people of God’. He went as far afield as London. This was not exceptional. Lawrence Clarkson when in prison in the 1640s could ‘sit at the street-door’ and ‘go abroad’. But when Bunyan’s enemies heard what was happening they ‘almost cast my jailor out of his place’ and tightened up Bunyan’s imprisonment. From October 1661 to October 1668 he is not recorded as attending meetings of the Bedford congregation. In 1666 he was released for a few months, but since he persisted in preaching he was rearrested. In jail Bunyan had only the Bible to read, we are told, until he bought a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Yet he was able to obtain and read William Penn’s The Sandy Foundations Shaken and Edward Fowler’s The Design of Christianity soon after they were published in 1668 and 1671 respectively.23
Access to the imprisoned Bunyan seems to have been easy. George Cokayne apparently had no difficulty in visiting him. A woman who had robbed her Wellingborough master of a considerable sum came to seek his advice. Bunyan offered to send for her master and endeavour to make her peace; but she was too frightened of being hanged. He had other similar visitors. He and his brethren preached to one another on Sundays, ‘in our prison chamber’. Bunyan has a touching story of one occasion when ‘it being my turn to speak’, he was ‘so empty, spiritless and barren that I thought I should not have been able to speak among them so much as five words of truth with life and evidence.’ Providentially his eye fell on Revelation 21, which produced not only a sermon but, ‘after we had well dined, I gathered up this basketful … of the fragments that were left’—amounting to 294 pages of The Holy City (1665).24
In the winter and early spring of 1660–1 there were more than fifty Quakers in prison with Bunyan; and there were more later. Overcrowding may indeed have accounted for his unofficial leave of absence. Other fellow-prisoners, at one time or another, included Nehemiah Coxe of his congregation (for preaching); John Gibbs of Newport Pagnell; John Dunne or Donne, ejected minister of Pertenhall; five men of Blunham, imprisoned for conventicles; John Fox, accused of murder. Elizabeth Pratt, Bedford’s last alleged witch, died in prison in 1667 before she came to trial.25
Enforced acquaintance with Quakers in jail may have modified Bunyan’s hostility to them, and theirs to him. In any case, the emphasis of Quaker doctrine had shifted since his controversies of the 1650s. The Quaker John Rush and his mother were released from Bedford jail at the same time as Bunyan. Bunyan’s name was included in a list of prisoners to be freed in 1672 at the instance of the Quaker George Whitehead. Both parties seem to have learnt the lesson which Bunyan drew in his Confession of my Faith and a Reason of my Practice— that divisions among the godly had ‘greatly prevailed to bring down these judgments which at present we feel and groan under’. They were, he added, ‘a cause thereof’.26
Greaves has drawn attention to an unexpected consequence of Bunyan’s imprisonment. At one time or another he was joined in jail by at least nine men who were to play a leading part in spreading dissenting congregations in and around Bedfordshire in the 1670s. Finding themselves ‘aside from the lumber and cumber of this world’, they had not much else to do but talk to one another. It seems reasonable to conclude that they planned there the rapid expansion and co-operation of churches which took place after 1672 under the Indulgence.27 The prisoners must have seen this frustration of the intentions of their Antichristian persecutors as providential.
One other thing that Bunyan was able to do in prison, rather surprisingly, was to write. Like George Fox, Bunyan took full advantage of his enforced leisure. Within the first six years of his imprisonment he produced a number of books—Grace Abounding, published in 1666; Of the Resurrection of the Dead and The Holy City (both 1665). The latter derived from the sermon which Bunyan preached to his fellow-prisoners. It is a large work about the New Jerusalem, with millenarian overtones. He experimented with verse—Profitable Meditations (1661) and Prison Meditations (1663), One Thing is Needful and Ebal and Gerizzim in 1665. During the six years after 1666 he published nothing. He was probably writing The Pilgrim’s Progress, and perhaps The Heavenly Foot-man, an account of life as a foot-race, which could have led on to The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was not published in Bunyan’s lifetime. It is just possible that others of his posthumously published works may date back to these years, though none have been positively identified. A more likely explanation for non-publication before 1678 is that the political atmosphere was unfavourable. This was a period of persecution during which the Bedford church seems to have met only in secret. The shop of Bunyan’s publisher, Francis Smith, was raided in 1666 and many books were seized, including almost certainly some of Bunyan’s. Smith named him as a highly suspect author. So either no other publisher would touch him, or Bunyan himself may have felt discretion to be the better part until his release in 1672 coincided with the Declaration of Indulgence which enabled the Bedford congregation to meet legally again.
In prison Bunyan must have added to his mastery of the Bible; he may have completed his own concordance. He may also have collected his considerable knowledge of the law and of litigation. Greaves has suggested that the analogy which Bunyan develops at length in The Advocateship of Jesus Christ, and the legal knowledge assumed, must mean that it was intended by Bunyan primarily for the literate and well-to-do London dissenting community, and for their counterparts in other areas.28 But Clive Holmes has recently argued that such knowledge may, of necessity, have been more common among yeomen and artisans than we are accustomed to think. The point is reinforced from the other side by Wilfrid Prest, who emphasizes that lawyers’ clients are found among classes well below the gentry.29 Bunyan’s own legal expertise no doubt derived from his own experience as a defendant. But his frequent use of legal technical terms suggests an assumption that his readers will understand them. Was such knowledge common among yeomen and artisans? Or had dissenters learnt from their experience of persecution, as Holmes’s fenmen learnt from their communal action against fen drainers?