The spirit of grace shall spring up in some that are great and mighty as well as in many that are poor and low.
BUNYAN1
The leading men thought they were sure of the nation so long as popery was in view.
G. BURNET2
Let the good Christian … not faint at seeming delays.
BUNYAN3
IT has been suggested that Bunyan from 1678 or thereabouts was mellowing, becoming more tolerant. He was certainly anxious to minimize disputes among the godly, and to establish broader unity among protestants; but this must be seen in the perspective of his growing fears of persecution, whether by papists or by the Anglican establishment and the Bedfordshire gentry. The international situation was becoming increasingly ominous. James’s accession in February 1685 was followed in June by the passing of the Palatinate to a Roman Catholic family. The Elector Palatine and his wife, James I’s daughter, had symbolized international protestantism in Bunyan’s youth. In October 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and Huguenot refugees flocked into England. Two months later the Duke of Savoy withdrew toleration from the Vaudois, who had been the focus of protestant sympathy in the mid-1650s, when Milton wrote his sonnet on those who kept the truth so pure of old, ‘when all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones’. All the time Habsburg persecution of Hungarian protestants was continuing.
Bunyan showed his awareness of the threat to European protestantism in Advice to Sufferers (1684) and The Pharisee and the Publican (1685). But he had never seen Antichrist specifically in foreign policy terms, as for instance Fifth Monarchists and George Fox had done in the 1650s. A change had come with the Popish Plot of 1678. ‘Then we began to fear cutting of throats,’ Bunyan wrote, ‘of being burned in our beds, and of seeing our children dashed in pieces before our faces.’ Yet he was reassured (so he said) to find that ‘we had a gracious King, brave Parliaments, a stout City, good Lord Mayors, honest sheriffs, substantial laws against them.’ The graciousness of the King was due to the ‘brave Parliaments’ and to the Lord Mayors and sheriffs elected after 1679. But the demonstration of protestant sentiment was impressive. The Bedford church started to hold regular meetings again in 1681–3. In December 1681 they decided that they would keep the first Thursday of every month to beg (among other things) ‘the mercy and blessing of God upon the King and governors’.4
Bunyan probably sympathized with the Whig attempt to exclude the papist Duke of York from the succession. After its failure the Duke of Monmouth, the rival claimant, took temporary refuge from politics in his mistress’s Bedfordshire house. In the absence of Parliaments Charles II initiated a purge of Whigs and nonconformists from local government, which left the Tory gentry in control. Hardly any meetings of the Bedford congregation are recorded between August 1684 and December 1686. Since for Bunyan all persecution was Antichristian, the ecclesiastical authorities and some at least of the gentry must have seemed to him to be acting as Antichrist’s agents.5 In Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress Giant Maul (persecution) is far more dangerous than Giant Pope in Part I.
After 1681 there were no more ‘brave Parliaments’, and the ‘stout City’ no longer had ‘honest sheriffs’, as Shaftesbury found to his cost. It was impossible for nonconformists not to have views about politics at this period. Recent research by Richard Greaves and Richard Ashcraft has shown that plots against the regimes of Charles II and James II were far more continuous than used to be thought, and that far more nonconformists were involved in them.6
Ashcraft suggests that Charles II pursued a consistent and persistent policy, from at least the Secret Treaty of Dover in 1670. Here he undertook to proclaim himself a Catholic, which ‘would provide the ideological foundation for the English monarchy as an absolutist institution’. War against the Netherlands, in alliance with France, would promote England’s colonial trade, and give Charles the opportunity to build up an army and extend his control over the militia. The King used the royal prerogative to enforce the Stop of the Exchequer, in order to provide funds for this war, and to grant indulgence to Roman Catholic and protestant dissenters. All of these actions could be seen as setting England on course towards absolutism and arbitrary rule.7
Dissenters were doubly involved in these plans. ‘Only a very considerable expansion in trade could improve the government’s revenues to the point where it might escape … indebtedness.’ But, as a House of Lords committee on trade reported in 1669, ‘some ease and relaxation in ecclesiastical matters will be a means of improving the trade of this kingdom’—a view supported by Locke. Shaftesbury thought that protestantism in England would be safe only if protestant dissenters were tolerated.8 James II had other plans. Toleration would help to increase trade; rising customs and excise revenue would make the government financially independent and so in a position to promote Catholicism as a basis for absolute rule.
Dissenters were thus faced with choices. Acceptance of toleration by prerogative, against the wishes of Parliament, would give instant relief but might in the long run lead to Roman Catholic absolutism by splitting the protestants. In 1662 and 1672 dissenters had accepted Charles II’s Declarations of Indulgence. But fears of a Popish successor led to the Popish Plot, the Rye House Plot, Argyll’s and Monmouth’s invasions: many dissenters supported Shaftesbury in 1678–82, some rallied to Monmouth in 1685. Others feared the prospects of a new civil war and revolution. The hard core of plotters, in exile in the Netherlands, included former Levellers like John Wildman as well as nonconformists; their objectives were political as well as religious. In the 1680s Anglicans and many dissenters in England preached non-resistance. ‘Private men must keep within their own bounds, and follow their own employments,’ declared a preacher before the Lord Mayor of London in October 1682. Bunyan came near to echoing those sentiments.9 By 1687 James’s policy had split and confused the dissenters.
Ashcraft suggests that Bunyan’s friend John Owen, whose City congregation consisted largely of traders and merchants, was more closely involved with radical Whig conspiracy than had previously been thought. In the 1670s his assistant preacher and intimate friend was Robert Ferguson, ‘the Plotter’. Ferguson had been arrested in 1663, and subsequently conspired successively with Shaftesbury and the Exclusionists, the Rye House plotters, and the Duke of Monmouth. Ferguson referred to Owen as a ‘great and incomparable man’. Probably through Ferguson and the Duke of Buckingham (one of Owen’s patrons) Owen became known to Shaftesbury and other Whig leaders. He kept up a correspondence with Ferguson in 1682–3 when the latter was in exile with Shaftesbury in the Netherlands. Owen was alleged later to have known of and supported the Rye House Plot.10
Another conspirator was Matthew Meade, a Bedfordshire man from Leighton Buzzard who was ordained by John Owen. Bunyan almost certainly preached at his Stepney church: the Bedford congregation had close relations with Meade’s. Meade had been under surveillance in 1661 as one of the ‘chief ringleaders’ of dissatisfaction among London dissenters. He soon fled to exile in the Netherlands. He was back by 1669, and in 1683—whilst trying to escape from England—he was arrested on suspicion of complicity in the Rye House Plot. Two years later Monmouth expected Meade to raise dissenters in London and Wapping; after the defeat of Monmouth’s rising Meade fled to the Netherlands again.11
It is then hard to distinguish between those who were and were not involved in plots, as witness the career of George Cokayne (pp. 96–8 above); and it was difficult for any dissenter to avoid connections with men directly implicated in revolutionary politics, as we saw when we considered Bunyan’s printers. Henry Newcome, a Presbyterian divine, far more conservative than Owen or Bunyan, sheltered and helped Robert Ferguson in 1683, when he was on the run after the Rye House Plot. On the other side, republicans may have read Bunyan. Henry Neville in 1681 said, ‘not the Giant Popery itself shall ever be able to stand before a Parliament.’12 At that date the reference is likely to have been to The Pilgrim’s Progress. There is no evidence to connect Bunyan with any revolutionaries. But it is not easy to be certain exactly where he stood, if he ever had a clearly defined position. Circumstances changed rapidly, and ideas had perforce to follow.
Bunyan may indeed have considered co-operation with James II. Tindall thought that Bunyan’s reference to the role of kings in Of Antichrist and his Ruin was ‘merely politic’. But I think it was more complicated than that. Bunyan stated traditional protestant doctrine. Martin Bucer had seen Edward VI, Henry Barrow had seen Elizabeth, as the ruler who would destroy Antichrist. Napier, Helwys, and Bussher allotted the role to James I; Henry Burton, even less plausibly, to his son. Arthur Dent had announced in 1603 that ‘the kings of Europe shall overthrow Rome’—though perhaps the Turks might help.13 Bunyan’s writings of the 1650s, and the pronouncements of the Bedford congregation at that time, make it clear that he started with no prepossessions in favour of monarchy. But the overwhelming providence of 1660 had to be accepted as God’s will. The sensational events of 1649 had similarly converted William Sedgwick into an enthusiastic supporter of the Army as God’s instrument.14 It was not only Puritans who accepted a providential view of history. A group of theorists, including John Dury, Anthony Ascham, and Marchamont Nedham, argued in 1649–51 that a government securely in power de facto must be accepted as ordained of God. Hobbes’s version was more secular: the only thing that matters about a government is its ability to protect its subjects: questions of legitimacy or divine right are irrelevant to this overriding consideration. Such arguments induced many royalists to recognize the Commonwealth and Protectorate; after 1660 they helped former supporters of the republic to accept the strange dispensation of the restoration.
In December 1659 the Quaker Richard Hubberthorne had rebuked Baptists for declaring that they would be obedient in civil matters to any government which was or might be established. ‘If Charles Stuart come’, Hubberthorne growled, ‘and establish popery and govern by tyranny, you have begged pardon by promising willingly to submit.’15 But Baptists may merely have been less frank than Quakers. Henry Danvers, for instance, a consistent plotter against the restored monarchy, nevertheless insisted that the saints must pray for Charles II even whilst openly and secretly resisting as Providence permitted.16 It sounds hypocritical, but, given the assumption that God for his own reasons has permitted the restoration of monarchy in England, this must be accepted so long as God appears to condone it. But it cannot be part of God’s long-term purpose to perpetuate an Antichristian regime. We must expect that an opportunity will be given to his servants to make a change though they must not try to force God’s hand by premature revolt.
After 1660 Quakers and others decided that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world. The powers that be must be obeyed unless their demands conflict with God’s, in which case resistance must be only passive. Bunyan differentiated himself from Quakers in theology; and he seems to have been closer to Danvers than to Quakers in his ideas after 1660. He protested his loyalty to the King whilst refusing to obey some of the government’s orders. As early as 1665, in The Holy City, Bunyan had anticipated that ‘in the latter day … God will take hold of kings’. ‘Some of them will lay their hand to help forward the work of this city.’17 So on Biblical and traditional protestant grounds he accepted that kings would cast down Antichrist. But it was not revealed which kings, or when.
Meanwhile Bunyan employed the well-established Parliamentarian distinction between the King and his evil advisers, some of whom, Bunyan thought, served Antichrist. In times of intensified persecution—the late 1660s, the mid-1670s, the early 1680s—the contrast between the King, whom perhaps God would one day enlighten, and local persecutors, who were ‘beyond the reach of God’s mercy’,18 must have supplied the only ray of hope in a gloomy world. Bunyan’s position was based on religious conviction; but it also made good sense tactically. He could protest his loyalty and adjure his readers to obey and suffer. God’s cause will prevail, even if not on earth in our time.
Bunyan’s writings make it clear how right Hobbes was to wish to discourage belief in rewards and punishments in the afterlife. For him this belief is almost a definition of sedition. For Bunyan—and for innumerable other dissenters—it was the strongest reason for refusing to compromise with the Antichristian state church.
The failure of the Rye House Plot in 1683 forced nonconformists to rethink their positions, just as the defeat of Venner’s rising had done in 1661. In Advice to Sufferers Bunyan gave ‘seasonable counsel’ to his co-religionists. He assumed that even severer persecution might unexpectedly strike, instancing the sudden execution of John the Baptist. Bunyan recommended extreme wariness ‘under the eyes of men’: do not ‘suffer thyself to be entangled in those snares that God hath suffered to be laid in the world for some’. ‘I am not for running myself into suffering.… Suffering for a truth ought to be cautiously took in hand, and as warily performed.’ But there are times when it may be necessary. ‘Oppression’, Bunyan agreed, ‘makes a wise man mad’; but the saints must beware of being drawn into conspiracies, whatever the provocation. ‘Let us mind our own business, and leave the magistrate to his work.’ When governors lay a yoke upon our necks, we must not murmur, wince, shrink, or complain; our own sins are no doubt to blame. ‘Discontent in the mind sometimes puts discontent into the mouth.’ There should be no talking against the government, no mocking of ‘men in place and power’, no ‘striving to deliver ourselves from the affliction’: the magistrate is God’s ordinance. To ‘fear God and honour the King … is the way to make the work of thy enemies hard.’
Bunyan’s concern is clear. Even if inferior magistrates ‘act beyond measure cruelly … I will … love them,… pray for them’; the magistrate may be ‘working out his own damnation by doing of thee good’. You cannot ‘cause that no more wicked men should anywhere be in power’. It is not much use appealing to ‘Kings and Parliaments and men in authority’. ‘None of these things can save thee from being devoured by the mouth of the sons of Belial.’ At all costs, a professor should not seek to be
revenged of him, that doth him ill. (You know the subject I am upon).… Men that are unquiet and discontented, and that seek revenge upon them that persecute them for their profession, … put themselves upon the brink of those ruins that others are further from.
The advice to discontented professors is to turn a Christian other cheek; but it is supported by prudential considerations. Bunyan added, very self-consciously:
I speak not these things, as knowing any that are disaffected to the government.… But because I appear thus in public, and know not into whose hands these lines may come, therefore thus I write. I speak it also to show my loyalty to the King … and my desire that all Christians should walk in ways of peace and truth.19
Although he professed to be talking about other countries when he said ‘Antichrist is yet alive’, Bunyan’s references to the Church of England are clear. ‘The government in all kingdoms is not yet managed with such light … as to let the saints serve God as he has said.’ And Bunyan discussed very seriously, like Milton in the De Doctrina Christiana, whether flight from persecution was ever justified, or whether one should always stand and face the worst. His advice was sensible:
If it is in thy heart to fly, fly: if it be in thy heart to stand, stand. Anything but a denial of the truth. He that flies … and he that stands has warrant to do so.… The man himself is best able to judge concerning his present strength.
Flight did not necessarily mean giving up: many protestants in the 1680s emigrated to the Netherlands and continued to plot from there against the English government. Those against whom Bunyan was severe were professors who made shameful concessions in face of persecution. In The Pharisee and the Publican (1685), after comparing publicans with ‘our informers and bum bailiffs’, Bunyan went on to ask, ‘what shall we think of compliance with a foreign prince to rob the church of God?’20 This last passage was omitted from editions published after 1688, presumably because it might be thought to refer to William III. But in 1685 could no one imagine Charles II or James II ‘complying with a foreign prince’ against the church of God?
In January 1685 the Bedfordshire JPs in general sessions ordered that the laws against nonconformists should forthwith be put into vigorous operation. This decision was printed as a broadside to give it the maximum publicity. Bishop Barlow, hitherto suspected of softness towards dissenters, publicly associated himself with the new policy. Then followed Monmouth’s rebellion in the summer of 1685, the last hopeless rising of the defenders of the Good Old Cause. On 23 December of that year Bunyan conveyed all his property to his wife, clearly as a safeguard against the possibility of being arrested or having to go underground. This action, and Bunyan’s worries about the ethics of fleeing from persecution, may have arisen from the accession of a popish King; but it relates also to the pugnacity of the local gentry and clergy. James was soon to offer himself as an ally against this personification of Antichrist.21
Charles II had been able to rule without Parliament for four years, thanks to the co-operation of the Tory gentry. But it was no longer possible to govern in that way indefinitely. That James II did not try to emulate his father’s personal rule of 1629–40 is evidence of the strength of Parliament. Since it could not be ignored, James tried to manipulate it, reversing the policy which his brother had so carefully evolved. Diabolus in The Holy War, ‘not thinking himself yet secure enough’, started ‘new-modelling the town’. In 1687 James, hoping to tame the Parliamentary electorate and so get Roman Catholics admitted to political and military offices, repurged corporations, this time replacing Anglicans with dissenters and others prepared to support repeal of the Test Act. Nearly half the JPs of England were displaced. In many counties between 75 and 90 per cent of JPs who had been in the commission since 1685 had been dismissed by 1688. These were ‘the prime of the gentry’; they were replaced by ‘ordinary persons both as to quality and estate (most of them dissenters).’ Early in 1688 fourteen men were dismissed from Bedford corporation, including Paul Cobb. Six or seven of the replacements were members of Bunyan’s congregation. The new Council set about a programme of reform, recovering from previous mayors moneys which had been diverted to the use of the oligarchy. It was as though the days of the Major-Generals had come again. This betrayal proved decisive in alienating even the most loyal Tories from the King. ‘Some would think one kick of the breach enough for a gentleman’, said Sir John Bramston, refusing to co-operate when James tried to reverse his policy again in October 1688.22
John Eston, son of a member of Bunyan’s church but himself a conforming Anglican, was prominent in these changes. His name was put forward as a potential MP for the town who would support repeal of the Test Act—together, ironically, with the name of Robert Audley, recently turned out of office. But Audley did not prove sufficiently compliant, and he was replaced by one of Bunyan’s former persecutors, William Foster, ‘ever … a close opposer of the ways of God’, and ready now to swallow his Anglican principles and do whatever the King wished. Bunyan—together with a former officer in the Parliamentarian army—was approached by a royal agent, we are told, who discussed with them the election of suitable MPs for Bedford. As in 1672, Bunyan would no doubt have welcomed toleration, even from a Roman Catholic king; he was unlikely not to favour repeal of the Test Act. He may have been momentarily seduced into considering the possibilities of active co-operation. Passive co-operation would have been in complete accordance with his proclaimed principles. William Penn seems to have had some such reasons for his active co-operation with James.23
How much further Bunyan would have gone we can only speculate. The record was muddied by his first biographers. Once the Glorious Revolution had happened it was impossible for them to admit that Bunyan could have been on the wrong side. ‘His piercing wit penetrated the veil’, wrote the Continuator of Bunyan’s life (Cokayne?). ‘He moved with caution and a holy fear’, but he ‘expressed his zeal with some weariness [wariness?]’ against James’s purges of corporations, ‘as foreseeing the bad consequence that would attend it’. And when ‘a great man … sent for him, as it is supposed, to give him a place of public trust, he would by no means come at him, but sent his excuse.’24 We may be sure of his ‘caution and holy fear’. But the Earl of Aylesbury (almost certainly the ‘great man’) was keeping James well-enough informed of Bedford politics for it to be unlikely that the offer of a job (if indeed there was such an offer) would be made without considerable thought and investigation. Many members of Bunyan’s congregation did in fact co-operate. But after Bunyan’s death and the landing of William the Liberator on the eighty-third anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s Day, Bunyan’s admirers would naturally credit him with having foreseen all.
The effect of James’s actions had been to introduce a large number of dissenters from a socially lower class into local government. The Earl of Aylesbury was appalled by what he had to do. He spoke with some distaste of the Deputy-Lieutenants whom he was ordered to create in Bedfordshire: ‘no one of the new ones had ever set foot in my house’, and he had no intention of inviting them now.25 In Bedford itself power had previously been shared between Anglicans and a nonconformist patriciate. James offended the dissenting establishment as well as the Anglican. Bunyan’s church was divided. Mr Mullet speculates that many dissenters had shed their political radicalism as they prospered under the Stuart monarchy. James was subverting ‘a fairly viable power-sharing system’ by an unprecedented degree of government intervention. Who could be sure it would be a once-only exercise of royal power?26
It is in this light that we should consider the revival of millenarianism in the late 1670s and 1680s which Barrie White has seen in Hanserd Knollys and some have seen in Bunyan. Millenarianism was a permanent background to Bunyan’s thought. In the 1650s he had believed the Second Coming to be imminent. But he came to recognize the folly of over-enthusiastic attempts to identify dates leading up to Christ’s return: all one could do was to study the signs. These he increasingly thought he could identify in the England of the 1680s. The Preface to Mr. Badman is almost hysterical about the flood of wickedness which ‘is like to drown our English world’, including some who ‘make a profession … on purpose that they may twist themselves into a trade’, and so enrich themselves ‘by the ruins of their neighbour’. He hinted at ‘the last times’, one of whose signs was ‘that professing men … shall be many of them base’. A Holy Life (1684) refers to ‘the dangerousness of the latter times’. There is much more evil in England now than there was under the rule of the Puritans. In The Jerusalem Sinner Bunyan reflected on the debauchery of youth, the decay of grace, and concluded: ‘Just before Jesus Christ came in the flesh, the world was degenerated as it is now.’27
So Bunyan must have become increasingly worried in the 1680s. The godly were always, by definition, a minority. The visible elect had, with great difficulty, organized themselves in congregations; yet these congregations bickered among themselves, and many of their members showed signs of backsliding and compromise with the world. Bunyan’s criticism of the defects of the visible elect extended even to ministers. So who is left to forward God’s cause? The failure of many of the godly may be a sign of the last times, but the Second Coming will have to be an extraneous act of divine power like Emanuel’s conquest of Mansoul, or Samson’s divinely inspired destruction of the Philistine aristocracy and clergy. The failure of Monmouth’s rebellion might suggest that Antichrist is not going to be overthrown by human effort alone: a miracle will be needed.28
In The Building of the House of God (1688) Bunyan repeated the cautions of Advice to Sufferers:
The godly are to be patient under persecution, not to resist. They must hold out, abide with the truth:
Then may we look for that reward
Promised at the coming of the Lord.29
In 1687–8 Bunyan might have envisaged the possibility of a permanent alliance between James II, English papists, and protestant dissenters which would have relieved the latter from persecution. The Popish Plot had suggested that there was little danger from English Catholics. Such an alliance seems with our hindsight a ridiculous prospect, but it might not have seemed so at the time. The gentry and the clergy rather than the monarchy had become for Bunyan the symbols of Antichrist. Such toleration as dissenters received after 1660 seemed to be owed to kings rather than to Parliament: the Popish Plot after all was believed to have been directed against the King. In these circumstances the traditional idea that kings of the earth would overthrow Antichrist might well revive. ‘’Tis a great encouragement to a man to hold up his head in the country’, Bunyan wrote in a work published in 1688, ‘when he has a special friend at the Court.’30
Alternatively, Bunyan was in close touch with dissenting leaders in London, and may have had some inkling of what was going on in the Netherlands. The question must remain open. Either way, it must have been clear to him that the godly alone could not overcome Antichrist. If persecution was to be ended, it must be by means of the power of the English state;31 and to that nonconformists could contribute, but by no manner of means decisively. So Bunyan’s tactics were from any point of view sensible: non-resistance, adherence to the truth, avoidance of scandal, readiness to co-operate with any state authority which would grant toleration.