4 - Bunyan as Writer:The Pilgrim's Progress

Summary

THE AUTHOR's APOLOGY FOR HIS BOOK

Bunyan was kept in the Bedford gaol for twelve years until 1672, when he was released and given a licence to preach. This must have seemed unlikely just a few years earlier when the full force of the Clarendon Code legislation hit home among the Nonconformists of Bedford as church meetings were disrupted and fellow dissenters imprisoned or driven undercover. The tide of persecution ebbed and flowed and imprisonment in the seventeenth century was not like modern incarceration. Harsh and unhealthy though his conditions were, Bunyan's incarceration did not, at first, cut him off from contact with the world. In the very early years he was sometimes allowed visitors, and, when his gaoler allowed it, left the gaol to conduct pastoral visits and even travelled to London to meet fellow Nonconformists. This more lenient regime ended with the Act of Uniformity in 1662 but by 1668, when Bunyan was released on what we would call ‘parole’, only to be rearrested for not conforming to ecclesiastical law, the mood towards religious dissenters was, if not softening, then modifying. In 1672 the Declaration of Indulgence suspended the execution of legislation punishing those who would not conform to the Church of England, including Roman Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists. While many saw this as a Stuart monarch favouring Roman Catholicism, it heralded a new era when men like Bunyan could not only be pardoned but apply for a licence to preach. Perhaps embarrassingly, given his vehement arguments with them, Bunyan was released as part of what was known as the ‘Quaker Pardon’.

Just before his release, Bunyan had been chosen by his church to be their pastor, and the congregation took advantage of the new context of 1672 to buy a barn to be converted into a meeting house. It is clear that by the time of his release Bunyan's standing was considerable not only within his own church but in the regional, and national Nonconformist networks. He helped to apply for a twenty-six licences for ministers to preach in the area and swiftly became the organizing force there. This can have been the only aspect of a nickname he seems to have acquired, ‘Bishop Bunyan’, that did not seem wholly inappropriate for a man of his religious and social views.