Transcribed from the 1888 Walter Scott edition , emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
John Bunyan, the author of the book which has probably passed throughmore editions, had a greater number of readers, and been translatedinto more languages than any other book in the English tongue, was bornin the parish of Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in the latter part of theyear 1628, and was baptized in the parish church of the village on thelast day of November of that year.
The year of John Bunyan’s birth was a momentous one both forthe nation and for the Church of England. Charles I., by the extortedassent to the Petition of Right, had begun reluctantly to strip himselfof the irresponsible authority he had claimed, and had taken the firststep in the struggle between King and Parliament which ended in theHouse of Commons seating itself in the place of the Sovereign. Wentworth (better known as Lord Strafford) had finally left the Commons,baffled in his nobly-conceived but vain hope of reconciling the monarchand his people, and having accepted a peerage and the promise of thePresidency of the Council of the North, was foreshadowing his policyof “Thorough,” which was destined to bring both his ownhead and that of his weak master to the block. The Remonstranceof Parliament against the toleration of Roman Catholics and the growthof Arminianism, had been presented to the indignant king, who, wilfullyblinded, had replied to it by the promotion to high and lucrative postsin the Church of the very men against whom it was chiefly directed. The most outrageous upholders of the royal prerogative and the irresponsiblepower of the sovereign, Montagu and Mainwaring, had been presented,the one to the see of Chichester, the other—the impeached andcondemned of the Commons—to the rich living Montagu’s consecrationhad vacated. Montaigne, the licenser of Mainwaring’s incriminatedsermon, was raised to the Archbishopric of York, while Neile and Laud,who were openly named in the Remonstrance as the “troublers ofthe English Israel,” were rewarded respectively with the richsee of Durham and the important and deeply-dyed Puritan diocese of London. Charles was steadily sowing the wind, and destined to reap the whirlwindwhich was to sweep him from his throne, and involve the monarchy andthe Church in the same overthrow. Three months before Bunyan’sbirth Buckingham, on the eve of his departure for the beleaguered andfamine-stricken city of Rochelle, sanguinely hoping to conclude a peacewith the French king beneath its walls, had been struck down by theknife of a fanatic, to the undisguised joy of the majority of the nation,bequeathing a legacy of failure and disgrace in the fall of the Protestantstronghold on which the eyes of Europe had been so long anxiously fixed.
The year was closing gloomily, with ominous forecasts of the cominghurricane, when the babe who was destined to leave so imperishable aname in English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottagein an obscure Bedfordshire village. His father, Thomas Bunyan,though styling himself in his will by the more dignified title of “brazier,”was more properly what is known as a “tinker”; “amender of pots and kettles,” according to Bunyan’s contemporarybiographer, Charles Doe. He was not, however, a mere tramp orvagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually are still, much lessa disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare’s ChristopherSly, but a man with a recognized calling, having a settled home andan acknowledged position in the village community of Elstow. Thefamily was of long standing there, but had for some generations beengoing down in the world. Bunyan’s grandfather, Thomas Bunyan,as we learn from his still extant will, carried on the occup