Jailed for the Gospel’s Sake
Charles II’s restoration as England’s monarch was accompanied with the immediate persecutions of nonconformists throughout the British Empire. On November 12, 1660, Bunyan stood before the local magistrate at Lower Samsell in South Bedfordshire, accused of leading a nonconformist religious gathering. His plan had been to preach out of doors that very day. Warned of an imminent arrest, Bunyan nevertheless kept the appointment and was summarily arrested. “The local magistrate offered him a way out: if he would go home and not preach anymore, he would not be prosecuted.”[1] Because he would not promise to refrain from preaching, he was imprisoned in the county jail in January of 1661. He wrote,
At the sessions after I was indicted for an upholder and maintainer of unlawful assemblies and conventicles, and for not conforming to the national worship of the church of England; and after some conference there with the justices, they taking my plain dealing with them for a confession, as they termed it, of the indictment, did sentence me to a perpetual banishment, because I refused to conform. So being again delivered up to the jailer’s hands, I was had home to prison, and there have lain now complete twelve years, waiting to see what God would suffer these men to do with me.[2]
Upon hearing the news of her husband’s incarceration, Elizabeth endured premature labor which ended in the newborn’s death.
Initially sentenced to three months in prison, Bunyan was never formally charged.[3] He was actually found guilty of the almost forgotten Conventicle Act of 1593, of “perniciously abstaining from coming to church to hear divine service, and for being a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom.”[4] The magistrate decided that Bunyan should be held for the full three months authorized by the Conventicle Act, after which, if then he should not agree to quit preaching, he should be banished the realm. Thus began the most well-known and industrious twelve-year period of Bunyan’s life; a time which would create world-wide and enduring fame for the tinker from Bedford.