THE subtle cunning with which Satan seeks to blacken the character of God’s people so that he may bemire their reputation until scarcely a shred of it is clean, and thus render their usefulness in the world to be of a negligible quantity is eminently illustrated in an incident in connection with John Bunyan’s life. It was well planned; there was a Satanic cunningness in the way in which each part of the story fitted in, and a masterly skill in enlisting the services of some of God’s people in the plot. Its effectiveness had only one serious, fatal defect, which marred it from beginning to end—it was a loathsome lie. And all its apparent verisimilitude
could not stand up against that damaging fact. The story as told by one of the most recent of Bunyan’s biographers may be quoted here:—”Agnes Beaumont, a girl of twenty-one, and a member of one of the rural congregations under Bunyan’s charge, kept house for her father, a well-to-do widower living in Edworth, Bedfordshire. Suit was paid her by a local lawyer by the name of Farry (or Farrow), who engaged her father’s interest and induced him to make over the bulk of his property to the girl. Puritan maidens, however, were expected to marry within the faith, and Farry was very much a man of the world. Bunyan, either by general exhortation or direct pastoral counsel, opposed the match. Farry was rejected, and vowed vengeance. Beaumont, also, thwarted in his domestic plans, was inflamed against Bunyan, and forbade Agnes’ associating with the Bedford Meeting.
This was the situation when one winter’s day, Bunyan mounted horse to ride to Gamlingay, within walking distance of Edworth, to conduct a preaching service. On the way he passed the house of Agnes’ married brother, who, with his wife, was riding pillion to the same meeting. Agnes was on the road, set upon going also, but disappointed of her means of conveyance, and held up by the drifted snow. She entreated Bunyan to let her ride behind him. He objected: “Your father,” he said, “will be grievous angry;” but in the end he was persuaded. On the road they met a local clergyman, who recognized them, and was ready enough to raise “a vile report.” Across the fields the elder Beaumont also seems to have espied them; and Agnes, returning after the preaching, “wet with snow,” found herself locked out of her father’s house. She spent the night in the barn, where next morning her angry father found her, “the snow frozen to her shoes and garments.” There was a stormy scene, and the girl was finally admitted to the house only on condition that she would go no more to meeting. That night her father was taken with a seizure. Agnes, alone with him in the house, ran barefoot through the snow to fetch her brother. When they reached the house Beaumont was dead.
In a rural community, divided as bitterly as any village on the Irish border in the grimmest days of the Ulster Covenant, the news was quickly on the tongues of gossips and scandalmongers, and the malice which in earlier years could invent the tale that Bunyan was a
highwayman or a Jesuit was ready enough to break out into new inventions now. But it was left for Farry himself to spread the diabolical report that “Agnes had poisoned her father, and that Bunyan had given her the stuff to do it with; that it would be ‘petit treason’ and that she must be burned. ‘Petit Treason,’ says Chamberlayne in his ‘Angliæ Notitiæ,’ ‘is either when a servant killeth his master or mistress, or a wife killeth her husband, or a clergyman his prelate to whom he oweth obedience; and for this crime the punishment is to be drawn and to be hanged. The punishment for a woman convicted of high treason or petit treason is all one, and that is to be drawn and burnt alive.”
The story set the countryside in an uproar. Beaumont’s funeral was postponed, and a Coroner’s inquest called. We shall not easily imagine what Bunyan must have passed through during those intervening days. He had long been a marked man. He knew the relentlessness of the enemy. He was full of sensibility. He knew himself to be the object of an active hatred which, if it could, would send him to the gallows, not as a heretic or seditionist, but as a criminal branded with the basest crimes. He knew that the winds of rumour were blowing the scandal far and wide, and rolling out the cloud of suspicion and infamy over his family, his church, and the cause of religion. Something of all this Bunyan had to endure, and it was not in human nature that he should pass through it unmoved. We can see now that for him this crisis and unsealing of the deeps meant presently a fresh up-burst of creative activity—sent him back to renew (as we shall see) his dream of the difficult pilgrimage, of encounters with giants, and the mortal perils which beset the unwary by the way; but it was not for him to take comfort of it at the time.
As we know, the plot miserably collapsed. At the Coroner’s inquest the medical evidence showed that Beaumont had died from natural causes, and Farry was able to produce no tittle of evidence for his charges. “You, sir,” said the Coroner, “who have defamed this young woman in this public manner, endeavouring to take away her good name, yea, her life also, if you could, ought to make it your business now to establish her reputation . . . and if you were to give her five hundred pounds it would not make amends.” For the rest, Bunyan found himself “stabbed broad awake.” He looked anew to the buckling of his armour, and took a fresh grip of his sword. If we may anticipate the
suggestion of the next chapter, it was soon after this that he wrote in his Dream: “For such footmen as thee and I are, let us never desire”—like Job’s war-horse—”to meet with an enemy, nor vaunt as if we could do better, when we hear of others that they have been foiled, nor be tickled at the thoughts of our own manhood, for such commonly come by the worst when tried. . . . When, therefore, we hear that such robberies are done on the King’s highway, two things become us to do: first, to go out harnessed, and to be sure to take a shield with us. . . . ‘Tis good also that we desire of the King a convoy, yea that He will go with us Himself. . . . O, my brother, if He will but go along with us, what need we be afraid of ten thousands that shall set themselves against us, but without Him, the proud helpers fall under the slain. I, for my part, have been in the fray before now, and though, through the goodness of Him that is best, I am as you see, alive, yet I cannot boast of my manhood. Glad shall I be if I meet with no more such brunts, though I fear we are not got beyond all danger. However, since the Lion and the Bear hath not as yet devoured me, I hope God will also deliver us from the next uncircumcised Philistine” (Griffith’s “John Bunyan,” pp. 210-214).