yle supposes that
Bunyan was not with the attacking party, but was in the town as one of
the garrison, and was taken prisoner there. But this cannot be, for he
says expressly that he was one of the besiegers. Legend gathers freely
about eminent men, about men especially who are eminent in religion,
whether they are Catholic or Protestant. Lord Macaulay is not only
positive that the hero of the English Dissenters fought on the side of
the Commonwealth, but he says, without a word of caution on the
imperfection of the evidence, 'His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges,
and his Captain Credence, are evidently portraits of which the
originals were among those martial saints who fought and expounded in
Fairfax's army.'[2]

[Footnote 2: _Life of Bunyan_: Collected Works, vol. vii. p. 299.]

If the martial saints had impressed Bunyan so deeply, it is
inconceivable that he should have made no more allusion to his
military service than in this brief passage. He refers to the siege
and all connected with it merely as another occasion of his own
providential escapes from death.

Let the truth of this be what it may, the troop to which he belonged
was soon disbanded. He returned at the end of the year to his tinker's
work at Elstow, much as he had left it. The saints, if he had met with
saints, had not converted him. 'I sinned still,' he says, 'and grew
more and more rebellious against God and careless of my own
salvation.' An important change of another kind, however, lay before
him. Young as he was he married. His friends advised it, for they
thought that marriage would make him steady. The step was less
imprudent than it would have been had Bunyan been in a higher rank of
life, or had aimed at rising into it. The girl whom he chose was a
poor orphan, but she had been carefully and piously brought up, and
from her acceptance of him, something more may be inferred about his
character. Had he been a dissolute idle scamp, it is unlikely that a
respectable woman would have become his wife when he was a mere boy.
His sins, whatever these were, had not injured his outward
circumstances; it is clear that all along he worked skilfully and
industriously at his tinkering business. He had none of the habits
which bring men to beggary. From the beginning of his life to the end
of it he was a prudent, careful man, and, considering the station to
which he belonged, a very successful man.

'I lighted on a wife,' he says, 'whose father was co