us or any of us or
other his Majties Justice of Peace within the said County to answer
the premisses and further to doo and receave as to Lawe and Justice
shall appertaine and hereof you are not to faile. Given under our
handes and seales this ffourth day of March in the seven and twentieth
yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles
the Second A que Dni., juxta &c 1674

J Napier W Beecher G Blundell Hum: Monoux
Will ffranklin John Ventris
Will Spencer
Will Gery St Jo Chernocke Wm Daniels
T Browne W ffoster
Gaius Squire"

There would be little delay in the execution of the warrant.

John Bunyan was a marked man and an old offender, who, on his arrest,
would be immediately committed for trial. Once more, then, Bunyan became
a prisoner, and that, there can be little doubt, in his old quarters in
the Bedford gaol. Errors die hard, and those by whom they have been once
accepted find it difficult to give them up. The long-standing tradition
of Bunyan's twelve years' imprisonment in the little lock-up-house on the
Ouse bridge, having been scattered to the winds by the logic of fact and
common sense, those to whom the story is dear, including the latest and
ablest of his biographers, Dr. Brown, see in this second brief
imprisonment a way to rehabilitate it. Probability pointing to this
imprisonment as the time of the composition of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
they hold that on this occasion Bunyan was committed to the bridge-gaol,
and that he there wrote his immortal work, though they fail to bring
forward any satisfactory reasons for the change of the place of his
confinement. The circumstances, however, being the same, there can be no
reasonable ground for questioning that, as before, Bunyan was imprisoned
in the county gaol.

This last imprisonment of Bunyan's lasted only half as many months as his
former imprisonment had lasted years. At the end of six months he was
again a free man. His release was due to the good officers of Owen,
Cromwell's celebrated chaplain, with Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln. The
suspicion which hung over this intervention from its being erroneously
attributed to his release in 1672, three years before Barlow became a
bishop, has been dispelled by the recently discovered warrant. The dates
and circumstances are now found to tally. The warrant for Bunyan's
apprehension bears date March 4