life. In
the previous June his mother had died, her death being followed within a
month by that of his sister Margaret. Before another month was out, his
father, as we have already said, had married again, and whether the new
wife had proved the proverbial _injusta noverca_ or not, his home must
have been sufficiently altered by the double, if we may not say triple,
calamity, to account for his leaving the dull monotony of his native
village for the more stirring career of a soldier. Which of the two
causes then distracting the nation claimed his adherence, Royalist or
Parliamentarian, can never be determined. As Mr. Froude writes, "He does
not tell us himself. His friends in after life did not care to ask him
or he to inform them, or else they thought the matter of too small
importance to be worth mentioning with exactness." The only evidence is
internal, and the deductions from it vary with the estimate of the
counter-balancing probabilities taken by Bunyan's various biographers.
Lord Macaulay, whose conclusion is ably, and, we think, convincingly
supported by Dr. Brown, decides in favour of the side of the Parliament.
Mr. Froude, on the other hand, together with the painstaking Mr. Offor,
holds that "probability is on the side of his having been with the
Royalists." Bedfordshire, however, was one of the "Associated Counties"
from which the Parliamentary army drew its main strength, and it was shut
in by a strong line of defence from any combination with the Royalist
army. In 1643 the county had received an order requiring it to furnish
"able and armed men" to the garrison at Newport Pagnel, which was then
the base of operations against the King in that part of England. All
probability therefore points to John Bunyan, the lusty young tinker of
Elstow, the leader in all manly sports and adventurous enterprises among
his mates, and probably caring very little on what side he fought, having
been drafted to Newport to serve under Sir Samuel Luke, of Cople, and
other Parliamentary commanders. The place of the siege he refers to is
equally undeterminable. A tradition current within a few years of
Bunyan's death, which Lord Macaulay rather rashly invests with the
certainty of fact, names Leicester. The only direct evidence for this is
the statement of an anonymous biographer, who professes to have been a
personal friend of Bunyan's, that he was present at the siege of
Leicester, in 1645, as a soldier in the Parlia