John Bunyan in Prison
As a ‘common upholder of unlawful meetings and conventicles’, Monica Furlong remembers, the great preacher was imprisoned for twelve years in 1660.
The decade of the 1650s had taken John Bunyan through intense personal storms and brought him to a kind of harbour in Bedford. But another kind of storm was about to strike him and many like him.
Cromwell had died in 1658 and had been succeeded as Protector by his son Richard. The talk was of Restoration of the Monarchy, a move the Nonconformists knew they would have reason to fear. Charles II came to the throne in May 1660. It was a black year for the Bedford Meeting. After John Gifford had died in 1655, he had been succeeded both as Minister of the Puritan Independent congregation and as Rector of St Johns by John Burton, Cromwell’s own nominee.
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