of the peace and other gentry of the county. Addressing Sir Matthew Hale
she said, "My lord, I make bold to come again to your lordship to know
what may be done with my husband." Hale received her with the same
gentleness as before, repeated what he had said previously, that as her
husband had been legally convicted, and his conviction was recorded,
unless there was something to undo that he could do her no good. Twisden,
on the other hand, got violently angry, charged her brutally with making
poverty her cloak, told her that her husband was a breaker of the peace,
whose doctrine was the doctrine of the devil, and that he ran up and down
and did harm, while he was better maintained by his preaching than by
following his tinker's craft. At last he waxed so violent that "withal
she thought he would have struck her." In the midst of all his coarse
abuse, however, Twisden hit the mark when he asked: "What! you think we
can do what we list?" And when we find Hale, confessedly the soundest
lawyer of the time, whose sympathies were all with the prisoner, after
calling for the Statute Book, thus summing up the matter: "I am sorry,
woman, that I can do thee no good. Thou must do one of these three
things, viz., either apply thyself to the king, or sue out his pardon, or
get a writ of error," which last, he told her, would be the cheapest
course--we may feel sure that Bunyan's Petition was not granted because
it could not be granted legally. The blame of his continued imprisonment
lay, if anywhere, with the law, not with its administrators. This is not
always borne in mind as it ought to be. As Mr. Froude remarks, "Persons
often choose to forget that judges are sworn to administer the law which
they find, and rail at them as if the sentences which they are obliged by
their oath to pass were their own personal acts." It is not surprising
that Elizabeth Bunyan was unable to draw this distinction, and that she
left the Swan chamber in tears, not, however, so much at what she thought
the judges' "hardheartedness to her and her husband," as at the thought
of "the sad account such poor creatures would have to give" hereafter,