But how did Mrs. Bunyan and her family live while the husband and father was in prison and so unable to provide for them?
Their Christian friends, and also some of their neighbors, were kind and did all in their power to help them. But they were themselves poor and could not support the family. It must often have grieved Bunyan deeply to see how pale and thin his children were looking, and to notice that their clothes, though always clean and neatly mended, could not keep them warm.
What could he do to earn even a few pence? He did not know any trade but his own, and in prison he could not work at that. Yet he felt that he must and ought to do something to help to provide food for his family. He could prepare shoe laces. A very small outlay would buy tape and braid enough to enable him to make a beginning. But how should he dispose of them? For that he must count upon the help of his much-loved blind daughter Mary. With her youngest brother Joseph, a child of six years old, as a guide, she could go from house to house offering them for sale. It seemed hard to send a timid, delicate girl like Mary on such an errand, but her father knew that she would do her best to find customers.
It was not long before the children were well-known in the streets and lanes of Bedford and its neighborhood, as day by day with varying success they tried to sell the laces their father had gotten ready for them. Sometimes Mary's gentle manner and pleading voice would arouse a feeling of compassion, and they would find a buyer; at others they would meet with a rough refusal, and then with her sightless eyes filled with tears Mary would try to draw her little brother past. Joseph, who was not easily discouraged, would sometimes add to his sister's timid plea such words as, "Please do buy Mary's laces; if you don't we shall starve, for we have no money to buy bread with."
Though during the first years of Bunyan's imprisonment he had been allowed a good deal of liberty, owing to the kindness of the head jailer, it was not to be continued. Many of his friends had urged him, if possible, to obtain leave of absence for two or three days, believing that if he could go to London and himself present a petition to the king, he might be set at liberty. Leave was granted, and there is every reason to believe that the journey was taken with no other object. But false reports were spread by his enemies, some even saying that his intention was to stir up a rebellion against the king. Though he was himself a loyal and peaceable subject, he did not get an opportunity of presenting his petition, and the only result of his journey appeared to be that his friend, the head jailer, received official notice during his absence that the prisoners committed to his charge were not to be allowed under any pretext to leave the prison.
Trying as this order must have seemed to Bunyan, he soon found that he had more leisure for writing. It was during the later years of his imprisonment that his great work, The Pilgrim's Progress, was written. He also wrote Grace Abounding, in which, in simple, though well-chosen words, he told the story of his own conversion. His Holy War was also written while he was in prison, and one or two other, less-known works.
After he had spent six years in Bedford jail he was granted a short interval of liberty, but he was again arrested on the old charge that he would not give up preaching the gospel. In the year of the great fire of London he was again sent to prison, where he remained another six years.
Early in 1672 his imprisonment came to an end. The long-closed gates were opened, and he went forth a free man, rejoicing in what he held dearer than personal liberty-freedom to preach the gospel.
But little is known of the closing years of Bunyan's life. He had always tried to be a peacemaker, and his last effort to persuade a father to forgive a son who had, he thought, greatly offended him brought on the illness that a few days later caused his death. The father pardoned the son, and, rejoicing in the success of his mission, he mounted his horse and began a ride of forty miles from Reading to London. The rain fell in torrents, and when he reached his journey's end he was soaked, chilled and exhausted. He only lived for two weeks after, and on August 31, 1688, in the sixtieth year of his age, the Lord put him peacefully to sleep.