Session, and be ruled by good advice.  The gaoler here put in his word in support of Cobb’s arguments:  “Indeed, sir, I hope he will be ruled.”  But all Cobb’s friendly reasonings and expostulations were ineffectual to bend Bunyan’s sturdy will.  He would yield to no-one in his loyalty to his sovereign, and his readiness to obey the law.  But, he said, with a hairsplitting casuistry he would have indignantly condemned in others, the law provided two ways of obeying, “one to obey actively, and if his conscience forbad that, then to obey passively; to lie down and suffer whatever they might do to him.”  The Clerk of the Peace saw that it was no use to prolong the argument any further.  “At this,” writes Bunyan, “he sat down, and said no more; which, when he had done, I did thank him for his civil and meek discoursing with me; and so we parted:  O that we might meet in heaven!”

The Coronation which took place very soon after this interview, April 13, 1661, afforded a prospect of release without unworthy submission.  The customary proclamation, which allowed prisoners under sentence for any offence short of felony to sue out a pardon for twelve months from that date, suspended the execution of the sentence of banishment and gave a hope that the prison doors might be opened for him.  The local authorities taking no steps to enable him to profit by the royal clemency, by inserting his name in the list of pardonable offenders, his second wife, Elizabeth, travelled up to London,—­no slight venture for a young woman not so long raised from the sick bed on which the first news of her husband’s arrest had laid her,—­and with dauntless courage made her way to the House of Lords, where she presented her petition to one of the peers, whom she calls Lord Barkwood, but whom unfortunately we cannot now identify.  He treated her kindly, and showed her petition to other peers, who appear to have been acquainted with the circumstances of Bunyan’s case.  They replied that the matter was beyond their province, and that the question of her husband’s release was committed to the judges at the next assizes.  These assizes were held at Bedford in the following August.  The judges of the circuit were Twisden and Sir Matthew Hale.  From the latter—­the friend of Richard Baxter, who, as Burnet records, took great care to “cover the Nonconformists, whom he thought too hardly used, all he could from the seventies some designed; and discouraged those who were inclined to stretch the laws too much against them”—­Bunyan’s case would be certain to meet with sympathetic consideration.  But being set to administer the law, not according to his private wishes, but according to its letter and its spirit, he was powerless to relieve him.  Three several times did Bunyan’s noble-hearted wife present her husband’s petition that he might be heard, and his case taken impartially into consideration.  But the law forbad what Burnet calls Sir Matthew Hale’s “tender and compassionate nature”