to have free exercise.  He “received the petition very mildly at her hand, telling her that he would do her and her husband the best good he could; but he feared he could do none.”  His brother judge’s reception of her petition was very different.  Having thrown it into the coach, Twisden “snapt her up,” telling her, what after all was no more than the truth, that her husband was a convicted person, and could not be released unless he would promise to obey the law and abstain from preaching.  On this the High Sheriff, Edmund Wylde, of Houghton Conquest, spoke kindly to the poor woman, and encouraged her to make a fresh application to the judges before they left the town.  So she made her way, “with abashed face and trembling heart,” to the large chamber at the Old Swan Inn at the Bridge Foot, where the two judges were receiving a large number of the justices 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, for what she deemed their “opposition to Christ and His gospel.”