BUNTING, WILLIAM MACLARDIE (1805–1866), Wesleyan minister, the eldest son of the Rev. Dr. d|Jabez|Bunting [q. v.] by his first wife, Sarah Maclardie, was born at Manchester on 23 Nov. 1805. He was educated at the Wesleyan schools at Woodhouse Grove, near Leeds, and Kingswood, and at the grammar school of St. Saviour's, Southwark, under Dr. William Fancourt, and at the early age of eighteen began his course as a preacher. In 1824 he was admitted a probationer, and in 1828 was ‘received in full connexion with the conference.’ He continued his itinerancy until his forty-fourth year, when his health broke down, and he became a supernumerary minister. For many years he took an active part in the proceedings of the Evangelical Alliance, and was for some time one of its honorary secretaries. He held a similar post in the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews. He died at his residence, Highgate Rise, 13 Nov. 1866. He was a contributor to the ‘Wesleyan Methodist Magazine,’ and in 1842 edited the ‘Select Letters of Mrs. Agnes Bulmer, author of Messiah's Kingdom, &c.’ After his death a selection of his sermons, letters, hymns, and miscellaneous poetical writings was published, with a portrait, and a biographical introduction by his younger brother, in which his character as a preacher, full of thought and tenderness, and a man of strong personal conviction, yet of liberality of mind and action, is sketched.
[Memorials of the late Rev. William M. Bunting, being selections from his sermons, letters, and poems, edited by the Rev. G. Stringer Rowe, with a Biographical Introduction by Thomas Percival Bunting, 1870.]
BUNYAN, JOHN (1628–1688), author of the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' 'Holy War,' 'Grace abounding,' &c., was born at the village of Elstow, Bedfordshire, a little more than a mile south of the town of Bedford, in November 1628. His baptism is recorded in the parish register of Elstow on the 30th of that month. The family of Buignon, Buniun, Bonyon, or Binyan (the name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways), had been settled in the county of Bedford from very early times. Their first place of settlement appears to have been the parish of Pulloxhill, about nine miles from John Bunyan's native village. In 1199 one William Buniun held land at Wilstead, a mile from Elstow. In 1327 one of the same name, probably his descendant, William Boynon, was living at the hamlet of Harrowden, at the south-eastern boundary of the parish, close to the very spot which tradition marks out as John Bunyan's birthplace, and which the local names of 'Bunyan's End,' 'Bunyan's Walk,' and 'Farther Bunyan's' (as old, certainly, as the middle of the sixteenth century) connect beyond all question with the Bunyan family. A field known as 'Bonyon's End' was sold in 1548 by 'Thomas Bonyon of Elstow, labourer,' son of William Bonyon, to Robert Curtis, and other portions of his ancestral properly gradually passed to other purchasers, little being left to descend to John Bunyan's grandfather, Thomas Bunyan (d. 1641), save the 'cottage or tenement' in which he carried on the occupation of 'petty chapman,' or small retail trader. This, in his still extant will, he bequeathed to his second wife, Ann, and after her death to her stepson Thomas and her son Edward in equal shares. Thomas, the elder son, the father of the subject of this biography, was married three times, the first time (10 Jan. 1623) when only in his twentieth year, his second and third marriages occurring within a few months of his being left a widower. John Bunyan was the first child by his second marriage, which took place on 23 May 1627. The maiden name of his second wife was Margaret Bentley. She, like her husband, was a native of Elstow, and was born in the same year with him, 1603. A year after her marriage, her sister Rose became the wife of her husband's younger half-brother, Edward. The will of John Bunyan's maternal grand-mother, Mary Bentley (d. 1632), with its 'Dutch-like picture of an Elstow cottage interior two hundred and fifty years ago,' proves (J. Brown, Biography of John Bunyan, to which we are indebted for all these family details) that his mother 'came not of the very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet decent and worthy in their ways.' John Bunyan's father, Thomas Bunyan, was what we should now call a whitesmith, a maker and mender of pots and kettles. In his will he designates himself a 'brasier;' his son, who carried on the same trade and adapted the same designation when describing himself, is more usually styled a 'tinker.' Neither of them, however, belonged to the vagrant tribe, but had a settled home at Elstow, where their forge and workshop were, though they
