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John Bunyan, the fifteen-year husband of Elizabeth Bunyan, was having an adulterous relationship with the twenty-two year old Agnes Beaumont - or at least that is what Anthony Lane, local Bedfordshire Anglican curate, told others on a Friday in February of 1674. Lane had stared 'as if he would have stared his eyes out' as Bunyan took Agnes for a ride on his horse.1 Agnes was a devout Puritan who wanted to partake of the Lord's Supper, which would be administered that Friday at a service led by Bunyan in Gamlingay. However, she lived seven miles south in Edworth. As she was wondering if there were any possible way to get there, Bunyan happened to arrive at her father's farm on horseback. She was too embarrassed to ask Bunyan herself for transportation, so she convinced her brother John to ask him on her behalf. Bunyan declined, but Agnes and her brother John implored him repeatedly and eventually he gave in.
The incident gave Bunyan's enemies an effective story to complement the rumours that were circulating about him. Richard Greaves claims that accusations of Bunyan's participation in sexual scandals had been in existence long before the Agnes Beaumont episode in 1674.2 He cites Grace Abounding as one piece of evidence, yet it is not in the first edition in 1666, but in the fifth edition in 1680 that Bunyan acknowledged false reports 'that I had my Misses, my Whores, my Bastards, yea two wives at once, and the like'.3 Apart from citing Beaumont's account of her father's disdain for Bunyan's reputation for 'scurrilous' conduct, Greaves provides no evidence that Bunyan was considered an ethical antinomian before the 1670s.
Instead, Bunyan's reputation as an ethical and theological antinomian was engineered at the end of his preaching career. Richard Baxter waited until 1690 to accuse him of theological antinomianism. Baxter, only too concerned about the licentiousness of antinomians and always on the lookout for them, put Bunyan in the company of a well- known antinomian, John Saltmarsh. In his book The Scripture Gospel Defended (1690), Baxter listed among the antinomian apologists,
such men as prefaced the Book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity, which on pretence of Moderation is Antinomian or Libertine, and very injudicious and unsound: And...