# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fuller, Thomas

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​FULLER, THOMAS (1608–1661), English divine and historian, eldest son of Thomas Fuller, rector of Aldwincle St Peter’s, Northamptonshire, was born at his father’s rectory and was baptized on the 19th of June 1608. Dr John Davenant, bishop of Salisbury, was his uncle and godfather. According to Aubrey, Fuller was “a boy of pregnant wit.” At thirteen he was admitted to Queens’ College, Cambridge, then presided over by Dr John Davenant. His cousin, Edward Davenant, was a tutor in the same college. He was apt and quick in study; and in Lent 1624–1625 he became B.A. and in July 1628 M.A. Being overlooked in an election of fellows of his college, he was removed by Bishop Davenant to Sidney Sussex College, November 1628. In 1630 he received from Corpus Christi College the curacy of St Benet’s, Cambridge.
Fuller’s quaint and humorous oratory soon attracted attention. He published in 1631 a poem on the subject of David and Bathsheba, entitled David’s Hainous Sinne, Heartie Repentance, Heavie Punishment. In June of the same year his uncle gave him a prebend in Salisbury, where his father, who died in the following year, held a canonry. The rectory of Broadwindsor, Dorsetshire, then in the diocese of Bristol, was his next preferment (1634); and on the 11th of June 1635 he proceeded B.D. At Broadwindsor he compiled The Historie of the Holy Warre (1639), a history of the crusades, and The Holy State and the Prophane State (1642). This work describes the holy state as existing in the family and in public life, gives rules of conduct, model “characters” for the various professions and profane biographies. It was perhaps the most popular of all his writings. He was in 1640 elected proctor for Bristol in the memorable convocation of Canterbury, which assembled with the Short Parliament. On the sudden dissolution of the latter he joined those who urged that convocation should likewise dissolve as usual. That opinion was overruled; and the assembly continued to sit by virtue of a royal writ. Fuller has left in his Church History a valuable account of the proceedings of this synod, for sitting in which he was fined £200, which, however, was never exacted. His first published volume of sermons appeared in 1640 under the title of Joseph’s party-coloured Coat, which contains many of his quaint utterances and odd conceits. His grosser mannerisms of style, derived from the divines of the former generation, disappeared for the most part in his subsequent discourses.
About 1640 he had married Eleanor, daughter of Hugh Grove of Chisenbury, Wiltshire. She died in 1641. Their eldest child, John, baptized at Broadwindsor by his father, 6th June 1641, was afterwards rector of Sidney Sussex College, edited the Worthies of England, 1662, and became rector of Great Wakering, Essex, where he died in 1687.
At Broadwindsor, early in the year 1641, Thomas Fuller, his curate Henry Sanders, the church wardens, and others, nine persons altogether, certified that their parish, represented by 242 grown-up male persons, had taken the Protestation ordered by the speaker of the Long Parliament. Fuller was not formally dispossessed of his living and prebend on the triumph of the Presbyterian party, but he relinquished both preferments about this time. For a short time he preached with success at the Inns of Court, and thence removed, at the invitation of the master of the Savoy (Dr Balcanqual) and the brotherhood of that foundation, to be lecturer at their chapel of St Mary Savoy. Some of the best discourses of the witty preacher were delivered at the Savoy to audiences which extended into the chapel-yard. In one he set forth with searching and truthful minuteness the hindrances to peace, and urged the signing of petitions to the king at Oxford, and to the parliament, to continue their care in advancing an accommodation. In his Appeal of Injured Innocence Fuller says that he was once deputed to carry a petition to the king at Oxford. This has been identified with a petition entrusted to Sir Edward Wardour, clerk of the pells, Dr Dukeson, “Dr Fuller,” and four or five others from the city of Westminster and the parishes contiguous to the Savoy. A pass was granted by the House of Lords, on the 2nd of January 1643, for an equipage of two coaches, four or six horses and eight or ten attendants. On the arrival of the deputation at Uxbridge, on the 4th of January, officers of the Parliamentary army stopped the coaches and searched the gentlemen; and they found upon the latter “two scandalous books arraigning the proceedings of the House,” and letters with ciphers to Lord Viscount Falkland and the Lord Spencer. Ultimately a joint order of both Houses remanded the party; and Fuller and his friends suffered a brief imprisonment. The Westminster Petition, notwithstanding, reached the king’s hands; and it was published with the royal reply (see J. E. Bailey, Life of Thomas Fuller, pp. 245 et seq.). When it was expected, three months later, that a favourable result would attend the negotiations at Oxford, Fuller preached a sermon at Westminster Abbey, on the 27th of March 1643, on the anniversary of Charles I.’s accession, on the text, “Yea, let him take all, so my Lord the King return in peace.” On Wednesday, the 26th of July, he preached on church reformation, satirizing the religious reformers, and maintaining that only the Supreme Power could initiate reforms.
He was now obliged to leave London, and in August 1643 he joined the king at Oxford. He lived in a hired chamber at Lincoln College for 17 weeks. Thence he put forth a witty and effective reply to John Saltmarsh, who had attacked his views on ecclesiastical reform. Fuller subsequently published by royal request a sermon preached on the 10th of May 1644, at St Mary’s, Oxford, before the king and Prince Charles, called Jacob’s Vow.
The spirit of Fuller’s preaching, always characterized by calmness and moderation, gave offence to the high royalists, who charged him with lukewarmness in their cause. To silence unjust censures he became chaplain to the regiment of Sir Ralph Hopton. For the first five years of the war, as he said, when excusing the non-appearance of his Church History, “I had little list or leisure to write, fearing to be made a history, and shifting daily for my safety. All that time I could not live to study, who did only study to live.” After the defeat of Hopton at Cheriton Down, Fuller retreated to Basing House. He took an active part in its defence, and his life with the troops caused him to be afterwards regarded as one of “the great cavalier parsons.” In his marches with his regiment round about Oxford and in the west, he devoted much time to the collection of details, ​ from churches, old buildings, and the conversation of ancient gossips, for his Church-History and Worthies of England. He compiled in 1645 a small volume of prayers and meditations,—the Good Thoughts in Bad Times,—which, set up and printed in the besieged city of Exeter, whither he had retired, was called by himself “the first fruits of Exeter press.” It was inscribed to Lady Dalkeith, governess to the infant princess, Henrietta Anne (b. 1644), to whose household he was attached as chaplain. The corporation gave him the Bodleian lectureship on the 21st of March 1645/6, and he held it until the 17th of June following, soon after the surrender of the city to the parliament. The Fear of losing the Old Light (1646) was his farewell discourse to his Exeter friends. Under the Articles of Surrender Fuller made his composition with the government at London, his “delinquency” being that he had been present in the king’s garrisons. In Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician (1646), partly authentic and partly fictitious, he satirized the leaders of the Revolution; and for the comfort of sufferers by the war he issued (1647) a second devotional manual, entitled Good Thoughts in Worse Times, abounding in fervent aspirations, and drawing moral lessons in beautiful language out of the events of his life or the circumstances of the time. In grief over his losses, which included his library and manuscripts (his “upper and nether millstone”), and over the calamities of the country, he wrote his work on the Cause and Cure of a Wounded Conscience (1647). It was prepared at Boughton House in his native county, where he and his son were entertained by Edward Lord Montagu, who had been one of his contemporaries at the university and had taken the side of the parliament.
For the next few years of his life Fuller was mainly dependent upon his dealings with booksellers, of whom he asserted that none had ever lost by him. He made considerable progress in an English translation from the MS. of the Annales of his friend Archbishop Ussher. Amongst his benefactors it is curious to find Sir John Danvers of Chelsea, the regicide. Fuller in 1647 began to preach at St Clement’s, Eastcheap, and elsewhere in the capacity of lecturer. While at St Clement’s he was suspended; but speedily recovering his freedom, he preached wherever he was invited. At Chelsea, where also he occasionally officiated, he covertly preached a sermon on the death of Charles I., but he did not break with his Roundhead patrons. James Hay, 2nd earl of Carlisle, made him his chaplain, and presented him in 1648 or 1649 to the curacy of Waltham Abbey. His possession of the living was in jeopardy on the appointment of Cromwell’s “Tryers”; but he evaded their inquisitorial questions by his ready wit. He was not disturbed at Waltham in 1655, when the Protector’s edict prohibited the adherents of the late king from preaching. Lionel, 3rd earl of Middlesex, who lived at Copt Hall, near Waltham, gave him what remained of the books of the lord treasurer his father; and through the good offices of the marchioness of Hertford, part of his own pillaged library was restored to him. Fuller was thus able to prosecute his literary labours, producing successively his descriptive geography of the Holy Land, called A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), and his Church-History of Britain (1655), from the birth of Jesus Christ until the year 1648. With the Church-History was printed The History of the University of Cambridge since the Conquest and The History of Waltham Abbey. These works were furthered in no slight degree by his connexion with Sion College, London, where he had a chamber, as well for the convenience of the press as of his city lectureships. The Church-History was angrily attacked by Dr P. Heylyn, who, in the spirit of High-Churchmanship, wished, as he said, to vindicate the truth, the church and the injured clergy. About 1652 Fuller married his second wife, Mary Roper, youngest sister of Thomas, Viscount Baltinglass, by whom he had several children. At the Oxford Act of 1657, Robert South, who was Terrae filius, lampooned Fuller, whom he described in this Oratio as living in London, ever scribbling and each year bringing forth new folia like a tree. At length, continues South, the Church-History came forth with its 166 dedications to wealthy and noble friends; and with this huge volume under one arm, and his wife (said to be little of stature) on the other, he ran up and down the streets of London, seeking at the houses of his patrons invitations to dinner, to be repaid by his dull jests at table.
His last and best patron was George Berkeley, 1st Earl Berkeley (1628–1698), of Cranford House, Middlesex, whose chaplain he was, and who gave him Cranford rectory (1658). To this nobleman Fuller’s reply to Heylyn’s Examen Historicum, called The Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659), was inscribed. At the end of the Appeal is an epistle “to my loving friend Dr Peter Heylyn,” conceived in the admirable Christian spirit which characterized all Fuller’s dealings with controversialists. “Why should Peter,” he asked, “fall out with Thomas, both being disciples to the same Lord and Master? I assure you, sir, whatever you conceive to the contrary, I am cordial to the cause of the English Church, and my hoary hairs will go down to the grave in sorrow for her sufferings.”
In An Alarum to the Counties of England and Wales (1660) Fuller argued for a free and full parliament—free from force, as he expressed it, as well as from abjurations or previous engagements. Mixt Contemplations in Better Times (1660), dedicated to Lady Monk, tendered advice in the spirit of its motto, “Let your moderation be known to all men: the Lord is at hand.” There is good reason to suppose that Fuller was at the Hague immediately before the Restoration, in the retinue of Lord Berkeley, one of the commissioners of the House of Lords, whose last service to his friend was to interest himself in obtaining him a bishopric. A Panegyrick to His Majesty on his Happy Return was the last of Fuller’s verse-efforts. On the 2nd of August, by royal letters, he was admitted D.D. at Cambridge. He resumed his lectures at the Savoy, where Samuel Pepys heard him preach; but he preferred his conversation or his books to his sermons. Fuller’s last promotion was that of chaplain in extraordinary to Charles II. In the summer of 1661 he visited the west in connexion with the business of his prebend, which had been restored to him. On Sunday, the 12th of August, while preaching at the Savoy, he was seized with typhus fever, and died at his new lodgings in Covent Garden on the 16th of August. He was buried in Cranford church, where a mural tablet was afterwards set up on the north side of the chancel, with an epitaph which contains a conceit worthy of his own pen, to the effect that while he was endeavouring (viz. in The Worthies) to give immortality to others, he himself attained it.
Fuller’s wit and vivacious good-humour made him a favourite with men of both sides, and his sense of humour kept him from extremes. Probably Heylyn and South had some excuse for their attitude towards his very moderate politics. “By his particular temper and management,” said Echard (Hist. of England, iii. 71), “he weathered the late great storm with more success than many other great men.” He was known as “a perfect walking library.” The strength of his memory was proverbial, and some amusing anecdotes are connected with it.
His writings were the product of a highly original mind. He had a fertile imagination and a happy faculty of illustration. Antithetic and axiomatic sentences abound in his pages, embodying literally the wisdom of the many in the wit of one. He was “quaint,” and something more. “Wit,” said Coleridge, in a well-known eulogy, “was the stuff and substance of Fuller’s intellect. It was the element, the earthen base, the material which he worked in; and this very circumstance has defrauded him of his due praise for the practical wisdom of the thoughts, for the beauty and variety of the truths, into which he shaped the stuff. Fuller was incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced, great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men” (Literary Remains, vol. ii. (1836), pp. 389-390). This opinion was formed after the perusal of the Church-History. That work and The History of the Worthies of England are unquestionably Fuller’s greatest efforts. They embody the collections of an entire life; and since his day they have been the delight of many readers. The Holy State has taken rank amongst the best books of “characters.” Charles Lamb made some selections from Fuller, and had a profound admiration for the “golden works” of the “dear, fine, silly old angel.” Since ​Lamb’s time, mainly through the appreciative criticisms of S. T. Coleridge, Robert Southey and others, Fuller’s works have received much attention.
There is an elaborate account of the life and writings of Fuller by William Oldys in the Biographia Britannica, vol. iii. (1750), based on Fuller’s own works and the anonymous Life of . . . Dr Thomas Fuller (1661; reprinted in a volume of selections by A. L. J. Gosset, 1893). The completest account of him is The Life of Thomas Fuller, with Notices of his Books, his Kinsmen and his Friends (1874), by J. E. Bailey, who gives a detailed bibliography (pp. 713-762) of his works. The Worthies of England was reprinted by John Nichols (1811) and by P. A. Nuttall (1840). His Collected Sermons were edited by J. E. Bailey and W. E. A. Axon in 1891. Fuller’s quaint wit lends itself to selection, and there are several modern volumes of extracts from his works.