Fuller, THOMAS, divine, historian, and wit, was born in 1608 at Aldwinkle St Peter's, Northamptonshire, elder son of the painful preacher, its rector and prebendary of Sarum, and of his wife, Judith Davenant. At his baptism (June 19) his godfathers were his two uncles, Dr Davenant, president of Queens' College, Cambridge, and Dr Townson, both of whom became in succession bishops of Salisbury. The boy early showed striking promise, and was in 1621 entered at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1625, and M.A. in due course three years later. Being unaccountably passed over in an election of fellows of his college, he was transferred in 1628 to Sidney Sussex College, and in 1630 received from Corpus Christi College the curacy of St Benet's, where he preached those Lectures on the Book of Job which he published in 1654. Next year his uncle gave him a prebend in Salisbury, in 1634 he was appointed to the rectory of Broadwinor in Dorsetshire, and in 1635 he proceeded B.D. Already in 1631 he had published his first work, an ingenious but indifferent poem of 124 seven-lined stanzas, in three parts, entitled David's Heinous Sin, Hearty Repentance, and Heavy Punishment; and here he fulfilled faithfully the duties of a parish priest, married happily, and compiled his first ambitious work, the characteristically bright, vigorous, and quaint History of the Holy War (1639), embracing the story of the Crusades, as well as The Holy and Prophane States (1642), a unique collection of essays and characters, full of shrewdness, wisdom, and kindness, lightened up on every page by the most unexpected humour, and by marvellous felicity of illustration. In 1640 Fuller sat as proctor for Bristol in the Convocation of Canterbury, and was one of the select committee appointed to draw up canons for the better government of the church. In the same year he published his Joseph's parti-coloured Coat, a comment on 1 Cor. xi. 18-30, with eight sermons full of the true Fuller flavour. Soon after he removed to London to become an exceedingly popular lecturer at the chapel of St Mary Savoy. In the exercise of his function he strove to allay the bitterness of party-feeling, but when the inevitable war broke out he adhered with fearless firmness to the royal cause, and shared in its reverses. Yet his characteristic moderation of tone offended the more hot-headed among the royalists, who misread his temperance into lukewarmness. He saw active service as chaplain to Hopton's men, and printed at Exeter in 1645 for their encouragement his Good Thoughts in Bad Times, a manual of fervid and devout short prayers and meditations, which was followed in 1647 by a second, Better Thoughts in Worse Times, and by his twenty-one short dialogues, The Cause and Cure of a Wounded Conscience. In the same year he began again to preach, at St Clement's, Eastcheap, but was soon suspended. His enforced leisure he gave with indomitable industry to study and compilation, being helped the while by patrons who knew his merit. One of the kindest of these was the Earl of Carlisle, who made him his chaplain, and presented him to the curacy of Waltham Abbey, which Fuller managed to keep throughout the troubles by passing the ordeal of Cromwell's Tryers. In 1650 he published his great survey of the Holy Land, full of maps and engravings, A Pisgah-sight of Palestine, where for once geography became a peg whereon to hang alternate wit, wisdom, and edification. The very rocks and deserts are fertilised by his fancy, and not one of his 800 pages is dry or tedious. In 1651 appeared Abel Redivivus, a collection of religious biographies, of which Fuller himself wrote seven. His first wife had been already dead ten years when in 1651 he married a sister of Roper, Viscount Baltinglass. In 1655 he published in a folio volume his long-projected Church History of Britain, from the birth of Christ till the year 1648, divided into eleven books—a twelfth being a History of the University of Cambridge. The early books are divided into centuries, the later into sections, and in both the paragraphs are duly labelled and numbered with much ostentation of method, despite the perpetual digressions into heraldry and the like 'for variety and diversion . . . to divert the wearied reader.' Each book is dedicated to some noble patron, and a dedication is prefixed to every century or section. Altogether there are no fewer than 75 dedicatory epistles, addressed to 85 patrons or patronesses, of whom many, he tells us, 'invited themselves on purpose to encourage my endeavours.' The work was bitterly assailed by Dr Peter Heylin with no less than 237 several 'Animadversions' in his Examen Historicum (1659), as a rhapsody rather than a history, full of 'impertinencies' as well as errors, and still worse marred by partiality to Puritanism. Fuller at once replied in The Appeal of Injured Innocence, in which he gives his animadversion's own words in their entirety followed by his own replies scribatim. Nowhere is his strong sense sharpened into bright and stinging wit more conspicuous than here. Moreover, broad, open-minded candour and large toleration to all honest opinion and fair argument, wedded to intense personal loyalty to his own church, are characteristic notes throughout, while it would be difficult to find a nobler example in our literature of magnanimous Christian charity tremulous with pathos than the concluding epistle to his antagonist. Bishop Nicolson, in The English Historical Library (2d ed. 1714), failing with one-eyed vision to see that he had before him an English classic, and one sui generis moreover, laments the lack of 'the gravity of an historian,' and the weakness for 'a pretty story' and for 'pun and quibble,' yet in his superior manner admits that, 'if it were possible to refine it well, the work would be of good use, since there are in it some things of moment hardly to be had elsewhere, which may often illustrate dark passages in more serious writers.'
Fuller had been presented by Lord Berkeley in 1658 to the rectory of Cranford in Middlesex, and at the Restoration he was reinstated in his former prements. In that year he published his Mixt Contemplations in Better Times, was admitted D.D. at Cambridge by royal mandate, and appointed chaplain-in-extraordinary to the king. Apparently also he would have been made a bishop had he lived. He died in London after a few days' illness of the 'new disease'—a kind of typhus fever, 16th August 1661, and was buried in the chancel of Cranford church. The Latin epitaph inscribed on a mural tablet there is not so brief as his own suggestion—'Here lies Fuller's earth,' but contains a conceit worthy of his own pen, how that while he was labouring to give others immortality he obtained it himself. His great work, The Worthies of England, left unfinished, was edited by the pious care of his son, and published in 1662. Fuller tells us elsewhere of his 'delight in writing of histories,' and we know that the preparation of his greatest work covered nearly twenty years of his troubled life. At the outset he sets forth his five ends in the book—each one sufficient in itself: 'to gain some glory to God, to preserve the memories of the dead, to present examples to the living, to entertain the reader with delight, and to procure some honest profit to myself.' The first four were most to Fuller, and all these he gained. The Worthies is a magnificent miscellany of facts about the counties of England and their illustrious natives, lightened up by unrivalled originality, spontaneity, and felicity of illustration, and aglow with the pure fervour of patriotism—the very apotheosis of the gazetteer.
The earliest and anonymous biographer of Fuller tells us that his stature was somewhat tall, 'with a proportionable bigness to become it,' his countenance cheerful and ruddy, his hair light and curly, his carriage such as could have been called 'majestical' but for his complete lack of pride, his deportment 'much according to the old English guise.' Such also is the Berkeley portrait, reproduced in Bailey's Life. His genial disposition, the charm of his company, and his marvellous feats of memory are mentioned by Pepys and all who have since written of him.
Of the judgments passed upon his genius, best known and hardly exaggerated is that of Coleridge: 'Wit 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.' His wit is fast wedded with wisdom and strong sense, and with all its freedom is never unkindly or irreverent—he 'never wit-wantoned it with the majesty of God.' He lays a spell of quite a peculiar kind upon his reader, who will either return to him often or neglect him altogether. His style shows admirable narrative faculty, with often a nervous brevity and point almost new to English, and a homely directness ever shrewd and never vulgar; while 'his wit,' says Charles Lamb, 'is not always a lumen siccum, a dry faculty of surprising; on the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human feeling and passion.' The pen that described negroes as 'the images of God cut in ebony' was that of a good man as well as a great writer.
See the fine 17th-century anonymous eulogy reprinted in vol. i. of J. S. Brewer's edition of the Church History (Clarendon Press, 6 vols. 1845); Rev. Arthur T. Russell's Memorials of Dr Fuller's Life and Works (1844); Henry Rogers' Selections and Essay (1856); J. E. Bailey's Life of Thomas Fuller (1874), his article in Encyclopædia Britannica, and his edition of the Collected Sermons (1891); the Life by Rev. Morris Fuller (2d ed. 1886); and Jessopp's selections (1892). Bailey's unique collection of books relating to Fuller was acquired by the Manchester Free Library in 1889.