Born, at Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, June 1606. Educated at village school and by his father. To Queen’s Coll., Cambridge, 29 June 1621; B.A., 1625; M.A., 1628; B.D., 11 June 1635. Ordained, 1630; Perpetual Curate to St. Benet’s, Cambridge, 1630–33. Prebend of Netherbury, 18 June 1631 to 1641. Rector of Broadwindsor, Dorsetshire, 1634–41. Married, 1637 [?]. Proctor for Diocese of Bristol, 1640. Settled in London after wife’s death, 1641. Curate of Savoy, 1641–43. Removed to Oxford, 1643. Chaplain to Sir Ralph Hopton, 1643–1644. Entered Princess Henrietta’s household at Exeter, 1644. Bodley Lecturer at Exeter, 21 March 1646. To London, April 1646. Perpetual Curate of Waltham Abbey, 1648 [or 1649?]. Married Hon. Mary Roper, 1651. Rector of Cranford, March 1658. Created D.D. by Royal Letters Patent, Aug. 1660. Died, in London, 16 Aug. 1661. Buried at Cranford. Works: [besides a number of separate sermons] “David’s Hanious Sinne,” 1631; “The History of the Holy Warre,” 1639; “Joseph’s Party-coloured Coat” (under initials T. F.), 1640; “The Holy State” and “The Profane State,” 1642; “Truth Maintained,” 1643; “Good Thoughts in Bad Times,” 1645; “Andronicus,” 1646 (2nd and 3rd edns. same year); “The Cause and Cure of a Wounded Conscience,” 1647; “Good Thoughts in Worse Times,” 1647; “A Pisgahsight of Palestine,” 1650; contrib. to “Abel Redivivus,” 1651; “A Comment on Matt. iv. 1–11,” 1652; “The Infant’s Advocate,” 1652; “A Comment on Ruth” (anon.), 1654; “Ephemeris Parliamentaria” (anon.), 1654; “A Triple Reconciler,” 1654; “The Church History of Britain,” 1655; “History of the University of Cambridge,” 1655; “History of Waltham Abbey,” 1655; “A Collection of Sermons” (5 pts.), 1656–57; “The Best Name on Earth,” 1657; “The Appeal of Injured Innocence,” 1659; “An Alarum to the Counties of England and Wales” (anon.), 1660 (2nd and 3rd edns. same year); “Mixt Contemplations in Better Times,” 1660; “A Panegyrick to His Majesty,” 1660. Posthumous: “The History of the Worthies of England” (ed. by J. Fuller), 1662; “Collected Sermons” (ed. by J. E. Bailey and W. E. A. Axon), 1891. He edited: Rev. H. Smith’s “Sermons,” 1657; J. Spencer’s “Καινα και Παλαια,” 1658.

Personal

  He was a boy of a pregnant witt, and when the bishop and his father were discoursing, he would be by and hearken, and now and then putt in, and sometimes beyond expectation, or his yeares. He was of a middle stature; strong sett; curled haire; a very working head, in so much that, walking and meditating before dinner, he would eate-up a penny loafe, not knowing that he did it. His naturall memorie was very great, to which he had added the art of memorie: he would repeate to you forwards and backwards all the signes from Ludgate to Charing-crosse…. He was a pleasant facetious person, and a bonus socius.

  In a moral and religious point of view, the character of Fuller is entitled to our veneration, and is altogether one of the most attractive and interesting which that age exhibits to us. His buoyant temper, and his perpetual mirthfulness, were altogether at variance with that austerity and rigour which characterized so many of the religionists of his time; but his life and conduct bore ample testimony that he possessed genuine and habitual piety. Amidst all his levity of manner, there was still the gravity of the heart—deep veneration for all things sacred; and while his wit clothed even his religious thoughts and feelings with irresistible pleasantry, his manner is as different from that of the scorner, as the innocent laugh of childhood from the malignant chuckle of a demon. In all the relations of domestic and social life, his conduct was most exemplary. In one point, especially, does he appear in honourable contrast with the bigots of all parties in that age of strife—he had learnt, partly from his natural benevolence, and partly from a higher principle, the lessons of “that charity which thinketh no evil,” and which so few of his contemporaries knew how to practise.

  Fuller is described as tall and bulky, though not corpulent, well made, almost “majestical,” with light curly hair, rather slovenly in dress and often absent-minded, and careless “to seeming inurbanity” in his manners. He was sparing in diet and in sleep. He seldom took any exercise except riding. His powers of memory were astonishing, and gave occasion for many anecdotes. He could, it was said, repeat five hundred strange names after two or three hearings, and recollect all the signs after walking from one end of London to the other. His anonymous biographer declares that he used to write the first words of every line in a sheet and then fill up all the spaces, which Mr. Bailey thinks “not a bad method.”

  Shrewd Dr. Fuller, and a man not to be forgotten! He was a “Cavalier parson” through the Civil-War days; was born down in Northamptonshire in the same town where John Dryden, twenty-three years later, first saw the light. He was full of wit, and full of knowledges; people called him—as so many have been and are called—“a walking library;” and his stout figure was to be seen many a time, in the Commonwealth days, striding through Fleet Street, and by Paul’s Walk, to Cheapside. There is quaint humor in his books, and quaintness and aptness of language.

A Pisgahsight of Palestine, 1650

  This is one of the most curious works ever written on the Scriptures…. The View of Palestine is not a mere geographical work; it contains many things relating to Jewish antiquities, and to the manners and customs of the people, and incidentally illustrates a number of passages of Scripture.

  His book really answers to its title. He might be thought to have seen the “Good Land,” so graphic are some of its sketches, so lively his observations, and so pleasantly does he keep the eyes and hearts of his hearers. He is as painstaking, acute, discriminating, and cautious as Dr. Robinson himself; but where this tedious Doctor is dull, dry, and monotonous, our old Fuller is all life and buoyancy, enticing you by his company into long rambles over scenes which he knows all about, and upon which he looks lovingly, about which he talks charmingly, and which he really photographs upon your very soul by the light of his genial wit and hallowed fancy. His wit, however, is never out of tune with pure and simple faith; his intellectual brightness never loses its devout warmth, nor does any affectation of science ever mar the loveliness of his meek and reverent spirit.

The Church History of Britain, 1655

  An ingenious gentleman some months since in jest-earnest advised me to make haste with my History of the church of England; “for fear,” said he, “lest the church of England be ended before the History thereof.” This History is now, though late, (all church-work is slow,) brought with much difficulty to an end. And, blessed be God! the church of England is still (and long may it be) in being, though disturbed, distempered, distracted. God help and heal her most sad condition! The three first books of this volume were for the main written in the reign of the late king, as appeareth by the passages then proper for the government. The other nine books we made since monarchy was turned into a state. May God alone have the glory, and the ingenuous reader the benefit, of my endeavours! which is the hearty desire of Thy servant in Jesus Christ.—From my Chamber in Sion College.

  Proceed we in the next place to verses and old ends of poetry, scattered and dispersed in all parts of the history, from one end to the other; for which he hath no precedent in any historian, Greek or Latin, or any of the national histories of these latter times…. By his interlarding of his prose with so many verses he makes the book look rather like a Church-romance (our late romancers being much given to such kind of mixtures) than a well-built ecclesiastical history. And if it be a matter so unconvenient to put a new piece of cloth on an old garment; the putting of so many old patches on a new piece of cloth must be more unfashionable. Besides that, many of those old ends are so light and ludicrous, so little pertinent to the business which he has in hand, that they serve only to make sport for children (ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias), and for nothing else.

  It is divided into eleven books, whereof the sixth gives the history of the abbies of England, from the first rise of monkery, to the final eradication of it under Henry the Eighth. These are subdivided into lesser sections, which are severally dedicated to such patrons as were most likely to make their due acknowledgements to the author. Nor were these infant lords and rich aldermen the only people he desired to flatter. He was to make his court to the powers then in fashion; and, he well knew, nothing would be more grateful to them, than squinting reflections on the management of the late King’s chief ministers of state, eminent churchmen, &c. For such misbehaviour as this, he was severely taken to task by Peter Heylin, in his “Examen Historicum;” to which was added Dr. Cosin’s Apology, in answer to some passages in that history, which concerned himself…. Even the most serious and most authentic parts of it are so interlaced with pun and quibble, that it looks as if the man had designed to ridicule the annals of our church into fable and romance…. There are in it some things of moment, hardly to be had elsewhere, which may often illustrate dark passages in more serious writers.

  There are only two writers of the genuine History of our Church who deserve the name of historians, Collier and Fuller.

  Quaint and witty, but sensible, pious, candid, and useful; an invaluable body of information to the death of Charles the First.

  All the charms of Southey’s prose may please you in his “Book of the Church;” on turning to the Old church historian, Thomas Fuller, you may find in his “History of the Church in Great Britain” (one of the most remarkable works in the language) the varied powers of learning, sagacity, pathos, an overflowing wit, humour, and imagination, all animating the pages of a church history.

  The desire of authors to obtain more pay for their work set them thinking of the best means to increase it. Fuller’s “Church History” has twelve title-pages, besides the general one, with as many particular dedications, and no less than fifty or sixty inscriptions addressed to benefactors.

  No man of his times was more witty or more popular for his wit. Edition after edition of his books was issued even during the days when it was dangerous to write of the Church’s doings. No one could tell a story as he could, yet no one was so free from bitterness. His sharpness, and indeed much of his humour too, lay upon the surface. He sought, and he achieved, the praise of being a moderate man; and though he did not escape slander, he was secure in the affections of his readers. “No stationer ever lost by me,” he said. He was, in fact, unquestionably the most popular of all the writers of his day. From him and such as he men learned that the Church was a larger home than Puritanism.

Worthies of England, 1662

  I met with Dr. Thomas Fuller. He tells me of his last and great book that is coming out: that is, the “History of all the Families in England;” and could tell me more of my own than I knew myself. And also to what perfection he hath now brought the art of memory; that he did lately to four eminently great scholars dictate together in Latin, upon different subjects of their proposing, faster than they were able to write, till they were tired; and that the best way of beginning a sentence, if a man should be out and forget his last sentence (which he never was), that then his last refuge is to begin with an Utcunque.

  It was huddled up in haste, for the procurement of some moderate profit for the author, though he did not live to see it published. It corrects many mistakes in his ecclesiastical story; but makes more new ones in their stead.

  It is a most fascinating storehouse of gossiping, anecdote, and quaintness; a most delightful medley of interchanged amusement, presenting entertainment as varied as it is inexhaustible.

  Fuller must be always read with a certain degree of caution; for he was fond of a joke, and often picked up intelligence in a slovenly manner.

General

  His writings are very facetious, and (where he is careful) judicious. His “Pisgah Sight” is the exactest; his “Holy War and State,” the wittiest; his “Church History,” the unhappiest,—written in such a time when he could not do the truth right with safety, nor wrong it with honour; and his “Worthies,” not finished at his death, the most imperfect. As for his other works, he that shall but read FULLER’S name unto them will not think them otherwise but worthy of that praise and respect which the whole nation afforded unto the author.

  The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of quaint, and with sufficient reason; for such was his natural bias to conceits, that I doubt not upon most occasions it would have been going out of his way to have expressed himself out of them. But his wit 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. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled.

  If ever there was an amusing writer in this world the facetious Thomas Fuller was one.—There was in him a combination of those qualities which minister to our entertainment, such as few have ever possessed in an equal degree. He was, first of all, a man of extensive and multifarious reading; of great and digested knowledge, which an extraordinary retentiveness of memory preserved ever ready for use, and considerable accuracy of judgment enabled him successfully to apply. He was also, if we may use the term, a very great anecdote-manger; an indefatigable collector of the traditionary stories related of eminent characters, to gather which, his biographers inform us, he would listen contentedly for hours to the garrulity of the aged country people whom he encountered in his progresses with the king’s army. With such plenitude and diversity of information, he had an inexhaustible fund for the purposes of illustration, and this he knew well how to turn to the best advantage. Unlike his tasteless contemporaries he did not bring forth or display his erudition on unnecessary occasions or pile extract on extract and cento on cento with industry as misapplied as it was disgusting…. So well does he vary his treasures of memory and observation, so judiciously does he interweave his anecdotes, quotations, and remarks, that it is impossible to conceive a more delightful chequer-work of acute thought and apposite illustration, of original and extracted sentiment, than is presented in his works. As a story-teller, he was most consummately felicitous. The relation which we have seen for the hundredth time, when introduced in his productions, assumes all the freshness of novelty, and comes out of his hands instinct with fresh life and glowing with vitality and spirit.

  Next to Shakspeare, I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvellous;—the degree in which any given faculty or combination of faculties is possessed and manifested, so far surpassing what one would have thought possible in a single mind, as to give one’s admiration the flavour and quality of wonder! Wit was the staff 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. He is a very voluminous writer, and yet, in all his numerous volumes on so many different subjects, it is scarcely too much to say, that you will hardly find a page in which some one sentence out of every three does not deserve to be quoted for itself—as motto or as maxim.

  Fuller is one of the few voluminous authors who is never tedious…. Of all the forms of wit, Fuller affects that of the satirist least. Though he can be caustic, and sometimes is so, he does not often indulge the propensity; and when he does it is without bitterness—a sly irony, a good-humoured gibe, at which even its object could hardly have helped laughing, is all he ventures upon…. So exuberant is Fuller’s wit, that, as his very melancholy is mirthful, so his very wisdom wears motley. But it is wisdom notwithstanding; nor are there many authors, in whom we shall find so much solid sense and practical sagacity, in spite of the grotesque disguise in which they masque themselves.

  Of a sanguine, happy, easy temperament, a jolly Protestant father confessor, and this attracted him to the side of the laughing muse. Yet he abounds in quiet, beautiful touches both of poetry and pathos.

  One of the liveliest and yet, in the inmost heart of him, one of the most serious writers one can meet with. I speak of this writer partly because there is no one who is so resolute that we should treat him as a friend, and not as a solemn dictator. By some unexpected jest, or comical turn of expression, he disappoints your purpose of receiving his words as if they were fixed in print, and asserts his right to talk with you, and convey his subtle wisdom in his own quaint and peculiar dialect.

  The wise old Fuller, whom no lover of wit, truth, beauty, and goodness can ever tire of reading.

  He is the most singular writer, full of verbal quibbling and quaintness of all kinds, but by far the most amusing and engaging of all the rhetoricians of this school, inasmuch as his conceits are rarely mere elaborate feats of ingenuity, but are usually informed either by a strong spirit of very peculiar humor and drollery, or sometimes even by a warmth and depth of feeling, of which too, strange as it may appear, the oddity of his phraseology is often a not ineffective exponent. He was certainly one of the greatest and truest wits that ever lived: he is witty not by any sort of effort at all, but as it were in spite of himself, or because he cannot help it…. No man ever (in writing at least) made so many jokes, good, bad, and indifferent; be the subject what it may, it does not matter; in season and out of season he is equally facetious; he cannot let slip an occasion of saying a good thing any more than a man who is tripped can keep himself from falling; the habit is as irresistible with him as the habit of breathing; and yet there is probably neither an ill-natured nor a profane witticism to be found in all that he has written. It is the sweetest-blooded wit that was ever infused into man or book. And how strong and weighty, as well as how gentle and beautiful, much of his writing is!

  Quaint but full and sufficient.

  For one reason or another Fuller has become a kind of privileged pet amongst those traders in literary curiosities whose favourite hunting ground is amongst the great writers of the seventeenth century. He is the spoilt child of criticism whose most audacious revolts against the respectable laws of taste have an irresistible claim. Some of their eulogies rather tax our credulity…. He was the most buoyant of mankind; and if he ever knew what it was to be melancholy, he could find relief in lamentations so lively as to sound like an effusion of exuberant spirits. The wonder is that we feel this boyish exhilaration to be significant of true feeling. Some men shed tears when they are deeply moved; Fuller pours forth a string of quibbles. It is a singular idiosyncrasy which inverts the conventional modes of expressing devotion, and makes jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, do duty for sighs. But nobody should read Fuller who cannot more or less understand the frame of mind to which such fantastic freaks are congenial; and those who do will learn that, if in one sense he is the most childlike, in another he is amongst the most manly writers. He enjoys a sort of rude intellectual health, which enables him to relish childish amusements to the end of his days; and it is difficult to imagine a more enviable accomplishment, though it must be admitted that it leads to some rather startling literary phenomena.

  The Quaintness of the seventeenth century is commonly linked with the name of Thomas Fuller, not because he is the most glaring example, but rather because he is one of the few high class writers in whom this quality is conspicuous. For in fact, although quaintness is best known to the modern reader through his writings, yet he does not afford a true example of the fault of quaintness. His quaintness is a sort, a droll sort perhaps, of beauty; because the language is a true vesture to the thought, and Fuller is quaint in his very thought. The quaintness which is blamable rises when a writer is more curious about his diction than careful to have something to say before he covers paper with decorated words. The Quaintness of the Seventeenth century is a phenomenon of the same nature as the Euphuism of the Sixteenth. It is like the secular return of an epidemic enthusiasm.

  Fuller perhaps has, and it may possibly be due to a sort of feeling of this that, though he has never wanted for fervent admirers, they seem always rather to have shrunk from paying him the greatest and the most necessary, if the most trying, honour that can be paid to an author by issuing a complete edition of his works. There are many curious contradictions in Fuller’s character, both personal and literary, and it is not impossible that the presence of them communicates to his personality and his literature the almost unmatched piquancy which both possess, and which have never failed to attract fit persons. A Puritan Cavalier (Dr. Jessopp calls him a Puritan, and though I should hardly go so far myself, there is no doubt that Fuller leaned far more to the extreme Protestant side than most of his comrades in loyalty), a man of the sincerest and most unaffected piety, who never could resist a joke, an early member of the exact or antiquarian school of historians, who was certainly not a very profound or wide scholar, and who constantly laid himself open to the animadversions of others by his defects in scholarship—Fuller is a most appetising bundle of contradictions. But his contradictions undoubtedly sometimes disgust; and perhaps even some almost insatiable lovers of “the humour of it” may occasionally think that he carries the humour of it too far.

  Without endorsing the extravagant praise of Coleridge, we must acknowledge that the wit of Fuller was amazing, if he produced too many examples of it in forms a little too desultory for modern taste.

  Of all our many English writers whom it is customary to designate as quaint, perhaps Fuller exhibits a quaintness which savours least of antiquity, of affectations now quite obsolete.

  As a theological writer, Fuller is distinguished by earnest piety and indomitable cheerfulness rather than by sublimity of thought or intensity of emotion. Though his moderate attitude on the burning questions of the day did not entirely satisfy either of the great religious parties, it enabled him to continue his ministry through all the vicissitudes of the Commonwealth without any of those vacillations of principle by which other men purchased the toleration of the ruling powers. His temperament unfitted him for entering into the war of invective and vituperation that was raging around him. He rarely displays either enthusiasm or indignation, preferring to interest and amuse rather than to rouse or convince. The homely imagery, of which his sermons and devotional writings are full, laid him open to the charge of levity; but though his similes are often grotesque, they are seldom actually ludicrous, while their very incongruity sometimes gives an added force to the comparison.