Moderates had an uncomfortable time during England's tumultuous seventeenth century. Individuals who nailed their colors to the mast and became avowed partisans risked emphatic defeat, depending on the religious, political, and military events of the day. But emphasizing the virtues of the middle ground, and the necessity of compromise, practically guaranteed disdain from whichever group of hardliners was in charge, whether Laudians, Puritans, or vengeful Cavaliers. And in terms of long-term reputation and scholarly attention, those written off as trimmers and Vicars of Bray have rarely attracted the adulation of any group of writers, keen to emphasize and enhance a particular tendency or movement in England's past. It is thus refreshing to encounter W. B. Patterson's careful and extensive account of a man whose witty mildness is attractive to modern liberal readers. The book also acts as a companion piece to Patterson's previous studies of different aspects of the broad religious middle ground, notably work on James VI/I's dreams of reuniting Christendom, and on William Perkins, the great communicator of Calvinism to the English.
Patterson's account is predominantly chronological, mixing details of Fuller's life and career with a recurring focus on the many and varied publications that flowed from his fluent pen. Thus we see the boy born in 1608 to a clergyman of the same name progress through Cambridge, take orders, benefit from patronage and employment, and endure the problems of the 1640s and 1650s. Although he became a chaplain in the Royalist armies, and at various times to both Princess Henrietta and the restored Charles II, Fuller was not fully embraced by the Royalist establishment. Too prone to see the best in moderate Puritans, and too keen to emphasize English kings’ constitutional obligations, Fuller ultimately returned to live in London in 1646. He would appear successfully before the Triers during the Interregnum, and favored both comprehension and toleration as a means of healing and settling up to his early death in 1661. Evidence is brought to bear from a variety of archival sources, not least a careful trawl of the various parish registers relevant to his clerical career.
The heart of Patterson's work, though, is a series of detailed readings of Fuller's published works, particularly his Church-History of Britain (1655) and the History of the Worthies of England, published posthumously in 1662, but also a wide range of more miscellaneous texts: sermons, meditations, occasional tracts, histories of things as divergent as the Crusades and the University of Cambridge. Regular quotation offers readers a clear sense of Fuller's tone and style. Witty, sometimes facetious, prone to alliteration, and—as Patterson notes—more likely to deploy words of Anglo-Saxon derivation than Latinate expressions, it is not hard to see why Fuller so rapidly went out of fashion after his death, earning the condescension of a range of self-satisfied successor historians like Gilbert Burnet to match the enmity he had experienced from partisan contemporaries like Peter Heylyn. Overall, Patterson succeeds in providing a useful primer to a very extensive set of absorbing works, in effect encouraging the reader to head off and reengage with the originals.
On the debit side, the book does sometimes feel rather unbalanced. Too much space is given to rather bland summaries of periods of time, specific events, or long-term processes like the development of historical writing in England and Europe from the Renaissance. The updating of a project that was originally a Harvard doctoral dissertation in 1966 is generally done well, in terms of scholarly awareness, but there remain some surprising gaps. It is odd, for instance, not to see use of Chad van Dixhoorn's monumental work on the Westminster Assembly, G. J. Toomer's two-volume study of John Selden's researches, or Jean-Louis Quantin's magisterial account of seventeenth-century Anglican scholarship and the formation of a confessional identity. The index is relatively poor, old-style references are retained in many footnotes (for instance, BM rather than BL), English place-names and modern scholars are sometimes misspelled, and there is a tendency to overstate praise for Fuller's scholarly activities: some of his arguments are said to prefigure Milton; the scale of his work on the Worthies of England anticipates Dr. Johnson's dictionary.
Nevertheless, Patterson performs a real service in his careful excavation of Fuller's many and varied sources, his working methods, and his intellectual networks. It is to be hoped that someone witty enough to annoy many of the right people in the seventeenth century, and sufficiently genial that two hundred clergymen attended his funeral, will continue to attract attention.
