M.J. Cohen celebrates the life of Thomas Fuller, a pioneer historian and contemporary of Milton, with whom he shares a 400th anniversary.
History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or grey hairs; privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. Yea, it not only maketh things past, present; but enableth one to make a rational conjecture of things to come. For this world affordeth no new accidents ... Old actions return again, furbished over with some new and different circumstances.
(Thomas Fuller in the Epistle Dedicatory to his The History of the Holy War, March 6th, 1639).
Thomas Fuller was born in June 1608 in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, the son of its rector. In June 1621, at the age of thirteen, he went up to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where the College president was his mother’s brother John Davenant, Professor of Divinity. Davenant resigned from Queens’ soon after, when elected Bishop of Salisbury (where he succeeded ....