SOURCE: Wood, James O. “Thomas Fuller's Oxford Interlude.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 17, no. 3 (May 1954): 185-208.

In the following essay, Wood explores Fuller's possible activities during his Oxford stay in the last months of 1643, activities that apparently included the composition of a verse drama satirizing the political climate of the time.

I

In the summer of 1643 Thomas Fuller was, at thirty-five, a popular preacher at St. Mary Savoy, London, and the well-known author of The Historie of the Holy Warre (Cambridge, 1639) and The Holy State and the Profane State (Cambridge, 1642). Like many another in that crucial year, however, he suffered the loss of his position and his earthly possessions. Having attracted unfavorable attention by the independence of his sermons and by the reservations with which he took a parliamentary “loyalty oath,” he preached a boldly royalist sermon “Of Reformation” at the Savoy on July 26, arranged for its publication in...