A Godly and Learned Sermon - Puritan William Fulke

A Godly and Learned Sermon - Puritan William Fulke

William Fulke D.D. (1538–1589), puritan divine, the son of Christopher Fulke, a wealthy citizen, was born in London in 1538, and is said to have been educated at St. Paul’s School. As a London schoolboy he was a contemporary of Edmund Campion, who defeated him in the competition for the silver pen offered as a prize to the city schools. He matriculated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in November 1555. He graduated B.A. in January 1557–8, and M.A. in 1563. By his father’s desire he studied law at Clifford’s Inn for six years, when, finding legal studies increasingly distasteful, he returned to Cambridge, and applied himself to mathematics, languages, and theology. He had already made one or two trifling essays upon astronomical subjects (see below). His father refused to help him after he relinquished the law, but his election to a foundation fellowship in 1564 placed him in comparative independence. He was thus enabled to study the text of holy scripture, having already taken up Hebrew and the other oriental languages then much neglected at Cambridge. In 1565 he was appointed principal lecturer of his college, in 1567 preacher and Hebrew lecturer, and in 1568 took his degree as B.D. Fulke on his return to Cambridge had attached himself to Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603), the puritan leader at Cambridge. He took a prominent part in the ‘vestiarian’ controversy, which was then distracting the university, and by his sermons and personal influence ‘beat into the heads of younger sort such a persuasion of the superstition of the surplice,’ that nearly three hundred at one time discarded it in the chapel of St. John’s. The dispute led to scenes of violence, barely stopping short of bloodshed (Strype, Annals, ii. i. 154). The contagion spread to other colleges. Discipline was relaxed, the whole university was in an uproar. Cecil found it necessary to interpose his authority as chancellor. He caused Fulke to be cited