Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/755

 Nicholas Fuller 745 his advice in hope of finding some legal loophole by which they might escape the impending sentence.' Ladd, the client whom he was defending when he delivered the speech against the High Com- mission, was a Puritan layman caught at a conventicle. In the month previous to the audacious outburst which so nearly proved fatal to him, (April, 1607), Fuller had only just missed coming into conflict with the Commission on a similar case. That body had summoned some twenty persons in Yorkshire to appear at London to answer various charges against them, and on their failure to come had imposed a fine upon them, as was provided by the ordinary process of the Commission. Fuller, whom the delinquents retained as their counsel, at once made a motion in their favor at the bar of the Exchequer, asking for a WTit of habeas corpus from that court, which if granted would have freed them for the time at least from the Commission. He seems also to have made a similar request in the King's Bench. In one or the other court he had hinted pretty broadly that he did not think the commissioners were competent judges in such matters and that at any rate their use of the oath ex officio seemed to him flatly illegal ; on examination before the Com- mission, he had maintained his position and was told that if he continued to express such opinions to the derogation of that body, he would be imprisoned in short order.^ Fuller, therefore, must have known that he was by no means an insignificant man who could say what he pleased with little chance of its being noticed by those in authority. Yet with the threat of the archbishop still ringing in his ears, he possessed so unusual a degree of courage that he proceeded to deliver in public within a month an even more scathing arraignment of the High Commission. This speech was therefore no chance eflfusion uttered in a thought- less moment by a man of no standing and caught up and prosecuted by a querulous and tyrannical government.^ It was another of a ■ Papers found on Melancthon Jewel, a fanatical Puritan arrested in Decem- ber 1604, contained a memorandum "To shewe Mr Nicholas Fuller what the Bishop proclaymeth of hime, and to requier his verie beste." State Papers, Do- mestic, James I., X., no. 81. 2 The Argument of Nicholas Fuller in the case of F. Lad and R. Maiinsell, his Clients. Wherein it is plainly proved that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners have no power, by vertue of their commission to imprison, or put to the oath ex oKcio or to fine any of his majesties subjects (London. 1607 : reprinted. London, 1641), pp. 22-23. This evidence comes from Fuller himself, and seems trust- worthy. But inasmuch as the tract was published by Fuller's friends long after he was imprisoned in hope of exciting public sympathy in his favor, it is just possible that this may be a distortion of a real occurrence inserted to show that the Commission was persecuting him. 3 Such has been the ordinary view taken of Fuller's case.