Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/331

Fuller rously murdered.’ The book contained a series of letters signed by Mary of Modena, and by persons about her court. Fuller presented a copy of his book to the king in person, and was for some time a hanger-on of the court. He then further published ‘Original Letters of the late King James,’ implicating many leading men in Jacobite plots. The new parliament on meeting (30 Dec. 1701) ordered him to prove his statements. On his failure to produce an imaginary ‘Jones,’ the House of Lords voted, on 19 Jan. 1702, that Fuller's last two books were false and malicious, and ordered that he should be imprisoned in the Fleet till formally prosecuted by the attorney-general. He was tried in May at the Guildhall, convicted of misdemeanor, and sentenced to go to all the courts in Westminster with a paper pinned on his hat, describing his crime, to stand three times in the pillory, to be sent to Bridewell, and there be whipped, and afterwards to be kept at hard labour till the second day of the following term, and be fined one thousand marks. The sentence was duly carried out, the treatment he received in the pillory at the hands of the mob being especially severe (ib. v. 189), and affording him material for ‘Mr. William Fuller's Trip to Bridewell, with a full Account of his barbarous usage in the Pillory’ (1703). Not being able to pay his fines, Fuller remained in prison. He published from the Queen's Bench prison in 1703 a further autobiography, containing the story of his life, and representing himself as the tool of Oates, Tutchin (whom he attacked in a separate pamphlet), and others who had really written his books. In the following year appeared ‘The Sincere and Hearty Confession of Mr. W. Fuller, … written by himself during his Confinement in the Queen's Bench,’ admitting his fraud and avowing repentance. Twelve years later Fuller, still in prison, issued ‘An Humble Appeal to the Impartial Judgment of all Parties in Great Britain,’ in which he maintained that he knew nothing of his alleged confession till he saw it in print, and that he had refused his liberty and large sums rather than retract his statements. He had, he said, at once answered the ‘Confession’ in ‘The Truth at Last,’ but it is significant that alone among Fuller's works this last has no date affixed. The ‘Confession’ is at least a good imitation of Fuller, and he probably wrote it in hope of a pardon; he admitted as much in a letter addressed to the Earl of Nottingham 11 July 1704 (Addit. MS. 29589, f. 429). In his ‘Humble Appeal,’ which he republished in 1717 as ‘The Truth brought to Light,’ he states that he had been introduced to Queen Anne, who believed his story, obtained him some liberty, and supplied him with money. The Earl of Oxford, however, at whose suggestion he had been brought before parliament in 1701, on becoming lord treasurer directed that he should be kept a close prisoner, and his supplies be stopped. He probably died in prison. A large number of Fuller's letters are preserved in the Ellis correspondence in the British Museum.

[The chief authority for Fuller's life consists in his very detailed autobiographical remains. These must be necessarily received with caution, but they are, at any rate, fairly consistent with one another, and better supported by external evidence than the extravagant Lives in which he was attacked. Of these the most important are Life of William Fuller, the late Pretended Evidence, 1692, by Abel Roper; Life of William Fuller alias Fullee, alias Ellison, &c., 1701, and Fuller once more Fullerised, 1701. Of the many occasional publications in which Fuller was held up to ridicule, interest attaches only to The Scribbler's Doom, or the Pillory in Fashion, being a new Dialogue between two Loophole Sufferers, William Fuller and De Fooe (sic), 1703. A woodcut portrait of Fuller at page 32 is prefixed to several of his publications. See also Luttrell's Diary (ed. 1857), ii. 312, 333, 344, 370, 381, 541, 613, 621, 626, iv. 125, 261, 291, v. 108, 109, 126–7, 129, 132–3, 140–1, 176, 189; Macaulay's Hist. of England; Addit. MSS. 28880, ff. 278, 325, 334, 336, 28886 passim, 28892, f. 77, 28893, ff. 80, 107.]  FULLERTON, GEORGIANA CHARLOTTE (1812–1885), novelist and philanthropist, born on 23 Sept. 1812 at Tixall Hall, Staffordshire, was the youngest daughter of Lord Granville Leveson Gower [q. v.] (afterwards first Earl Granville), by his wife, Lady Harriet Elizabeth Cavendish, second daughter of William, fifth duke of Devonshire. A great part of her early life was spent in Paris, where her father had been appointed ambassador. She married on 13 July 1833, at Paris, Alexander George Fullerton, esq., of Ballintoy Castle, co. Antrim, then an officer in the guards, and after a visit to England she returned to the English embassy, which continued to be her home for eight years. The Fullertons left Paris in 1841, when Lord Granville finally retired from the embassy. They went first to Cannes, where Lord Brougham lent them his villa, and subsequently they resided with Lady Georgiana's brother at Rome, in the Palazzo Simonetti in the Corso. Mr. Fullerton was received into the catholic church at Rome in 1843. His wife began her literary career at the age of thirty-two by the publication of ‘Ellen Middleton,’ a novel which had been previously commended by Lord Brougham and Charles Greville, and which was ably