Welsh Journals

and active member of the King's Head Society formed in 1730, serving on various committees and occupying the chair at several of its meetings as the minutes85 of the Society show. He was liberal with his financial aid to the Society giving it two donations of £ 500 each.86 He was called the munificent patron' of Heckmondwike and Northowran Academy in Yorkshire87 and was actively engaged with the Northern Education Society' formed in London on 24 May 1756 for the purpose of dispelling the cloud of Socinian darkness then spreading over the northern counties of England '88 and he was the second Treasurer of the Society. This Society was responsible for the Heckmondwike Academy.89 Fuller was also connected with the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor' founded on 8 August 1750 as the result of a sermon preached by the celebrated Philip Doddridge. He became a subscriber in 175690 and his name still appears among the sub- scribers for 1799,91 a year before his death. When in 1768 Erasmus Middleton author of Biographia Evan- gelica (1786) and five others were expelled by the Vice-Chancellor from St. Edmund Hall Oxford for holding tenets called Method- istical,' William Fuller whose private acts of generosity, to use Middleton's own words, were more numerous than the world were acquainted with made him an unsolicited offer of support in the further prosecution of his studies. This liberal offer, liberal both in respect of its amount and of its being made by a regular and conscientious Dissenter to an Episcopalian, he very thankfully accepted and in 1769 entered King's College Cambridge where he finished his academical career and was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Divinity'.92 In the controversy over the living of Aldwinkle in Northamptonshire in 1767 it is clear that Fuller felt deeply for John Kimpton the Patron and was convinced that 85 King's Head Society Minute Book from 25/10/1737 to 27/10/1747. In N.C.L. Library. 86 'Statement of Donations of William Fuller to the Society'. Ref. 239/ 19 N.C.L. Library. 87 See James Bennett, The History of Dissenters (London 1833), vol. ii, 529. 88 Edward Williams, An Account of the Rotherham Independent Academy (Sheffield 1797), 4. 89 See W. B. Selbie, Congregationalism (London 1927), 126. 90 Account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, Begun Anno 1750 (1766), 11. In N.C.L. Library. 91 John Rippon, A Discourse on the Origin and Progress of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor. From its commence- ment in 1750 to the year 1802 (1803). ^Evangelical Magazine, 1805, 339. 'Memoir of the late Rev. Erasmus Middleton, B.D. Rector of Turvey in Bedfordshire.'