to weigh the Gold of Gospel Truth,’ 1774. 4. ‘Zelotus [? Zelotes] and Honestus Reconciled; or an Equal Check to Pharisaism and Antinomianism’ (which includes the first and second parts of the ‘Scripture Scales’), 1775. 5. ‘The Fictitious and Genuine Creed,’ 1775. 6. ‘A Polemical Essay on the Twin Doctrines of Christian Imperfection and a Death Purgatory,’ popularly called his ‘Treatise on Christian Perfection,’ 1775. 7. ‘A Vindication of Mr. Wesley's Calm Address to our American Colonies, in Three Letters to Mr. Caleb Evans.’ 8. ‘American Patriotism further confronted with Reason, Scripture, and the Constitution; being Observations on the Dangerous Politics taught by the Rev. Mr. Evans and the Rev. Dr. Price,’ 1776 (‘I carried one of them’ (these tracts), wrote Vaughan to Wesley, ‘to the Earl of D. His lordship carried it to the lord chancellor, and the lord chancellor handed it to the king. One was immediately commissioned to ask Mr. Fletcher whether any preferment in the church would be acceptable? Or whether he [the chancellor] could do him any service? He answered, “I want nothing but more grace”’). 9. ‘The Reconciliation; or an Easy Method to Unite the Professing People of God, by placing the Doctrines of Grace and Justice in such a Light as to make the candid Arminians Bible-Calvinists, and the candid Calvinists Bible-Arminians,’ 1776. This was preceded by a tract entitled ‘The Doctrines of Grace and Justice equally essential to the Pure Gospel; with some Remarks on the mischievous Divisions caused among Christians by parting those Doctrines;’ but this was intended as an introduction to the ‘Reconciliation,’ and the two were subsequently printed and sold in one volume. During the last nine years of his life his health was too delicate to allow him to write anything except letters to his friends and the pastoral addresses already referred to.
[Life of the Rev. John W. de la Flechere, compiled from the narrative of the Rev. J. Wesley (1786); the Biographical Notes of the Rev. Mr. Gilpin, his own Letters, &c., by the Rev. Joseph Benson; Fletcher's Checks to Antinomianism, and Works, passim.]
FLETCHER, JOSEPH (1582?–1637), religious poet, son of Thomas Fletcher, merchant tailor of London, was, according to his epitaph, sixty years old at the time of his death in 1637. There can be little doubt that he was four or five years younger. He was entered at Merchant Taylors' School on 11 March 1593–4, and was elected to St. John's College, Oxford, in 1600, matriculating on 23 Jan. 1600–1, at the age of eighteen. He proceeded B.A. in 1604–5 and M.A. in 1608. He took part in a burlesque pageant called ‘The Christmas Prince,’ played at Oxford in 1607, together with his fellow-collegiate, Laud (Triphook, Miscellanea Antiqua Anglicana, 1816). In the autumn of 1609 he was presented to the rectory of Wilby, Suffolk, by Sir Anthony Wingfield, and he died there on 28 May 1637, being buried in the church. A mural brass above his grave with verses inscribed upon it is still extant. He married, first, in May 1610, Grace, daughter of Hugh Ashley, vicar of St. Margaret's, Ilkettshall, a parish in the neighbourhood of Wilby. By her he had six children: Joseph (baptised 7 April 1611), William (baptised 13 April 1612), Grace (baptised 28 Dec. 1613), Marie (baptised 27 Aug. 1605), John (baptised 18 May 1617), and a sixth child, born in December 1618. Fletcher's first wife died in giving birth to the sixth child, and she was buried in Wilby Church on 4 Dec. 1618. Her husband, when entering her death in the burial register, added two elegiac poems, one in Latin and the other in English. Fletcher's second wife (Anne) survived him, and to her he left all his property by a will dated 1 May 1630.
Fletcher was the author of a volume of poetry—now very rare—entitled ‘The Historie of the Perfect, Cursed, Blessed Man: setting forth man's excellencie, miserie, felicitie by his generation, degeneration, regeneration, by I. F., Master of Arts, Preacher of God's Word, and Rector of Wilbie in Suffolk,’ London, 1628, 1629. This is dedicated to the author's patron, Sir Anthony Wingfield. A long prose address to the reader precedes the poem, which is written throughout in heroic verse, and rarely rises above mediocrity. Emblematical designs by Thomas Cecil are scattered through the volume. No copy is in the British Museum. A poem of far higher literary quality called ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat, or The Source of God in his Agonie, by I. F.’ (London, 1613), has also been attributed to Fletcher by Dr. Grosart and Mr. W. C. Hazlitt. The British Museum Catalogue accepts the identification of ‘I. F.’ with Fletcher's initials. But the authorship is very uncertain, and little of the fervour of the earlier work is discernible in the later. Dr. Grosart reprinted the two volumes in his ‘Fuller's Worthies Library’ as Joseph Fletcher's poetical works (1869).
[Robinson's Merchant Taylors' School Reg. i. 34; Clark's Oxf. Univ. Reg. (Oxf. Hist. Soc.), II. ii. 245, iii. 250; Dr. Grosart's preface to Fletcher's Poetical Works; Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. viii. 268.]
