Name Robert Boreman Died 1675 | Education Westminster School | |
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Robert Boreman or Bourman (died 1675) D.D, was a Church of England clergyman who supported the Royalist cause in the English Civil War.
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Biography
Boreman was a member of a family which came originally from the Isle of Wight, and brother of Sir William Bourman, clerk of the green cloth to King Charles II. He received his education at Westminster School, whence he was elected in 1627 to a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. in 1631; was admitted a minor fellow of his college on 4 Oct. 1633, and a major fellow on 10 March 1634; and proceeded to the degree of M.A. in 1635.
Like other royalists, Boreman was deprived of his fellowship, but was restored to it in 1660. He was also created D.D. by virtue of letters mandatory from King Charles II dated 9 Aug. 1660. On 15 October in the same year he was admitted by the Archbishop of Canterbury—the see of Peterborough being then vacant—to the church of Blisworth, in Northamptonshire. and it seems that on 31 July 1662 he was formally admitted to that rectory by Dr. Lant, bishop of Peterborough. He was admitted on 18 November 1663 to the rectory of St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, on the presentation of the king, and on 19 December 1667 he was installed as a prebendary of Westminster. He died a bachelor at Greenwich on 15 November 1675, and was buried at that place.
Character
Boreman bore the character of a pious and learned divine. It is to be regretted, however, that party feeling should have led him to make an utterly unfounded attack on the celebrated Richard Baxter, whom he charged in an anonymous work with being a "man of blood", for, addressing him, he wrote: "I must tell you in your ear what I have heard, and is commonly reported, that in the late wars you slew a man with your own hand in cold blood". Baxter was highly indignant at this false charge, and began to write an answer to Boreman's pamphlet, which he abandoned. He later answered Boreman in his True History of Councils (1682) see N H Keeble and G F Nuttall (eds) Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (Oxford 1991) letter 693 and R Thomas The Baxter Treatises - a catalogue of the Richard Baxter papers (other than the letters) in Dr Williams’s Library- Dr Williams’s Library Occasional Paper no 8 (1959) p11
Works
Boreman's works are:
Boreman published and dedicated to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, ‘The True Catholicks Tenure’ (Cambridge, 1662), written by his friend Dr. Edward Hyde. Several specimens of his poetry are met with among the loyal effusions of the university of Cambridge before the troubled times of the English Civil Wars.