Author: Burnet, Thomas
Biography:
BURNET, Thomas (1694-1753: ODNB)
The youngest son of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, and his second wife, Mary Scott (d 1698), he was born on 19 Feb. 1694 in London. He matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, on 12 Nov. 1705 but left in 1705 to study at the University of Leiden. He chose to follow his paternal grandfather’s profession of the law and was admitted to the Middle Temple on 15 Jan. 1708/9. However, although initially he took up residence he was more interested in travel, politics, and socialising and he was not called to the bar until 1728/9. Politically he was opposed to the tories and his anonymous publication, Some New Proofs, by Which it Appears that the Pretender is Truly James III (1713), took satiric aim at Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. His father had to intervene to save him from imprisonment. Burnet continued stirring up trouble by publishing A Second Tale of a Tub (1715) which satirised Robert Harley and Homerides (1715: issued as by “Sir Iliad Doggrel”) which attacked Alexander Pope. (Pope wrongly believed that Burnet also contributed to another attack, Pope Alexander’s Supremacy [1729].) Burnet’s hopes of securing a political place were not realised until 1719 when he was made British consul in Lisbon. He returned to England in 1728, was called to the bar, and launched a successful legal career. He became a serjeant-at-law in 1736, was called to the bench of the Court of Common Pleas in 1741, and knighted in 1745. He died at his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, on 8 Jan. 1753 and was buried at St. James’s, Clerkenwell. His will states “I trust I shall dye in the true faith of Christ as taught in the Scriptures but not as taught or practised in any one visible church” and, after legacies to family and servants, left his estate to a niece and nephew. The editor of the book of poems listed in this bibliography is not known; the preface records that the verses were “fairly transcribed” by their author before his death but never published. (ODNB 1 Sept. 2023; Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple [1949]; National Archives UK PROB 11/799/340) SR
Other Names:
- Sir T. Burnet