Author: BURTON, John
Biography:
BURTON, John (1696-1771: ODNB)
Burton was born in Wembworthy, Devon, on 26 Nov. 1696 to the Rev. Samuel Burton and his wife Mary whose birth surname was probably Bentham. He was baptised in Wembworthy on 17 Dec. 1796. He was educated at Oakhampton and Tiverton but, after his father’s death in 1706 or 1707, he was put in the care of his mother’s cousin, the Rev. Samuel Bentham, vicar of Witchford in Ely, Cambridgeshire. He matriculated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on 21 Oct. 1713 (BA 1717, MA 1721, Fellow 1723, BD 1729, DD 1752). He taught Greek at Oxford and is credited with introducing the writings of John Locke to the curriculum. In 1733 he was made a Fellow of Eton College and given the living of Mapledurham, Oxfordshire. In 1735 he married his predecessor’s widow, Frances (Goode) Littleton; she had three daughters from her first marriage but no children with Burton. She died in 1748 and in 1766 Burton became rector at Worplesdon, Surrey. However, he suffered increasingly from painful attacks of erysipelas. He was living at Eton College at the time of his death on 11 Feb. 1771 and is buried at the entrance of the chapel. His other publications include The Genuineness of Lord Clarendon’s “History of the Rebellion” Vindicated (1744), Pentalogia (1758: a collection of Greek tragedies), Occasional Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford (1764-65), and his Latin theological dissertations. His poem Sacerdo Parœcialis Rusticus was first published in 1757 and translated into English in 1800 by the Rev. Dawson Warren. Warren was born in London to James Warren and his wife Martha Dawson on 14 Dec. 1770 and baptised at St. Martin in the Fields on 14 Jan. 1771. He matriculated at Trinity College, Oxford, on 16 Nov. 1790 (BA 1794, MA 1799) and became vicar of Edmonton, Middlesex, in 1795. He married Charlotte Lucy Jackson on 19 Jan. 1796; just four of their nine children survived their father. He retired from his parochial duties in 1831 because of illness and died in Dec. 1838; he was buried at All Saints, Edmonton, on 26 Dec. 1838. He had served as a chaplain in Paris during peace negotiations there in 1801-02 and his journal from that time was published in 1913. (ODNB 28 Aug. 2023; ancestry.co.uk 28 Aug. 2023; A. Chalmers, The General Biographical Dictionary [1813]; Dawson Warren, A Letter to His Parishioners [1831]; Alumni Oxonienses) SR