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Andrew Forman

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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ANDREW FORMAN ( c. 1465-1521), Scottish ecclesiastic, was educated at the university of St Andrews and entered the service of King James IV. about 1489. He soon earned the favour of this king, who treated him with great generosity and who on several occasions sent him on important embassies to the English, the French and the papal courts. In 1501 he became bishop of Moray and in July 1513 Louis XII. of France secured his appointment as archbishop of Bourges, while pope Julius II. promised to make him a cardinal. In 1514 during a long absence from his own land Forman was nominated by Pope Leo X. to the vacant archbishopric of St Andrews and was made papal legate in Scotland, but it was some time before he secured possession of the see owing to the attempts of Henry VIII. to subject Scotland to England and to the efforts of his rivals, Gavin Douglas, the poet, and John Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, and their supporters. Eventually, however, he resigned some of his many benefices, the holding of which had made him unpopular, and through the good offices of the regent, John Stewart, duke of Albany, obtained the coveted archbishopric and the primacy of Scotland. Afterwards he was one of the vice-regents of the kingdom and he died on the iith of March 1521. As archbishop he issued a series of constitutions which are printed in J. Robertson's Concilia Scotiae (1866). Mr Andrew Lang ( History of Scotland, vol. i.) describes Forman as "the Wolsey of Scotland, and a fomenter of the war which ended at Flodden." See the biography of the archbishop which forms vol. ii. of The Archbishops of St Andrews, by J. Herkless and R. K. Hannay (1909).