FORMAN, ANDREW (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 11th 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).
FORMAN, SIMON (1552-1611), English physician and astrologer, was born in
1552 at Quidham, a small village near Wilton, Wiltshire. At the age of
fourteen he became apprentice to a druggist at Salisbury, but at the end
of four years he exchanged this profession for that of a schoolmaster.
Shortly afterwards he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied
chiefly medicine and astrology. After continuing the same studies in
Holland he commenced practice as a physician in Philpot Lane, London,
but as he possessed no diploma, he on this account underwent more than
one term of imprisonment. Ultimately, however, he obtained a diploma
from Cambridge university, and established himself as a physician and
astrologer at Lambeth, where he was consulted, especially as a
physician, by many persons of rank, among others by the notorious
countess of Essex. He expired suddenly while crossing the Thames in a
boat on the 12th of September 1611.
A list of Forman's works on astrology is given in Bliss's edition of
the _Athenae Oxonienses_; many of his MS. works are contained in the
Bodleian Library, the British Museum and the Plymouth Library. _A
Brief Description of the Forman MSS. in the Public Library, Plymouth_,
was published in 1853.
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