Background
Gilbert was born on September 18, 1643, in Edinburgh, Scotland.
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Gilbert Burnet
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Gilbert was born at Edinburgh on Sept. 18, 1643, the youngest son of Robert Burnet, a Scottish judge. Gilbert mastered Latin by the age of ten and received a master of arts degree from Aberdeen University at 13. He decided to enter the Church and in 1661 became a probationer in the Scottish ministry. Because of the unsettled state of Church affairs, however, he refused the offer of a benefice. In 1663 he visited England and the Continent, where he studied Hebrew and met the leading Protestant ministers. On his return to Scotland, he became minister at Saltoun and then clerk of the presbytery at Haddington. Burnet was a brilliant pulpit orator and acquired many influential friends, including John Maitland, later the Duke of Lauderdale. In 1669 Burnet became professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow. After Lauderdale's repression of the Scottish Covenanters, Burnet moved to London, where he became chaplain of the Rolls Chapel and lecturer at St. Clement's.
In 1677, at the request of Anne, Duchess of Hamilton, Burnet published his first important historical work, Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton and Castleherald. He then embarked on his History of the Reformation, published in three volumes in 1679, 1681, and 1715. In 1683 he began writing his memoirs, A History of My Own Time, the work for which he is most famous. At his request, they were published posthumously (two volumes, 1724-1734).
Burnet played a somewhat equivocal role at the time of the Rye House Plot against Charles II in 1683. He did, however, attend Lord Russell, who was condemned to death for his part in the conspiracy, while Russell was in prison. At the accession of James II in 1685, Burnet was deprived of his appointments because of his anti-Catholic sympathies. He lived in exile in Holland, where he became friendly with James II's daughter, Princess Mary. Burnet accompanied her husband, Prince William of Orange when he invaded England in the "glorious revolution" of 1688. Burnet had been of great service to William. He had helped to persuade Mary to place all political power in her husband's hands upon their joint accession to the throne and had published an Inquiry into the Measures of Submission to the Supreme Authority, which defended the revolution. For these acts, Burnet was rewarded by being appointed a bishop of Salisbury in 1689, a post he held until his death. In 1698 Burnet was made preceptor to Princess Anne's son, the Duke of Gloucester, but his influence at court diminished after Mary's death and ended after the accession of Queen Anne.
The most important of several pamphlets Burnet wrote in defense of the Broad Church position was his "Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles" (1699). This was intended to pave the way for readmission of nonconformists to the Church of England but was condemned as heterodox by the Lower House of Convocation. Burnet died of pleurisy in London on Mar. 17, 1715.
