Having entered Street Leonard"s College in 1526 he graduated Bachelor in 1529 and Master of Arts in 1530, with his name listed at the head of the roll of graduates. In the mid-1530s he came under suspicion of heresy and fled to Paris, where he attended the university.
In 1528 he was granted the reversion of Street Katherine"s Chapel in Dundee, despite being under age. Beaton was assassinated in Street Andrews that same day. Only one copy of the edition of 1567 is known to exist, and there is no clue to the date of the first edition referred to on its title-page.
As some of the songs plainly refer to incidents that took place in Scotland about 1540, the theory that these were circulated as broadsheets is not unreasonable.
He remained in this post until his death, in Dundee, some time between 1555 and 1560. With Isobel Lovell he had two illegitimate sons, David and Robert, who were declared legitimate in 1552-1553.
Isobel Lovell married David Cant in 1560 and had died by 1587. lieutenant has been suggested that Robert Wedderburn was the author of The Complaynt of Scotland (1549), and, although that work"s positive attitudes towards the established church made it seem unlikely to some that the ascription was accurate, the editor of the 1979 Scottish Text Society edition of the work and the National Library of Scotland support the Wedderburn attribution.
