Beaumont, Joseph Dd

Beaumont, Joseph D.D., an English divine, was born at Hadleigh, Suffolk, March 13, 1615. At the age of sixteen he was placed in Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he made great progress in learning, and subsequently became fellow, tutor, and moderator. In 1643 he was ejected from his fellowship on account of his adherence to Charles I. He was ejected from three other preferments received during the Rebellion for a like reason. In 1650 he became domestic chaplain to bishop Wren. At the Restoration he nwas made first chaplain to Charles II. In 1662 he was appointed master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and in 1663 master of Peterhouse. The same year he was instituted to the rectory of Teversham, near Cambridge, and in 1664 to that of Barley, Hertfordshire. In 1665 he had a controversy with Dr. Henry More on account of certain doctrines advanced by the latter in his Mystery of Godliness, which he thought subversive of the English ecclesiastical constitution. Dr. Beaumont received the thanks of the university for his services on this occasion, and in 1670 was elected to the divinity chair. He died Nov. 23, 1699. His Poems in English and Latin were published in 1749. His principalwork was Psyche, or Love's Mystery, in twenty-four cantos, displaying the intercourse between Christ and the soul (1648). He is said to have left all his critical and polemical works to his college, strictly forbidding the printing of any of them.