Thomas Broughton (biographer)

Thomas Broughton (1704–1774), was an English clergyman, biographer, and miscellaneous writer, whose works include the libretto to Handel's Hercules.

Broughton was born in London on 5 July 1704, the son of the rector of St. Andrew's, Holborn. He was educated at Eton, before going up to Cambridge in about 1723. There "for the sake of a scholarship he entered himself of Gonville and Caius College." In 1727, after taking B.A., he was admitted to deacon's orders, and in 1728 he was ordained priest, and proceeded to the M.A.

He served for several years as curate of Offley, Hertfordshire, and in 1739 became rector of Stepington, Huntingdonshire; the patron, the Duke of Bedford, also appointing him one of his chaplains. As reader to the Temple, to which he was chosen soon afterwards, he won the favour of the master, Bishop Sherlock, who in 1744 presented him to the vicarage of Bedminster, near Bristol, with the chapels of St. Mary Redcliffe, St. Thomas, and Abbot's Leigh annexed. It was also to Sherlock's influence he owed a prebend in Salisbury Cathedral, on receiving which he moved from London to Bristol, where he died on 21 December 1774.

He was an industrious writer in many kinds of composition. He published an Historical Dictionary of all Religions from the Creation of the World to the Present Times (1742), a huge work in two volumes folio ; he translated Voltaire's Temple of Taste and part of Pierre Bayle's Dictionary; vindicated orthodox Christianity against Matthew Tindal; converted a Roman Catholic book (Dorrel on the Epistles and Gospels) to Protestant uses; edited John Dryden; wrote in defence of the immortality of the soul; and contributed the lives marked 'T' in the original edition of the Biographia Britannica.

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