He represented the king in Rome in 1489/90 where he was appointed protonotary apostolic by Pope Innocent VIII. The first benefice he received was in 1489 when Pope Innocent VIII provided him to the Parsonage of Forest church (Yarrow in the Scottish borders). Then in 1492, he used his influence at Rome to obtain the guarantee of the provision to the abbacy of Culross but resigned his rights in 1493 in return for a substantial pension from the monastery's income. The possession of multiple religious appointments was common in late medieval Scotland when ecclesiastical and later, temporal lords, would be gifted commendatorships of monasteries at the discretion of the monarch—it was unlikely that the monasteries in question would have been visited by their commendators very often, if at all. He became prior of May (Pittenweem) in 1495—an office which he retained up until his death—and by 30 September 1497, he was protonotary apostolic. The king received Perkin Warbeck, the bogus Duke of York, in Stirling Castle in November 1495 and designated Forman to attend him. Warbeck's presence in Scotland may have been used by King James and some of his councillors as an excuse to wage war with England. Apart from a raid into Northumberland, war did not ensue and in July 1497, Forman watched over Warbeck's departure from the port of Ayr.