He was educated at Sedbergh School under Dr. Wynne Bateman, and was the Tatham who was admitted at Magdalene College, Cambridge, as sizar on 11 May 1767; but the entry does not give the Christian name of either father or son, and he presumably never went into residence.
Tatham concluded the discourse by leaving the subject to the learned bench of bishops, ‘who have little to do and do not always do that little.’ Usually at open war with his fellow members of the Hebdomadal Council, he vehemently opposed the views advocated by Cyril Jackson and the new examinations which had been instituted through his influence at the university.
He died at the rectory-house in the parish of Combe on 24 April 1834, and was buried in the church of All Saints, Oxford, where a monument was erected by the widow to his memory.
Tatham's major work was his set of Bampton lectures, entitled The Chart and Scale of Truth by which to find the Cause of Error, vol.
Dr. Thomas Reid and David Doig admired it, and the article "Logic" in the fourth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was almost wholly taken from it.
Besides polemical sermons preached at Oxford, Tatham published: He married, in 1801, Elizabeth, the wealthy daughter of John Cook of Cheltenham.
She died on 24 August 1847, having founded at Lincoln College, in her husband's memory, a scholarship of the annual value of fifty guineas, limited in the first instance to candidates born or educated in Berkshire.