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Thomas Norton

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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THOMAS NORTON (1532-1584), English lawyer, politician and writer of verse, was born in London in 1532. He was educated at Cambridge, and early became a secretary to the Protector Somerset. In 1555 he was admitted a student at the Inner Temple, and married Margery Cranmer, the daughter of the archbishop. From his eighteenth year Norton had begun to compose verse. We find him connected with Jasper Heywood; as a writer of "sonnets" he contributed to Tottel's Miscellany, and in i 560 he composed, in company with Sackville, the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc, which was performed before Queen Elizabeth in the Inner Temple on the 18th of January 1561. In 1562 Norton, who had served in an earlier parliament as the representative of Gatton, became M.P. for Berwick, and entered with great activity into politics. In religion he was inspired by the sentiments of his father-in-law, and was in possession of Cranmer's MS. code of ecclesiastical law; this he permitted John Foxe to publish in 1571. He went to Rome on legal business in 1579, and from 1580 to 1583 frequently visited the Channel Islands as a commissioner to inquire into the status of these possessions. Norton's Calvinism grew with years, and towards the end of his career he became a rabid fanatic. His punishment of the Catholics, as their official censor from 1581 onwards, led to his being nicknamed "Rackmaster-General." At last his turbulent puritanism made him an object of fear even to the English bishops; he was deprived of his office and thrown into the Tower. Walsingham presently released him, but Norton's health was undermined, and on the Toth of March 1584 he died in his house at Sharpenhoe, Bedfordshire.

The Tragedie of Gorboduc was first published, very corruptly, in 1565, and, in better form, as The Tragedie of Feerex and Porrex, in 1570. Norton's early lyrics have in the main disappeared. The most interesting of his numerous anti-Catholic pamphlets are those on the rebellion of Northumberland and on the projected marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the duke of Norfolk. Norton also translated Calvin's Institutes (1561) and Alexander Nowell's Catechism (1570).

Gorboduc appears in various dramatic collections, and was separately edited by W. D. Cooper (Shakespeare Soc. 1847), and by Miss Toulmin Smith in Volkmoller's Englische Sprachand Literaturdenkmale (1883). The best account of Norton, and his place in literary history, is that of Sidney Lee in his Dictionary of National Biography. (E. G.)