He was caught up in Charles's campaign against recusancy in 1628; he was imprisoned first in the Fleet Prison and then in the Marshalsea, where he languished for want of a person of power to intercede for him.
This is valuable for its notices of contemporary authors such as Ben Jonson, whom he praises as the greatest English poet; this manuscript was reprinted in Joseph Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays (vol.
In the preface, Bolton hints that James had encouraged the work, and the language of the whole text is a more or less evident bid for the patronage of Charles I.
Hypercritica was a kind of prolegomenon to Bolton's most ambitious project, never completed: an updated history of Britain based on archives and other original sources, free of both the cant of medieval historians and the clumsiness of Tudor chroniclers such as Stow.
A surviving contents-list includes a projected chapter on "Joseph of Arimathea and the Abbie of Glastenberie", which raises the interesting possibility that Bolton might have been intending to use this controversial figure in a bid to reconcile Protestant and Catholic antiquarian narratives.
But it was bought by Aprosio, a collector from Ventimiglia, in the 17th century and then sold to the bibliophile Giacomo Filippo Durazzo; it is now part of the Durazziana.