Burton was born at Colchester in 1710, and was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London (1725–6), and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was admitted in 1727 and graduated M.B.
His activities badly affected the success of the Whig interest in York, personified in the prominent local clergyman, the Rev.
It was probably his wife's income that enabled Burton to continue his medical studies, under Herman Boerhaave at Leiden University, where he became acquainted with Heinrich van Deventer's teachings on midwifery; he was awarded MD from Reims.
[citation needed] Burton's position was financially improved in 1743, when he inherited substantial estates on the deaths of his father and mother-in-law.
Burton travelled late in November to Lancashire, where Charles Edward Stuart's forces were marching south after their capture of Carlisle.
His motives were unclear but his absence from York at this critical time strengthened the suspicion, fuelled by his Whig enemies, that he was going over to the Young Pretender.
[2] Burton's political rehabilitation was marked by his appointment as commissioner for the land tax in 1750, 1765, and 1766, and by the offer in 1754 of the freedom of the city of York (which he did not accept).
Burton is commonly supposed to have resembled Laurence Sterne's satirical description of him the novel Tristram Shandy as the character Dr Slop: "a little, squat, uncourtly figure...of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly".