On 16 October 1656 he was called upon by the parliament to answer a charge of disaffection towards the existing government, which he did to the satisfaction of the house.
Burton was re-elected for Westmorland to Richard Cromwell's parliament, which met on 27 January 1659 and was dissolved on 22 April 1659.
The authorship was in dispute during the nineteenth century, as reported by Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography, Thomas Carlyle having suggested Nathaniel Bacon; later research has confirmed the author as Burton, according to Ivan Roots in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
It was edited and published in four volumes in 1828 by John Towill Rutt, a key record of proceedings in the Parliaments of 1656–1659.
The Diary was first printed in 1828, by Rutt, from the author's notebooks, which had come into the possession of William Upcott, librarian of the London Institution.