[4] He was inspired by the religious views of his father-in-law, and was in possession of Cranmer's manuscript code of ecclesiastical law; this he permitted John Foxe to publish in 1571.
[citation needed] Norton's puritanism made him objectionable to the English bishops; he was deprived of his office and thrown into the Tower.
Francis Walsingham released him, but Norton's health was undermined, and in March 1584 he died in his house at Sharpenhoe, Bedfordshire.
He contributed to Tottel's Miscellany, and in 1560 he co-authored, along with Thomas Sackville, the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc, which was performed before Elizabeth I in the Inner Temple on 18 January 1561.
His numerous anti-Catholic pamphlets include those on the rebellion of Northumberland and on the projected marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Duke of Norfolk.
[2] Gorboduc was edited by William Durrant Cooper (Shakespeare Society, 1847), and Lucy Toulmin Smith in Karl Vollmöller's Englische Sprache-und Literatur-denkmale (1883).