NORTON, Simon (1578-1641), of Little Park Street and Allesley, Coventry, Warws.

According to the heralds’ visitation of Warwickshire in 1683, this MP was a grandson of the Richard Norton who had been sheriff of Yorkshire under Elizabeth I and his wife Susanna, daughter of Richard [Neville, 2nd] Baron Latimer; two of his uncles were noted as having been executed at York.14Visitation of Warws. 1683, 138. The long-lived Richard Norton, ‘Old Norton’, a veteran of the Pilgrimage of Grace and a leader of the northern rebellion, had seen many relatives suffer for their defiance of the crown by the time he died in 1585, of wounds sustained during his capture by English forces on the continent.15‘Richard Norton [called Old Norton]’, Oxford DNB. However, the visitation registers a doubt that John, the second son among Richard’s 20 children, was, as claimed, the father of the MP who had settled at Allesley near Coventry – apparently following a second or subsequent marriage – by the time his eldest child was baptised there in 1575, but who died ‘at the manor house’ in March 1581, leaving his widow to marry local gentleman Raymond Fitch the following year.16Visitation of Warws. 1683, 138; Allesley par. reg.148. Whatever the truth of this, our MP was himself the second son, and was probably apprenticed as a dyer, the occupation ascribed to him later.17Coventry Archives, Add. 11364, f. 16.

Norton seems to have established himself fairly rapidly among Coventry’s mercantile elite, marrying in August 1601, at the age of 22, into the prominent Jesson family.18Ryton-on-Dunsmore par. reg. About 1610 he had a fine house built in the city.19VCH Warws. viii. 148. But it was only from 1626 that his career in local government gathered pace. Named that year as a councillor, he steadily gained other offices and developed an association with his brother-in-law William Jesson*, with Humphrey Burton, later his son-in-law and town clerk, and with John Barker*.20Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/1, ff. 217v, 283v, 299v, 295v, 300v, 301v, 310v, 322, 328, 336, 354, 357, 365. In 1633-4 he served as mayor and then became an alderman of Bayley Lane ward, also lending £40 to the corporation to be used at the Bridewell prison, of which he became a governor in 1638.21Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/1, ff. 322, 328, 354; BA/H/C/20/1 p. 206; Add. 11364, f. 16. With Jesson and Barker he was prominent in the city’s attempts in 1635-6 to negotiate a reduction in its Ship Money assessment to reflect the economic decline it had experienced since its medieval heyday.22Coventry Archives, BA/4/K/2/1, ff. 12v, 13v, 57v, 67v. In 1639 Norton was one of the three signatories to a letter to the lord lieutenant of Warwickshire, Spencer Compton, 2nd earl of Northampton, resisting his attempt to hold musters outside the city for the army to be despatched to fight the Scottish rebels.23Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A7/165.

The death of the 1st Baron Coventry (Sir Thomas Coventry), lord keeper and city recorder, before the election on 31 March 1640 to what became the Short Parliament freed electors to reject his recommendation and choose two of their own.24Coventry Archives, BA/H/Q/A79/190; A. Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warws, (1987), 117. Given his standing over the previous decade or so, Norton’s return alongside Jesson was unremarkable. Once at Westminster, he received no committee appointments, but probably spoke on the administration of estates (1 May) and almost certainly on ecclesiastical abuses (2 May), observing on the latter occasion that ‘the ecclesiastical power is very heavy and pressing’ and seeking protection for those who had ‘advanced themselves … by their own industry’.25Aston’s Diary. 111, 119. Such a stance might seem to rule out a Yorkshire Catholic ancestry, but puritanism and recusancy could be found within other families, and godliness sat well with local sentiment.

Re-elected to Parliament in the autumn, again for the junior seat, this time Norton was partnered by Barker. With Barker he offered £1,000 towards security for the loan from the City of London to supply the army in the north (21 Nov.).26D’Ewes (N), 52. On 29 January 1641 he joined Barker on the committee investigating complaints against the ceremonialist William Piers, bishop of Bath and Wells, while on 13 February he was appointed to the committee sitting on the bill for abolishing superstition and idolatry, and advancing true worship.27CJ ii. 75a, 84b; Procs. LP 305, 438. He took the Protestation promptly on 3 May, but made no recorded contribution to debate.28CJ ii. 133b.

‘Sick’ when he drew up his will on 2 July 1641, Norton died within a few days.29PROB11/187/147. His death was reported locally on 7 July and Barker informed the Commons of it on the 11th, seeking a writ for a by-election to fill the vacancy.30Coventry Archives, BA/H/C/17/2, f. 19; Procs. LP v. 608. Norton had requested burial in St Michael’s, Coventry, near his first wife. Evidently in comfortable circumstances when he died, he provided in his will for his second wife Ellen, and left £1,000 between his ten grandchildren, £600 between his younger son Thomas and two sons-in-law, £100 to a surgeon should he cure his daughter Prudence of a chronic disability, and £13 6s 8d to ‘an able and orthodox preaching minister’ should Bablake become a parish church. Properties in Gosford Street were left to the corporation to for the vicar and churchwardens to relieve the poor, along with detailed instructions for a dole of bread worth £10 a year, 300 marks for poor inmates of city hospitals and 40 shillings to the poor of Allesley. Among witnesses to this beneficence was Sir Richard Skeffington*.31PROB11/187/147. Notwithstanding the godliness of their father, Norton’s two surviving sons supported the king during the civil war. The elder, also Simon, an esquire of the body to Charles I, was imprisoned in the Fleet by order of Parliament in September 1642 and was later killed fighting for the royalists. The younger son and eventual heir, (Sir) Thomas Norton†, embarked on an academic career but was ejected from Christ’s College, Cambridge by parliamentarian visitors in 1644 and was a persecutor of conventiclers in the 1660s, before being elected to Parliament for Coventry in 1685.32CJ ii. 761a, 792b; HP Commons 1660-1690.