1571 Dalton spoke in favour of the bill to enforce church attendance and the taking of the sacrament. He was appointed to the committee on the succession question on 31 Oct. He was summoned before the Privy Council, which decided to ask the House exactly what he had said, but the Queen, as part of her current policy of appeasing the Commons, intervened and the matter was dropped. His precise words are now uncertain, but he probably strayed into some attack on the Scottish title. Later in the month he was in trouble over the succession question when, speaking against Patrick Adamson’s poem on the birth of Prince James, he was alleged to have said that he trusted never to see the day ‘that ever any Scot or stranger shall have any interest in the Crown of this realm’. 1566, whether the Queen’s command forbidding the Commons ‘to speak or treat any more of the succession’ was a breach of the liberty of free speech. He supported Paul Wentworth’s motion on 11 Nov. He sat on over 70 Commons committees and spoke frequently.

However, he later took care to rid himself of any reputation for extremism, bringing his views more and more into line with official policy. His puritan sympathies are obvious throughout his parliamentary career, and indeed he quickly attracted attention in his first Parliament as a member of the Peter Wentworth group. In 1579 he was described in a list of leading lawyers as ‘well practised, not wealthy’.ĭalton’s most probable patron at Saltash was the 2nd Earl of Bedford, at Lostwithiel Lord Burghley, and at Preston the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Expelled for heresy, he was re-admitted in May 1558, when it was said that his expulsion had been ‘odiously prosecuted and odiously registered in the time of popery’, and must be ‘utterly blotted out and put to perpetual oblivion’.

He played an active part in the affairs of Lincoln’s Inn, where he was specially admitted in 1555. Biographyĭalton was a distinguished lawyer and parliamentarian. Inn 1569, Autumn reader 1572, treasurer 1577, Lent reader 1585 under-sheriff of London 1594.

Two Thousand Years by M. Dalto