health as an excuse for not proposing him. Accordingly, at the meeting of the new parliament on 31 Oct. 1780, Charles Wolfran Cornwall [q. v.], the ministerial nominee, was elected to the chair by 203 votes against 134 recorded in favour of Norton, who was proposed by Dunning and seconded by Thomas Townsend (ib. xxi. 793–807). On 20 Nov. following the thanks of the house were voted him for his conduct in the chair by 136 votes to 96 (ib. pp. 873–85), and were conveyed to him by the new speaker on 1 Feb. 1781 (ib. p. 1106). On 12 Dec. 1781 Norton spoke in favour of Sir James Lowther's motion for putting an end to the American war, and declared that ‘it was his firm sentiment that until this was done not a single shilling should be voted as a supply to his majesty’ (ib. xxii. 813–15). He supported Lord John Cavendish's resolutions of censure against the ministry on 8 March 1782 (ib. p. 1144). He was created Baron Grantley of Markenfield, Yorkshire, on 9 April 1782, and took his seat in the House of Lords for the first time on the 16th of the same month (Journals of House of Lords, xxvi. 432). Norton seems to have owed his peerage to the rivalry between Rockingham and Shelburne. The latter obtained a peerage for Dunning without Rockingham's knowledge, whereupon Rockingham insisted that a similar honour should be conferred by the king upon Norton (Wraxall, ii. 258–61). Though he changed sides once more, he does not appear to have taken much part in the debates of the House of Lords. He opposed Fox's East India Bill in 1783, and voted for Pitt's East India Bill in 1784. He was appointed a member of the privy council for the consideration of all matters relating to trade and foreign plantations on 5 March 1784, and again upon the reconstruction of the committee on 23 Aug. 1786. He spoke for the last time in the house on 19 March 1788, when he opposed the third reading of the East India Declaratory Bill (Parl. Hist. xxvii. 245–7). He died at his house in Lincoln's Inn Fields on 1 Jan. 1789, aged 72, and was buried at Wonersh in Surrey on the 9th of the same month.
Norton was a shrewd, unprincipled man, of good abilities and offensive manners. His violent temper and lack of discretion unfitted him for the post of speaker. Though by no means a learned lawyer, he was a bold and able pleader, and was remarkable alike for the clearness of his arguments and the inaccuracy of his statements. According to Lord Mansfield, Norton's ‘art was very likely to mislead a judge and jury; and with him I found it more difficult to prevent injustice being done than with any person whoever practised before me’ (Law and Lawyers, 1840, i. 188). Walpole, who never tires of abusing Norton, even asserts that ‘it was known that in private causes he took money from both parties, and availed himself against one or other of them of the lights they had communicated to him’ (Memoirs of the Reign of George III, i. 240). Junius made a violent attack upon Norton in Letter 39, quoting Ben Jonson's description of the lawyer who ‘gives forked counsel’ (Woodfall's edition, 1814, ii. 139–40). Churchill satirises him in ‘The Duellist’ (bk. iii.) Mason, under the pseudonym of ‘Malcolm Macgreggor, wrote an ‘Ode to Sir Fletcher Norton in imitation of Horace, Ode viii. Book iv,’ which he published with ‘An Epistle to Dr. Shebbeare’ in 1777 (London, 4to). In the satires and caricatures of the day Norton was usually nicknamed ‘Sir Bull-face Double Fee.’
Norton married, on 21 May 1741, Grace, eldest daughter of Sir William Chapple, kt., a justice of the king's bench, by whom he had five sons—viz.: (1) William, his majesty's minister to the Swiss Cantons, who succeeded his father as second baron, and died on 12 Nov. 1822; (2) Fletcher, a baron of the exchequer in Scotland, who died on 19 June 1820; (3) Chapple [q. v.]; (4) Edward, a barrister-at-law, recorder and M.P. for Carlisle, who died on 27 March 1786, and (5) Thomas, who died an infant—and two daughters: Grace Traherne, who died an infant, and Grace, who married, on 19 Nov. 1799, John, third earl of Portsmouth, and died on 16 Nov. 1813. Norton's widow died on 30 Oct. 1803, aged 95.
A portrait of Norton in his speaker's robes, by Sir William Beechey, belongs to Earl Grantley. There is a whole-length caricature of him by James Sayer.
