English historian, antiquarian, and poet whose lyrics are among the best in the miscellany Englands Helicon (1600), a widely known anthology of late 16th-century lyric and pastoral poetry.

Bolton was educated at Cambridge and the Inner Temple, London. He obtained a minor position at court but was debarred from public office because of his Roman Catholicism, and he tried to support himself by writing. A friend of William Camden and other scholars, he petitioned James I to form a royal academy, but the king died before giving formal sanction. His plans to write official histories of England and London also failed, and Bolton, after imprisonment for recusancy, seems to have died in poverty. His most considerable works are the history Nero Caesar (1624) and Hypercritica, a treatise on the writing of history in which he reviews contemporary authors.