also rested with the members, as well as decisions on all affairs of the church.
Born into “a family of consequence” at Tolethorpe Hall, three miles from Stamford, in Rutlandshire, near 1550, Browne attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he attained the A.B. degree in 1572. Here he subscribed to the views of those who “were there known and counted forward in religion.” At that time Thomas Cartwright, the founder of Puritanism, served as Lady Margaret professor of divinity at Cambridge.
For three years following his graduation Browne engaged in teaching, in Northamptonshire. Here he taught religion, along with other subjects.
Perturbed that the church offered so little help in maintaining Christian standards among its members, he delved into the study of ecclesiastical government with the view of discovering its shortcomings and abuses.
With true missionary zeal he imparted his findings, not only to his pupils but to the townsmen as well. Consequently he was not slow in making enemies, and shortly thereafter he received his dismissal as a teacher.
He remained in the town, however, teaching what pupils were sent him, until the plague forced him to return to his home. His biographer maintains that Browne could have lived the life of a country gentlemen, but that his restlessness, his ever seeking for an ideal, led him to return to Cambridge, where Richard Greenham, a thoroughgoing Puritan preacher at Dry Drayton, invited him to preach in his parish.
This he proceeded to do. He disdained the use of a bishop’s license, even when his brother later procured one for him. His preaching brought him fame in Cambridge circles, so much so that he was invited to preach there, with the consent of the mayor and the vice-chancellor of the university.
His views had crystallized by this time, in 1579, at least on two points.
He believed that the headship of the church belongs to Christ alone, and that next under Him in authority was, not the bishops, nor any other individual, but the church collectively.
Feeling himself rejected at Cambridge, he went to Norwich, accompanied by Robert Harrison. He had met Harrison at Cambridge and had persuaded him not to accept ordination at the hands of a bishop, but to join him in
his mission of reform. They lived in the same house, as Browne took the lead in their crusade against the legalized churches. Here their preaching found fertile soil among the Lollards, who had resided there since
Wycliffe’s day, and among the Mennonites from the Low Countries, who had been invited to settle there by the duke of Norfolk.
They condemned the “popish power” of the Established Church, the ministers who took their orders from that church, and the parishes guided by those ministers. Browne called the Church of England
“a Jericho partially pulled clown at the Reformation, but since rebuilt on the old foundations (probably referring to the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity under Elizabeth), and so inheriting Joshua’s curse.” — Frederick H. Powicke, Robert Browne, Pioneer of Modem Congregationalism, pages 69,70.
Browne’s preaching gained listeners — a hundred at a time crowded into private houses to hear him. He extended his labors to other parts of the country, constantly remonstrating
“against bishops, ecclesiastical courts, ceremonies, and ordinations of ministers.” — Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain, vol. 3, p. 65.
The bishops complained that Browne’s “corrupt and contentious
doctrine” was likely to mislead “the vulgar sort of people,” with the result that Browne was thrown into prison.
When he was released, his parishioners, now tried as by fire, organized themselves into a church. But when Browne was imprisoned the second time and taken to London, there to be released at the intercession of his relative, the Lord Treasurer Burghley, and when many of his members were likewise persecuted and imprisoned, they decided to leave England and go to Middelburg in Zeeland, which, like Holland, was under the direction of William of Orange, a friend of Protestantism.
For two miserable years they remained there trying out their experiment of a pure democracy in a local church, a corporate self-government.
Doubtless Browne, with his tyrannous temperament, impulsiveness, lack
of patience, and arrogant spirit, was at fault for the lack of unity and the breach that resulted; but Powicke concludes,
“The main root of bitterness lay in the jealousy and instability of his colleague Robert Harrison.” — Ibid., pp. 32,33.
During this period Browne published several books upholding his views.
One of the most important is A Treatise of the Reformation Without Tarrying for Any, and the Wickedness of Those Preachers, Which Will Not Reform Till the Magistrate Command or Compel Them. He wrote at least twenty-five different works before he was forty years old.
Browne had waited in vain for action on the part of the civil magistrates, whose duty he believed it to be to reform the existing ecclesiastical system. According to him, Elizabeth had failed to do her duty. Now necessity demanded that the true and faithful Christians separate themselves from the existing corruption of the Established Church
“without tarrying for any,” not even the queen. “The kingdom of God. . . is not to be begun by whole parishes, but rather of the worthiest, were they never so few.”
Originally of the opinion that magistrates should make proper provision for right religious practices, to see that the clergy and the church members performed their duty, Browne grew weary of waiting for these reforms to take place. Consequently he affirmed, “The magistrates have no
ecclesiastical authority at all, but only as any other Christian if so they be Christians.”
It is thought by some historians that after having produced a clean, pure church, he would have turned it back to civil authority to have it run properly. Of course this view weakens his position on true religious liberty; nonetheless, this idea is perhaps the most logical one to accept if one wishes to trace a thread of consistency through what otherwise, in the light of his later actions, appears to be a deplorably vacillating life.
After quarreling with Harrison, Browne took four or five families with him and crossed over to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he obtained a letter of introduction from Andrew Melville. Immediately Browne started preaching his peculiar doctrines, setting the teeth of the Scottish kirk on edge. He forthrightly pronounced, his biographer, Powicke, says, that
“the whole discipline of Scotland was amiss and that he and his company were not subject to it.” — Powicke, op. cit., pp. 36,37.
Again Browne found himself in custody, from which the king (James VI of Scotland, later James I of England) released him, not because he liked Browne, but because he wished to embarrass the kirk, with which he was at odds at the moment.
In his earnestness and zeal to present his message, Browne never stopped traveling and preaching while free to do so. He endured much hardship and many imprisonments, as often as thirty-two times, he stated, until he returned to his wife and family at Tolethorpe sometime in 1584, as a marked man. Because of his doctrines, which implied subversiveness to existing government, and the books he had published, he remained in constant danger of imprisonment.
In 1583 Elizabeth had sent out a proclamation against these “sundry seditious, scismaticall, and erronious printed Bookes and libelles, tending to the depraving of the Ecclesiastical government established within this Realme.” Two men had already been executed on the charge of helping spread his books.
About this time a printed form of a letter Browne had written concerning
“joining with the English church,” an answer to Cartwright’s charges against Harrison, fell into the hands of Whitgift, prime minister of England and archenemy of all that differed from the episcopal order of things.
Again Lord Burghley came to his kinsman’s assistance, and it seems that Browne, after promising to conform, was turned over to his father for safekeeping. This was a task his father little relished, because of his son’s continual aberrations. Browne was excommunicated on October 7, 1585, and he placed his name to a long list of articles signifying his conformity to the Established Church.
But neither Browne nor his wife went to church as they had promised.
Browne, contrary to his word, met with his followers in London in conventicles, and bade his listeners not to attend the churches of England.
Browne took an inconsistent course of action, promising the church authorities he would obey their demands, when he had no intention of
doing so. He yielded, outwardly at least, to the commands of the Church of England, all the while preserving his faith under a cloak of submission.
Perhaps he silenced his conscience by reasoning that since it was a wicked church and a child of Satan, a promise to comply with its requests was a mere external, that God looked upon the heart; and if his heart was right, if he believed the true doctrine, it made little difference what he told the bishops.
This attitude of counterfeiting conformity brought down many anathemas upon his head from many biographers, particularly those of the Anglican and Presbyterian extraction, and even caused some of his followers to deny him the primacy of starting the Separatist movement. Few other Protestant Reformers have been so much maligned or received so much ill will from their fellow Protestants as did Browne, as the result of his not remaining stanch to the cause he espoused. Henry M. Dexter calls him
“an elaborately slandered man.” — The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, page 22.
A number of biographers have attempted to account for his actions, and have assigned reasons for his dissembling and subsequent return to the Established Church; among them are insanity (a theory which has gained wide acceptance); fear of the stake, or at least of further imprisonments and consequent removal from his wife and family; ill-health and broken spirits, to which his Middelburg experiment may have contributed; and his reasoning that it was useless to kick against the pricks, to beat one’s head against a stone wall; therefore, why should he not spend the rest of his clays in peace and return to the church ruled by the magistrates? for, after all, he had originally been of that opinion.
In 1586 Browne became master of a grammar school in South-wark, after signing another series of articles to conform to the Established Church.
Again he promised to abstain from preaching his Separatist doctrines and to attend the duly authorized church.
In 1591 he gave up his school and asked that he be given a “living,” to which Lord Burghley helped him. The rectory of Achurch-cum-Thorpe in Northamptonshire was supplied him, and shortly afterward he was ordained a priest.
During the forty years he served at Achurch he continued at heart to be a rebel from the Established order, although conforming frequently enough to save himself. It cannot be denied that he deserved the appellation of a spiritual and moral coward. But it is to be doubted that he changed his opinions on the separation of church and state, regardless of what his outward conformity might have been; for in 1587 he still wrote on the old themes as he had before 1583. The church continued to irk him. A letter to an uncle, written about 1588, contended that elders should be selected by the church, by a group of true believers.
At Achurch he repeatedly wandered from the path of Established rectitude and openly flaunted its discipline. He refused to wear the surplice, to use the cross in baptism, and to follow portions of the Book of Common Prayer.
For such acts of nonconformity he was suspended from his office. He had succeeded in winning some to his way of thinking, and for them he built a chapel house to which they resorted at times for counsel and worship.
There is some question whether he was ever reinstated in Achurch as its pastor.
Toward the end of his life he was imprisoned once more, this time for striking a constable who attempted to collect taxes. A feeble, aged man, without means of transportation, he was carried to the jail on a cart
cushioned by a feather bed. He was released after a short time and lived for a few years longer. He died in 1633, more than eighty years of age, and was buried in the St. Giles churchyard.
Browne was married twice, the first time to Alice Allen at Middelburg.
She died in 1610, and two years later he married Elizabeth Warrener, of Stamford. It is recorded that a scandal which she incurred drove them apart.
To appraise Browne’s worth by the results of his work would mean to accord him a foremost place among Reformers, for in this case “the harvest was better than the sower.” He lighted a candle which caused the gleams of religious liberty to shine throughout the earth. After he made the
beginning, other men, all acclaimed for their scholarship and deep
consecration as Nonconformists — Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, and
John Penry — bore the same message of religious freedom and laid down their lives for the truth as they saw it.
Firm in their opposition to both Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, the Separatists were persecuted largely by the ecclesiastical courts until they literally had “no place to hide.”
They took refuge in the Low Countries; but there, too, oppression became so severe that they sought means to liberate themselves, lest they be completely destroyed. Departure for New England proved to be the solution.
Their arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, represented the first step in the development of religious and civil liberty in the United States.
This was to be the outgrowth of the principle which had had its inception in the mind of Robert Browne in England.
Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed their plight and their contribution to humanity in his “Robinson of Leyden”:
No home for these! — too well they knew The mitered king behind the throne; —
The sails were set, the pennons flew, And westward ho! for worlds unknown.
And these were they who gave us birth, The Pilgrims of the sunset wave, Who won for us this virgin earth, And freedom with the soil they gave.