atic Robert Brown, a
Rutlandshire man, bred at Cambridge, who had become a preacher at
Norwich.

Here and there in England by his tongue during those ten years, and
sometimes by pamphlets in exile, Brown, who could boast that he had been
"committed to thirty-two prisons, in some of which he could not see his
hand at noon-day," and who escaped the gallows only through some family
connection he had with the all-powerful Lord Burghley, had preached
doctrines far more violently schismatic than those of Cartwright and the
majority of the Puritans. His attacks on bishops and episcopacy were
boundlessly fierce; and the duty of separation _in toto_ from the Church
of England, the right of any number of persons to form themselves into a
distinct congregation, the mutual independence of congregations so
formed, and the liberty of any member of a congregation to preach or
exhort in it, were among his leading tenets.

At length, tiring of the tempest he had raised around him, he accepted a
living in Northamptonshire; and, though he is not known to have ever
formally recanted any of his opinions, he lived on in his parsonage till
as late as 1630, when Fuller knew him as a passionate and rather
disreputable old man of eighty, employing a curate to do his work,
quarrelling with everybody, and refusing to pay his rates. Meanwhile the
opinions which he had propagated fifty years before had passed through a
singular history in the minds and lives of men of steadier and more
persevering character. For, though Brown himself had vanished from
public view since 1590, the Brownists, or Separatists, as they were
called, had persisted in their course, through execration and
persecution, as a sect of outlaws beyond the pale of ordinary
Puritanism, and with whom moderate Puritans disowned connection or
sympathy. One hears of considerable numbers of them in the shires of
Norfolk and Essex and throughout Wales; and there was a central
association of them in London, holding conventicles in the fields, or
shifting from meeting-house to meeting-house in the suburbs, so as to
elude Whitgift's ecclesiastical police. At length, in 1592, the police
broke in upon one of the meetings of the London Brownists at Islington;
fifty-six of these were thrown into divers jails; and, some of the
Separatist leaders having been otherwise arrested, there ensued a
vengeance far more ruthless than the government dared against Puritans
in general.

Six of the leaders