7th of October 1585 he was induced to make a qualified submission to the established order. The story that this result was brought about by excommunication, actual or threatened, is very doubtful, and rests on late and questionable authority. A further submission prepared the way for his appointment, in November 1586, to the mastership of St Olave’s grammar school, Southwark, which he held for more than two years. During part of this time he was much engaged in controversy, on the one hand with Stephen Bredwell, an uncompromising advocate of the established order, and on the other with some of those who more or less occupied his own earlier position, and now looked upon him as a renegade. In particular he several times replied to Barrowe and Greenwood; one of his replies, entitled A Reproofe of certaine schismatical persons and their doctrine touching the hearing and preaching of the word of God (1587–1588), has recently been recovered, and sheds a flood of light upon the development of Browne’s later views (see Burrage, pp. 45-62, for this whole period).
Before the 20th of June 1589 his mastership of St Olave’s seems to have terminated, and after being rector of Little Casterton (in the gift of his eldest brother) for a month or two, he finally, in September 1591, accepted episcopal ordination and the rectory of Achurch-cum-Thorpe Waterville, in Northamptonshire. There he ministered for forty-two years, with one lengthy interval, 1617–1626, which is only partly accounted for (see Burrage, pp. 68-71). There is reason to believe that he never entirely abandoned his early ideal, but latterly thought it possible to maintain a spiritual fellowship within the framework of the Established Church. The closing years of his life seem to have been clouded, due partly to separation among his own flock, and partly to growing irritability in himself, a lonely and disappointed man. When over eighty years old he had a dispute with the parish constable about a rate, blows were struck, and before a magistrate he behaved so stubbornly that he was sent to Northampton gaol, where he died in October 1633. He was buried in St Giles’s churchyard, Northampton. In spite of his later attitude of compromise with expediency, which he felt forced on him by external conditions too strong to defy or ignore, Robert Browne remains a pioneer in ecclesiastical theory in England, the first formulator of an ideal which subsequently became known as Congregationalism (q.v.). He rediscovered certain forgotten aspects of primitive church life, and did not shrink from suffering for the sake of what he held to be the truth. In addition to the works above-mentioned, Browne wrote several controversial and apologetic treatises, of which some remained in MS. until quite recently, and some are still missing.
See H. M. Dexter, The Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years (1880); C. Burrage, The True Story of Robert Browne (Oxford, 1906); Congregational Historical Society’s Transactions, passim (1901–1906).
BROWNE, SIR THOMAS (1605–1682), English author and physician, was born in London, on the 19th of October 1605. He was admitted as a scholar of Winchester school in 1616, and matriculated at Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College), Oxford, in 1623, where he graduated B.A. in January 1626. He took the further degree of M.A. in 1629, studied medicine, and practised for some time in Oxfordshire. Between 1630 and 1633 he left England, travelled in Ireland, France and Italy, and on his way home received the degree of M.D. at the university of Leiden. He returned to London in 1634, and, after a short residence at Shipden Hall, near Halifax, settled in practice at Norwich in 1637. He married in 1641 Dorothy Mileham. Their eldest son, Edward, became president of the Royal College of Physicians, and glimpses of their happy family life are obtainable in the fragmentary correspondence contained in Simon Wilkin’s edition. In 1642 a copy of his Religio Medici, which he describes as “a private exercise directed to myself,” was printed from one of his MSS. without his knowledge, and reviewed by Sir Kenelm Digby in Observations . . . (1643). The interest aroused by this edition compelled Browne to put forth a correct version (1643) of the work, in which letters between Digby and Browne were included. The book was probably written as early as 1635, for he describes himself as still under thirty. In 1646 he published Pseudodoxia Epidemica; Enquiries into very many commonly received Tenents and commonly presumed Truths (1646), and in 1658 Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall; or, a discourse of the sepulchrall urnes lately found in Norfolk. Together with the Garden of Cyrus, or the quincunciall, lozenge, or net-work plantations of the ancients, artificially, naturally, and mystically considered. With Sundry observations (1658). These four works were all that he published, though several tracts, notably the Christian Morals[1] intended as a continuation of Religio Medici, were prepared for publication, and appeared posthumously. In 1671 he received the honour of knighthood from Charles II. on his visit to Norwich. He began a correspondence with John Evelyn in 1658. Very few of the letters are extant, but the diarist has left an account of a visit to Browne (Diary, 17th of October 1671). He died in 1682 on his seventy-seventh birthday, and was buried at St Peter’s, Mancroft, Norwich. His coffin was accidentally broken in 1840, and his skull is preserved in the museum of the Norwich hospital.
Browne’s writings are among the few specimens of purely literary work produced during a period of great political excitement and discord. He remained to all appearance placidly indifferent to the struggle going on around him. His first book appeared in the year of the outbreak of the Civil War; Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the critical year of 1646; and Hydriotaphia, the reflections on the shortness of human life inspired by the unearthing of some funeral urns, on the eve of the Restoration. A mind as aloof as his is a psychological curiosity, and its peculiarities are faithfully reflected in the form and matter of his works. His display of erudition, his copious citations from authorities, his constant use of metaphor and analogy, and his elaborate diction, are common qualities of the writers of the 17th century, but Browne stands apart from his contemporaries by reason of the peculiar cast of his mind. Imbued with the Platonic mysticism which taught him to look on this world as only the image, the shadow of an invisible system, he regarded the whole of experience as only food for contemplation. Nothing is too great or too small for him; all finds a place in the universe of being, which he seems to regard almost from the position of an outsider. He did not speculate systematically on the problems of existence, but he meditates repeatedly on the outward and visible signs of mortality, and on what lies beyond death. Of Browne, as of the greatest writers, it is true that the style is the man. The form of his thought is as peculiar and remarkable as the matter; the two, indeed, react on one another. Much of the quaintness of his style, no doubt, depends on the excessive employment of latinized words, many of which have failed to justify their existence; but the peculiarities of his vocabulary do not explain the unique character of his writing, which is appreciated to-day as much as ever.
The Religio Medici was a puzzle to his contemporaries, and it is still hard to reconcile its contradictions. A Latin translation appeared at Leiden in 1644, and it was widely read on the continent, being translated subsequently into Dutch, French and German. In Paris it was issued in the belief that Browne was really a Roman Catholic, but in Rome the authorities thought otherwise, and the book was placed on the Index Expurgatorius. It is the confession of a mind keen and sceptical in some aspects, and credulous in others. Browne professes to be absolutely free from heretical opinions, but asserts the right to be guided by his own reason in cases where no precise guidance is given either by Scripture or by Church teaching. “I love,” he says, “to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O, Altitudo!” The Pseudodoxia Epidemica, written in a more direct and simple style than is usual with Browne, is a wonderful storehouse of out-of-the-way facts and scraps of erudition,
- ↑ Ed. John Jeffery, archdeacon of Norwich, 1716. The dignified “Letter to a Friend, upon the occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend” (written about 1672, pr. 1690) has been generally supposed to be a preliminary sketch for Christian Morals, but Dr W. A. Greenhill thinks it was written later.
