The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut | Page 5

bishop's license to preach, though urged to do so, because he had come
to consider it as contrary to the authority of the Scriptures. Nevertheless,
he continued preaching until he was silenced by the prelate. Browne
then went to Norwich, preaching there and at Bury St. Edmunds, both
of which had been gathering-places for the Separatists. At Norwich, he
organized a church. Writing of Browne's labors there in 1580 and 1581,
Dr. Dexter says: "Here, following the track which he had been long
elaborating, he thoroughly discovered and restated the original
Congregational way in all its simplicity and symmetry. And here, by
his prompting and under his guidance, was formed the first church in
modern days of which I have any knowledge, which was intelligently
and one might say philosophically Congregational in its platform and
processes; he becoming its pastor." [3] Persecution followed Browne to
Norwich, and in order to escape it he, in 1581, migrated with his church
to Middelburg, in Zealand. There, for two years, he devoted himself to
authorship, wherein he set forth his teachings. His books and pamphlets,
which had been proscribed in England, were printed in Middelburg and
secretly distributed by his friends and followers at home. But Browne's
temperament was not of the kind to hold and mould men together,
while his doctrine of equality in church government was too strong
food for people who, for generations, had been subservient to a system
that demanded only their obedience. His church soon disintegrated.
With but a remnant of his following, he returned in 1583 by way of

Scotland into England, finding everywhere the strong hand of the
government stretched out in persecution. Three years later, after having
been imprisoned in noisome cells some thirty times within six years,
utterly broken in health, if not weakened also in mind, and never
feeling safe from arrest while in his own land, Browne finally sought
pardon for his offensive teachings and, obtaining it, reentered the
English communion. Though he was given a small parish, he was
looked upon as a renegade, and died in poverty about 1631, at an
extreme old age. He died while the Pilgrim Separatists were still a
struggling colony at Plymouth, repudiating the name of Brownists;
before the colonial churches had embodied in their system most of the
fundamentals of his; and long before the value of his teachings as to
democracy, whether in the church or by extension in the state, had
dawned upon mankind.
The connecting link between Brownism and Barrowism, whose
similarities and dissimilarities we shall consider together, or rather the
connecting link between Robert Browne and Henry Barrowe, was
another Cambridge student, John Greenwood. He was graduated in
1581, the year that Browne removed to Middelburg. Greenwood had
become so enamored with Separatist doctrines, that within five years of
his graduation he was deprived of his benefice, in 1586, and sent to
prison. While there, he was visited by his friend, Henry Barrowe, a
young London lawyer, who, through the chance words of a London
preacher, had been converted from a wild, gay life to one devout and
godly. During a visit to Greenwood, Barrowe was arrested and sent to
Lambeth Palace for examination. Upon refusing to take the oath
required by the bishop, Barrowe was remanded to prison to await
further examination. Later, he damaged himself and his cause by an
unnecessarily bitter denunciation of his enemies and by a too dogmatic
assertion of his own principles. Accordingly, he was sent back to prison,
where, together with Greenwood, he awaited trial until March, 1593.
Then, upon the distorted testimony of their writings, both men were
sentenced as seditious fellows, worthy of death. Though twice
reprieved at the seemingly last hour, they were hanged together on
April 6, 1593.

Both Greenwood and Barrowe frequently asserted that they never had
anything to do with Browne. [4] Yet it is probable that it was Browne's
influence which turned Greenwood's puritanical convictions to
Separatist principles. Barrowe had been graduated from Clare Hall,
Cambridge, in 1569-70; Browne, from Corpus Christi in 1572. The two
men, so different in character, probably did not meet in university days,
and certainly not later in London, where one went to a life of pleasure
and the other to teaching and to the study of the Scriptures. Greenwood,
however, had entered Cambridge in 1577-78, and left it in 1581. Thus
he was in college during the two years that Browne was preaching in
and near Cambridge. It is safe to assume that the young scholar, soon to
become a licensed preacher, and overflowing with the Puritan zeal of
his college, might be drawn either through curiosity or admiration to
hear the erratic and almost fanatic preacher. Later, when Browne's
writings were being secretly distributed in England, both Barrowe and
Greenwood had