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OLD BROWNISTS: By this name may be called certain adherents of that vehement Independency, more extreme than mere Congregationalism, which had been propagated in Elizabeth's reign by Robert Brown himself.
In the interim, many particular ships went thither, and finding my relations true, and that I had not taken that I brought home from the French men, as had been reported: yet further for my pains to discredit me, and my calling it New England, they obscured it, and shadowed it, with the title of Canada, till at my humble suit, it pleased our most Royal King Charles, whom God long keep, bless and preserve, then Prince of Wales, to confirm it with my map and book, by the title of New England; the gain thence returning did make the fame thereof so increase that thirty, forty or fifty sail went yearly only to trade and fish; but nothing would be done for a plantation, till about some hundred of your Brownists of England, Amsterdam and Leyden went to New Plimouth, whose humorous ignorances, caused them for more than a year, to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with an infinite patience; saying my books and maps were much better cheap to teach them than myself: many others have used the like good husbandry that have payed soundly in trying their self-willed conclusions; but those in time doing well, diverse others have in small handfulls undertaken to go there, to be several Lords and Kings of themselves, but most vanished to nothing."
For a long time the "Separatists," as they were called, were as unpopular with the great body of Puritans as with the churchmen. Popular aversion was expressed by the derisive name of "Brownists," given them from Robert Browne, the first to set forth their doctrines in a formal pamphlet, entitled The Life and Manners of True Christians.
It was not the Puritan Nonconformists who first sought refuge on American shores, but a less aggressive people, who were called Brownists in derision, but who called themselves Separatists. Robert Browne first formulated the doctrines of the sect; but its origin, and the reasons for its persistence in the face of bitter persecution, are not altogether clear.
The Brownists, the Anabaptists, the Papists, the Puritans, the Separatists, and "such factious Humorists," were taking possession of the land that Smith claimed to have "discovered," and in which he had no foothold. Failing to get employment anywhere, he petitioned the Virginia Company for a reward out of the treasury in London or the profits in Virginia.
Rigid Brownists or Separatists say, that the fraternity or community of the faithful unpresbyterated is the first receptacle of proper ecclesiastical power from Christ: unto whom some of independent judgment subscribe. Independents thus resolve: First, That the apostles of Christ are the first subject of apostolical power.
At first they did not intend to form a new sect; but in 1580 one of their ministers, named Robert Brown, urged them to separate from the Church of England, and soon gathered about him a great number of followers, who were called Separatists or Brownists. They boldly asserted their right to worship as they pleased, and put their doctrines into practice.
In a letter to the countess of Lincoln, March 28, 1631, the deputy governor, Thomas Dudley, one of the warmest of the Puritans, repelled "the false and scandalous report," which those who returned "the last year" had spread in England that "we are Brownists in religion and ill affected to our state at home"; "and for our further cleareinge," he said, "I truely affirme that I know noe one person who came over with us the last yeare to be altered in his judgment and affection eyther in ecclesiasticall or civill respects since our comeinge hither."
And so Truth and Peace hold their long discourse, evolving very much that doctrine of the absolute Liberty of Conscience, as derivable from, or radically identical with, the idea of the utter distinctness of the Church of Christ from the world or civil society, which had been propounded first by the Brownists and Baptists, and had come down as a tradition from them.
They were sometimes called Separatists because they separated themselves from the church of England, sometimes Brownists after the name of one of their eminent ministers. These Puritans suffered so much persecuted in England that, in 1607, many of them went over to Holland, and lived ten or twelve years at Amsterdam and Leyden.
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