BROWNE, Sir Ambrose, 1st bt. (c.1591-1661), of Betchworth Castle, Dorking, Surr.

The Brownes acquired Betchworth Castle, near Dorking, in the fifteenth century and first represented Surrey in 1478. Ancient gentry, they had held court office and served as sheriffs in Surrey. A cadet branch had acquired the title Viscount Montagu. This MP’s grandfather, Thomas Browne† (d.1597), and his father, Sir Matthew Browne†, both sat in Parliament, but the latter was killed in a duel at the age of 40, when his son was only 12.30‘Browne, Sir Matthew’, ‘Browne, Thomas’, HP Commons 1558-1603.

Sir Ambrose Browne had already spent 14 years on the commission of the peace and served as sheriff and deputy lieutenant when he was elected to Parliament for the senior county seat in 1628, succeeding his maternal uncle. His sole committee appointment and his only recorded speech both related to Surrey affairs.31‘Browne, Sir Ambrose’, HP Commons 1604-1629. Alongside his long-running offices, he was regularly nominated to local commissions during the 1630s.32C181/4, ff. 35-198v; C181/5, ff. 8v-239v; CSP Dom. 1637, p.110; 1638-9, p. 50. However, disapproval on religious grounds may have counted for as much as narrow geographical horizons in his refusal to contribute towards the second bishops’ war in 1639.33Rushworth, Hist. Collns. iii. 914.

A high profile in local administration probably helped to ensure Browne’s re-election as a knight of the shire in 1640, but as before, his prominence was not replicated at Westminster. There is no indication of his active participation in the Short Parliament. Returned again in the autumn, he was slightly more visible, being nominated to committees preparing a money bill (19 Nov.) and investigating complaints about the deputy lieutenants of Leicestershire (14 Dec.).34CJ ii. 31b, 50b. On 21 November he was among Members each offering security for a loan of £1,000 to support the armies in the north.35Procs. LP, i. 229, 232, 236. In February 1641 he was among Surrey MPs and others appointed to discuss a private bill for settling property belonging to local landowner and recusant William Copley.36CJ ii. 93b; VCH Surr. iii. 198. Having taken the Protestation promptly on 3 May, he was named to a further committee, investigating corruption among sheriffs, on 6 July.37CJ ii. 133b, 200a. Beyond parochial concerns, it seems that he was also interested in reform of abuses and in religion.

With Sir John Evelyn of Surrey*, Browne was made a commissioner for disarming recusants following revelations of the ‘army plot’ (30 Aug.).38LJ iv. 385b. At the end of the year he presented to Parliament a petition from ‘divers gentlemen and others’ of Surrey requesting the removal of ‘popish lords and bishops from the Lords’ House’.39D’Ewes (C), 306. In the panic engendered by the king’s attempt to arrest the Five Members, Browne was one of the Surrey Members deputed on 10 January 1642 to search for illicit arms at Vauxhall and Foxes Hall in Lambeth, ‘where the Lord Herbert, a papist son to the earl of Somerset, did exercise his engineerie’ [i.e. engineering].40PJ i. 28. Vigilant against subversion and loyal to those driving the business of the House, on 11 February Browne informed against John Nelson, rector of Mickleham, Surrey. Already reckoned by some ‘a scandalous minister’ – in 1639 he was said, while drunk, to have indecently assaulted a woman – Nelson was now supposed to have claimed that John Pym* was ‘neither a scholar nor a gentleman’ and that ‘it was by his malicious procurement that Sir Edward Dering* was sent to the Tower, where those who sent him thither did better deserve to be’. But Browne’s allegation lacked corroborative witnesses, so the matter was postponed pending Nelson’s response to a summons to the House.41PJ i. 359; Walker Revised, 352. When commissioners for the western division of Surrey petitioned the Commons in April that the assessments imposed on them were disproportionately high, diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes* was critical of the choice of such officers made by Browne and his fellow knight of the shire, Sir Richard Onslow*.42PJ ii. 239.

In June, as war loomed, Browne offered ‘two horses well furnished’ for the defence.43PJ ii. 475. When the Surrey assizes were adjourned for greater security from Kingston-upon-Thames to Dorking, Browne, together with his cousin Sir Anthony Vincent, his son-in-law William Muschamp and others, was ordered to oversee the process (12 Aug.).44CJ ii. 717a; LJ v. 291a. In February 1643 his name, followed by Vincent’s, headed the Surrey committee for levying weekly assessments and he was subsequently (7 Mar.) given the responsibility of giving a regular account of its proceedings, but by 31 March, having been confronted by the realities of civil strife on his doorstep, he had begun to question his instructions.45CJ ii. 980a, 992b. Bolstering complaints already made by colleague Francis Drake*, that day he ‘stood up and desired to know’ whether Surrey should submit to the warrant of the parliamentarian commander, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, for £1,000 ‘forthwith ... at the peril of the inhabitants’ of the middle division of the county or obey the parliamentary ordinance for weekly contributions. Since Surrey had been ‘lately impoverished by the king’s army’, the division ‘was not possibly able to represent or pay in this sum’ and ‘if this warrant were seconded by the rapine and plundering of the soldiers which was suspected would follow, divers of the inhabitants would leave the county’.46Harl. 164, f. 349b. The injunction issued in response –that he go to Surrey and put ordinances into speedy execution – had to be repeated a week later (7 Apr.).47CJ iii. 25b, 35a.

Perhaps because his essential sympathy for the cause could not be doubted and because he was too locally significant to be overlooked, Browne continued to be included on Surrey committees and commissions, although his name was among those added belatedly to those charged with raising forces there (24 July).48A. and O.; CJ iii. 180a. He took the vow and covenant in support of the earl of Essex on 8 June and the Solemn League and Covenant on 16 October.49CJ iii. 180a, 275b. By Christmas 1643 Betchworth Castle had become a parliamentarian garrison, reported to be housing a thousand men.50HMC 4th Rep. 279. This probably severely tested Browne’s loyalty. His elder son Adam Browne†, who had matriculated at Cambridge in 1640, at some point became a royalist army officer.51P.R. Newman, Royalist Army Officers (New York, 1981), 46. But Sir Ambrose did not defect: indeed, a letter to the county committee from the Committee of Both Kingdoms on 30 March 1644 was addressed in the first instance to him.52CSP Dom. 1644, p. 84.

After a long absence from the record, Browne re-appeared in the Commons Journal on 10 July 1645, when he was nominated with Onslow, Evelyn of Surrey and others to confer with the militia of London about raising additional forces for the siege of Oxford.53CJ iv. 203a. After another lengthy interval during which he was visible only on local commissions, he was ordered on 23 December 1647, again with Onslow and Evelyn, to go to Surrey to hasten the collection of assessments.54CJ v. 400b. Given the religious preferences evident in the fact that he appears as a Presbyterian elder in Dorking in 1648, he may have absented himself from Westminster in periods when political Presbyterianism was in eclipse and the Independents in the ascendant, and he was possibly implicated in the insurrections of 1648. The Derby House Committee evidently entertained suspicions of him following the seizure in May 1648 of letters revealing royalist hopes that Browne and Onslow might be persuaded to rally the county to their cause.55LJ x. 287b. Adam Browne, by this time a colonel, sought leave to compound that month.56CCC 1837. On 4 July the Committee (at which Onslow, who distanced himself from insurgency, was present) informed Sir Ambrose that they had ‘notice of some things concerning which you are able to give us more full information’ and summoned him to attend them ‘with what expedition you can’. He was instructed to take precautions to ensure that ‘the enemy’ who had ‘a design to surprise and keep divers strongholds in your county’ did not in his absence seize upon Betchworth, ‘a place of some strength’, ‘to the interruption of the peace of the county’.57SP21/24, f. 179. His precise response is unknown, but Adam was among the insurgents and on 28 September Sir Ambrose lodged a bond of £2,000 for his son’s appearance to answer for his actions.58CCC 1837; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 291.

As a peace treaty with the king seemed imminent on 24 November, Onslow and Browne, apparently at Westminster, were instructed to write to Surrey to encourage the collection of army assessments.59CJ vi. 88a. Both were made militia commissioners on 2 December.60A. and O. But while Onslow was only briefly imprisoned on 6 December at Pride’s Purge, Browne was permanently excluded from the House.61A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648) (669.f.13.62). In 1650 he came close to having his estate sequestered following allegations in June by one William Saull that he had covertly raised a troop of horse for Charles I and sent them to Oxford. Browne was discharged on 3 January 1651, but Saull lodged fresh accusations, including that Sir Ambrose had commenced actions against him and others in the bailiff’s court at Southwark (which was presided over by Speaker William Lenthall’s* brother-in-law Samuel Warcup) and had threatened them and their families with violence. However, proceedings against Browne were dropped in November 1651 on the grounds that insufficient evidence had been produced.62CCAM 1236-7; CCC 304, 393-4, 398.

Browne appears to have played no part in public administration during the protectorate. But the record of the diarist John Evelyn of his visits to Betchworth Castle, in 1654 and 1658, indicates that he remained a figure in local society.63Evelyn Diary ed. de Beer, iii. 143, 219. He was listed among the formerly secluded Members who, having been readmitted in February 1660, were sitting at the dissolution of the Long Parliament on 16 March.64The Grand Memorandum, or a True and Perfect Catalogue (1660) (669.f.24.37). Four days earlier he had once again been named a militia commissioner.65A. and O.

The examination in December 1660 of one Giles Horsington of Gardiner Lane, King Street, Westminster, a former officer in the parliamentary army in Ireland who denied holding intelligence with disbanded soldiers, revealed that Browne had been lodging in his house for the previous four months.66SP29/24, f. 13. Browne died on 16 August 1661.67CB. His son Adam, the last of the male line, was then sitting for Surrey in the Cavalier Parliament.68HP Commons 1660-1690.