BROWNE, John II (1608-aft.1675), of Milford, Little Ness, Baschurch, Salop.

Browne was born five miles outside the Welsh border, of yeoman stock, though during his lifetime he acquired the style of ‘gentleman’. According to a local nineteenth-century antiquary, the Brownes had been at Little Ness, before 1605 a chapelry of Baschurch, since the time of Henry VIII.6Salop Archives, 2868/273. Nothing is known of his family, and because of deficiencies in the Little Ness parish register, it is a likelihood and not a certainty that he was the John Browne baptised there in February 1608. It was probably his sister who was buried there in the same month he was baptised, but we are on surer ground in believing that he had a brother, Edward.7Little Ness par. reg. It was Edward Browne who left a record of John Browne’s first known political act. On 27 February 1643, Browne was arrested in Shrewsbury by Sir Paul Harris, and imprisoned awaiting the spring assizes. He had refused to pay taxes and to join the posse comitatus, compounding his offence by denying that the parliamentarians at Edgehill had been rebels, and asserting that ‘the power of the king was in the two Houses of Parliament’. Edward Browne travelled to Little Ness to tell his sister-in-law of these events, and after he had left, a royalist raiding party arrived to terrify John Browne’s wife, seven children and an elderly man living with them, perhaps the father of John and Edward. Some clothes of Edward Browne were taken, which he feared might fall into the hands of his neighbours ‘to aggravate the grief of my wife’.8Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. 2nd ser. vii. 272-3, 267-8. Apart from the light this throws on the size of John Browne’s family, it also indicates that the Brownes thought of themselves as unable to draw on the sympathy of their neighbours. Taken together, the episode suggests that the family was puritan in outlook by the start of the civil war.

The suffering of John Browne’s wife was central to the narrative of his imprisonment, and there has been doubt about her identity. A recent authority identifies her forename as Katherine, but this cannot be the case.9BDBR i. 103. Thomas, the son of John and Katherine Browne, was born in 1652, but the son of that name of John Browne the MP had married Mary Gough, daughter of the annalist, Richard Gough, by July 1663.10Salop Archives, 2868/249-50; R. Gough, Hist. Myddle ed. Hey, 161. Another John Browne of Little Ness was married to one Mary, with some children born in the late 1630s, and this seems more probably the relevant family.11Little Ness par. reg. How long John Browne remained in gaol in Shrewsbury is not known. It seems likely that he joined the parliamentarian army, but a number of officers shared his name, and it is difficult to identify him with any certainty. Men of that name who had long careers in the Eastern Association and in the 3rd earl of Essex’s own regiment can be quickly discarded.12E.g., SP28/17/245, 344; 18/90, 19/420; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. i. 8, 16, 70, 76. The John Browne who was recruited as a major in the brigade of Sir William Brereton in Cheshire and Staffordshire in 1643, who was in Coventry in June 1644, and in November 1645, with the rank of captain-lieutenant, gave in a list of soldiers from the Nantwich district for their pay, seems likely to have been the individual in question.13M. D. Wanklyn, 'Landed Society and Allegiance in Cheshire and Salop in the First Civil War' (Manchester Univ. PhD thesis 1976), 244; Staffs. Co. Cttee. 100; Brereton Letter Bks. ii. 186, 187n.; SP 28/224, fos. 47, 49-50. One with the same name but the title colonel mustered the Cheshire and Staffordshire force in December 1644, so it is possible he temporarily held that rank.14SP28/21/299. Although Browne may have served under Thomas Mytton* in Shropshire, it is most unlikely that he continued in the army following the formation of the New Model.15Wanklyn, 'Landed Society', 268.

By 1647, Browne had retired from whatever military service he had undertaken, and had re-established himself at Little Ness with the title ‘gentleman’, to which he had not aspired before the civil war. He is unlikely to have been the Shropshire county committeeman, serving from May 1649, whose name was rendered by the compilers of the committee lists as ‘Broom’. That individual had died by June 1654, when the remaining commissioners issued an order for recovery of monies still in his custody when he died.16A. and O.; CCC, 256, 268, 686. John Browne was a kinsman of the devout London woman, Sarah Wight, and wrote to her mother early in September 1647 with pious sentiments and to assure Sarah that the grace of God had ‘much comforted, much refreshed and confirmed the souls of your friends with us’, hinting at Browne’s centrality among the Shropshire godly.17H. Jessey, Exceeding Riches of Grace (3rd ed. 1648), sig. a, verso. He was probably the Mr John Browne named as an elder of the first Shropshire classis, centred on Shrewsbury, and if so, this was the first recorded association between Browne and Thomas Baker*, of Sweeney.18Severall Divisions and Persons for Classicall Presbyteries (1647), 4. Browne was said by Richard Gough to be Baker’s ‘oracle’ on religious and political matters.19Gough, Hist. Myddle, 161. Neither Baker nor Browne was a Presbyterian in fact, and both inclined towards Independency. By 1647, Browne was an associate of Daniel Lloyd, a prominent member of the Independent congregation at Wrexham, to which the former army chaplain Morgan Llwyd was minister, and Browne and Lloyd tried to encourage Sarah Wight out of her overwhelming sense of irredeemable sinfulness. When Sarah came to Shropshire, the ministers Llwyd and Ambrose Mostyn were among those who counselled her.20H. Jessey, Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (1647), 8.

This network accounts for Browne’s inclusion among the commissioners for propagating the gospel in 1651. He was active among the north Wales commissioners, and attended meetings in Conway, Llangollen, Caernarfon and Wrexham between July 1651 and May 1652, mostly regulating the appointments of schoolmasters across the region.21LPL, Comm. VIII/1 pp. 231, 319, 320, 321, 322. In October 1651, he signed a letter from ‘the church of Christ at Wrexham to the Saints in London’, on God’s mercies, especially as evident in the outcome of the battle of Worcester, urging unity among the Saints and the benefits of closer correspondence.22Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd ii. ed. J.H. Davies (1908), 247-50. There is no doubt that Browne shared the millenarianism of Llwyd, Thomas Harrison I* and Oliver Cromwell* in 1653, and joined Llwyd and others of the Wrexham congregation in congratulating Cromwell on the forced dissolution of the Rump Parliament, ‘too rusty for the high and supernatural work now on the wheels in the earth’.23Original Letters ed. Nickolls, 120. Browne and his colleagues recommended to Cromwell that the gathered churches send nominees to Westminster, advice to which the lord general was evidently very well-disposed. In May 1653 Browne, Hugh Courtney, Richard Price were selected by Harrison and the millenarian minister Vavasor Powell for duty in what became the Nominated Assembly.24'Inedited Letters' ed. Mayer, 227. There is a suggestion that Browne was not as well-connected as some others among the Fifth Monarchist Saints: certainly John Jones I* wished all the Welsh representatives well, but confessed that he did not know Browne.25'Inedited Letters' ed. Mayer, 237.

For all the heightened fervour with which Browne and other millenarians hailed the Nominated Assembly, he made very little impression on its proceedings. With other Members, he petitioned for lodgings vacated by outgoing Rumpers (15 June), and was one of those awarded Denis Bond’s former accommodation (8 July). The only surviving evidence of his parliamentary activity is his addition to the committee for prisons and prisoners on 20 July.26CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 412; 1653-4, pp.14, 98; CJ vii. 287b. He was one of a cluster of six Members whose names do not appear in the Journal between then and the dissolution in December: perhaps their absence marked dissent. On 22 Aug. the Whitehall committee were instructed ‘to take care that the rooms in Whitehall in possession of Mr Brown be assigned to some of Council’s officers whose rooms in the House have been made use of for a Member’, which may be a reference to John Browne.

Browne was out of sympathy with the protectorate, and aligned himself with the millenarian minister Vavasor Powell, who had been responsible for his selection for the 1653 Parliament. With Powell and a number of other godly activists from north Wales, he wrote reprovingly to Walter Cradock, a leading south Wales minister who supported Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell*. In the view of Browne and his colleagues the title ‘Highness’ was ‘due to none but God’.27Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd iii. ed. J. G. Jones, G. W. Owen (Cardiff, 1994), 78-9. He subscribed Powell’s A Word for God, which in 1655 denigrated the protectorate. Browne should not be confused at this point with a millenarian figure of the same name, from Orpington, Kent, who published a Fifth Monarchist tract.28 BDBR i. 103 But while Browne remained close to Powell, he was able to allow his name to go forward as a militia commissioner in July 1659, when the republican government was under threat during the rising of Sir George Boothe*, and as a tax commissioner in January 1660.

Subsequently he was confined to his spiritual sphere. He was probably the man on a warrant from Lord Newport to Sir Francis Ottley to be arrested in 1665, and by 1669 was holding a conventicle at his house.29R. F. Skinner, 'Nonconformity in Shropshire (1662 to 1815)' (London Univ. PhD thesis, 1967), 96-7. He was licensed there as an Independent in 1672. His daughter Martha (baptised at Little Ness in 1640) married in 1668 Hugh Owen of Bronclydwr, Merioneth, ‘the apostle of Merioneth’, another devotee of the Wrexham congregation, who became a prominent Independent minister in north-west Wales.30BDBR i. 103; ii. 281; Little Ness par. reg. Another associate of Browne after 1660 was Henry Maurice, a minister who conformed in 1660; in 1672 Browne proposed that Maurice visit Monmouthshire.31The People of God ed. J. V. Cox (2 vols., Centre for Local Hist., Keele University, Salop Record Ser., ix., x), ii. 4. Browne was still an elder of the Wrexham gathering in 1675, but probably died soon after.32Palmer, Older Nonconformity of Wrexham, 49. His eldest son Thomas married a half-niece of Thomas Baker*, thereby acquiring the Sweeney Hall estate. The memoirs of Richard Gough, a neighbour, recalled John Browne as ‘a self conceited, confident person’, and it seems that two of his male children became Shrewsbury tradesmen after 1660.33The People of God i. 28-9, 31. None of the family sat in later Parliaments.