were brought to the scaffold, including Henry
Barrowe, a Gray's Inn lawyer--of such note among those early Brownists
by his writings that they were also called Barrowists--John Greenwood, a
preacher, and the poor young Welshman, John Penry, whose brave and
simple words on his own hard case, addressed before his death to Lord
Burghley, thrill one's nerves yet. All these were of Cambridge training,
though Penry had also been at Oxford. Others died in prison; and of the
remainder many were banished.

Among the observers of these severities was Francis Bacon, then rising
into eminence as a politician and lawyer. His feeling on the subject was
thus expressed at the time: "As for those which we call Brownists,
being, when they were at the most, a very small number of very silly and
base people here and there in corners dispersed, they are now--thanks be
to God--by the good remedies that have been used, suppressed and worn
out, so as there is scarce any news of them." Bacon, doubtless, here
expressed the feeling of all that was respectable in English society.
For not only was it the theory of Brownism intrinsically that the Church
of England was a false church, an institution of anti-christ, from which
all Christians were bound to separate themselves; but the scurrilities
against the bishops that had been vented anonymously by some particular
nest of Brownists, or their allies, in the famous series of _Martin
Marprelate Tracts_ (1589), had disgusted and enraged many who would have
tolerated moderate Nonconformity.

With respect to the theory of church government called Independency or
Congregationalism, the state of the case in 1640 may be thus summed up:
There was an unknown amount of traditional affection for the theory,
even where it could not be articulately stated, in the native and
popular antiprelacy of England itself. This vague and diffused
Independency had also a few champions in known Separatist ministers, who
had managed to remain in England through all difficulties, and perhaps
it had well-wishers in a private opinionist or two, like John Goodwin,
regularly in orders in the Church of England; but the effective mass of
English-born Independency lay wholly without the bounds of England,
partly in little curdlings of Separatists or Semiseparatists among the
English exiles in some of the towns of Holland, but chiefly, and in most
assured completeness both of bulk and of detail, in the incipient
transatlantic commonwe