Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 07.djvu/15

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Brown
9
Brown

costume is some thirty years or so later than the date given in the inscription, which cannot be contemporary with the painting. In 1522 Brown was elected alderman of London, but resigned the office in 1525, before he had served either as sheritf or mayor. During the last. years ot his life he sat on the commission of the peace in Essex and Middlesex. He was a member of the companies of Haberdashers and Painter Stainers, and shortly before his death (24 Sept. 1532) conveyed to the latter company his house in Little Trinity Lane, which has from that time continued to be the hall of the company. The house had been in his possession since 1504. His portrait, dated 1504, is preserved in the hall, but is apparently a copy painted after the great fire of 1666, when the hall was burnt. His arms were ‘argent on a fess counter embattled, sable, 3 escallops of the first; on a canton, quarterly gules and azure, at leopard’s head caboshed, or:’ crest, ‘on a wreath argent and sable, a crane’s head azure, beaked gules, winged or, the neck and wings each charged with an escallop counterchanged, and holding in its beak an oak branch fructed proper.’ This resembles the coat borne by the Brownes of Kent. In the British Museum is a book (Lansdowne MS. 858) which once belonged to him, and has his signature. It is the account of banners, &c., furnished to the Duke of Suffolk, and contains the shields of arms in colours of sovereigns of Europe and English nobles. By his will, dated 17 Sept. 1532, and proved 2 Dec. of the same year, it appears that he left a widow Anne and two daughters, Elizabeth and Isabel. By a previous wife, Alice, he probably had two daughters, married to Richard Colard and Edmund Lee. A house at Kingsland and lands in Hackney, and another house called ‘The Swan on the Hope’ in the Strand, are mentioned, and certain books of arms and badges begueathed to his servant. He was buried in St. Vedast’s, Foster Lane.

[Calendar of State Papers of Hen. VIII, vols. iv.; Chronicle of Calais; Madden’s Expenses of Princess Mary, p. clix; Stowe's Survey of London, iii, 126; Walpole's Anecdotes, i. 64; Some Account of the Painters' company, 1880, p. 14; Archæologia, xxxix. 23; Lansd, MS. 858.]

C. T. M.


BROWN, JOHN (1610?–1679), of Wamphray, church leader, was probably born at Kirkcudbright; he graduated at the university of Edinburgh 24 July 1630. He was probably not settled till 1655, although he comes first into notice in some highly complimentary references to him in Samuel Rutherford's letters in 1637. In the year 1655 he was ordained minister of the parish of Wamphray in Annandale. For many years he seems to have been quietly engaged in his pastoral duties, in which he must have been very efficient, for his name still lives in the district in affectionate remembrance. After the restoration he was not only compelled by the acts of Parliament of 1662 to leave his charge, but he was one of a few ministers who were arrested and banished, owing to the ability and earnestness with which they had opposed the arbitrary conduct of the king in the atfairs of the church. On 6 Nov. 1662 he was sentenced to be kept a close prisoner in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, his crime being that he had called some ministers ‘false knaves’ for keeping synod with the archbishop. The state ot' the prison causing his health to break down, he was banished 11 Dec. from the king’s dominions, and ordered not to return on pain of death. He went to Holland. In 1676 Charles II urged the States-General to banish him from their country, a step which they refused to take. For a few years he was minister of the Scotch church in Rotterdam, and shortly before his death, which occurred in 1679, he took part in the ordination of Richard Cameron [q. v.]. He was the author of many learned and elaborate works, among which were-‘Apologetical Relation of the Suiferings of Ministers of the Church of Scotland since 1660,’ 1665: ‘Libri duo contra Woltzogenium et Velthusium,’ 1670; ‘De Causà Dei adversus anti-Sabbatarios,’ 2 vols. 4to, 1674-76; ‘Quakerism the Pathway to Paganism,' 1678; ‘An Explanation of the Epistle to the Romans,' 1679; ‘The Life of Justification opened,' 1695. Other treatises were published between 1720 and 1792, and a manuscript history of the church is in the university library at Edinburgh. Of his treatise on justification a writer says: ‘It is by far our most thorough exposition and dismission of the doctrine it handles; and it is all the more to be prized because of the particular bearing it has on the new views which Baxter and others had begun to propagate, and which in some shape are ever returning among ourselves’ (JAmes Walker, D.D., Carnwath, The Theology and Theologians of Scotand).

[Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution: Memoir prefixed to reprint of Apologetical Relation in the Presbyterian Armoury, Vol. iii. Edin. 1846; Scott's Fasti, ii. 663.]

W. G. B.


BROWN, JOHN (1627?–1685), the ‘christian carrier,’ one of the most eminent names in the Scottish covenanting martyro-