principles might be felt by the Independents of the next age, they repudiated any connection with Browne's name, and held his character and history in the utmost abhorrence. [Sidenote: 1583.] Browne's influence told considerably in the Eastern Counties, where a strong leaven of ultra-Protestantism has existed ever since the Lollard days. Even Kett's rebellion, often treated as a Roman Catholic outbreak, looks more like a peasants' war in aid of the Reformation than anything else. Bury St. Edmunds, where Brownism flourished, witnessed the death of Copping and Thacker, two Congregational martyrs, hanged in 1583. In Essex, a movement which looked like Congregationalism won some measure of sympathy from the upper classes, and even the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, attended meetings held in Rochford Hall by Mr. Wright, who had been ordained in the Netherlands. Writing to Lord Burleigh, that lady observed, "I hear, them in their public exercises, as a chief duty commanded by God to be done, and also I confess, as one that hath found mercy, that I have profited more in the inward feeling knowledge of God his holy will, though but in a small measure, by such sincere and sound opening of the Scriptures by an ordinary preaching within these seven or eight year, than I did by hearing odd sermons at Paul's well nigh twenty year together."[441] It is a curious circumstance to find Lord Bacon's mother connected with a minister who maintained, as Wright did, that every pastor was a bishop, and that he should be chosen by his own congregation, opinions which constitute the essence of modern Congregationalism. From these opinions the ecclesiastical authorities sought to convert him by imprisonment; and with that forcible argument another was associated, which is so original that we cannot resist the temptation of quoting it. Mr. Barwick, a conforming clergyman, commended to Wright the Church of England as a church most admirable on account of its being free from the two opposite extremes of Popery and Puritanism. "God delights in mediocrity," says this logician, and the logic is worth being noted for its curiosity: "Man was put in the _midst_ of Paradise; a rib was taken out of the _midst_ of man; the Israelites went through the _midst_ of the Red Sea, and of Jordan; Samson put firebrands in the _midst_, between the foxes' tails; David's men had their garments cut off by the _midst_; Christ was hanged in the _midst_ between two thieves." [Sidenote: _Congregationalism--Henry Browne._]