Born in Dennistoun in Glasgow on 28 March 1889, Browning was the son of Daniel Browning, JP, the managing director of a picture frame manufacturing firm and the Liberal candidate for a Glasgow parliamentary constituency in the 1918 general election.
He had already won the Stanhope Prize the previous year for an essay on the 17th-century politician Thomas Osborne, 1st Duke of Leeds.
Poor eyesight initially left him ineligible to fight in the First World War, so he covered for an absent lecturer in the history department and contributed to the Glasgow Herald.
[7][8] In the meantime, Browning edited the Memoirs of Sir John Reresby with a selection of letters, which was published in 1936.
During the Second World War, he had published a short book British Political Institutions (1943) and had earlier authored Modern Europe, 1648–1714 with D. B. Horn (1931) as well as several articles.
[9] But it was his biography of Osborne, his edition of Reresby's Memoirs and his contribution to the English Historical Documents series which established his reputation.