It formed in response to the Queen's decision to make the Catholic Church in England and Wales to once again be the state religion and to her simultaneous religious persecution of Protestants.
One member, John Smith, later explained: "When it came to this point, that all our preachers were displaced by your law… Then we bethought us what were best to do; and we remembered that there was a congregation of us in this city in Queen Mary's days.
Other arrests occurred off Pudding Lane, in the house of James Tynne, a goldsmith, and in the dwelling of Bishop Grindal's own servant.
[6] In 1568, leading members of the movement, with the agreement of William Cecil, went to Scotland, apparently with a view to taking their church into exile there, but decided against it.
[7] William White wrote a tract justifying the illegal meetings of the underground church, A brief of such things as obscure Gods glory (undated).
[9] The puritans Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were converted to Separatism – now known as Brownism after the Norfolk Separatist Robert Browne – around 1586.
A service in the house of one Henry Martin was raided on 8 October 1587 in the west London parish of St Andrew-by-the Wardrobe.
On 18 March, Barrow was interviewed by the council, where he called the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, to his face, 'a monster, a miserable compound'.
The Bishop of London put together a team of 42 ministers and academics to visit the Brownists twice a week and engage in theological debate in order to win them back to the church – or failing that to get evidence to be used against them in court.
Member of the church carried his coffin to the door of Justice Richard Young, an officer in the episcopal Court of High Commission, leaving it with an inscription saying 'his blood crieth for speedy vengeance'.
Penry, described by Stephen Tomkins as 'the most wanted puritan in England', was one of the leading figures behind the notorious Martin Marprelate tracts.
This congregation thrived, growing to a few hundred, and produced a stream of propaganda against the Church of England that was smuggled back into the homeland.
The remaining Londoners, under the deacon Nicholas Lee, tried to appoint their own minister, but were overruled by Francis Johnson, according to his brother George, fearing there would then be less incentive for people to come to Amsterdam.
[16] Other Separatist groups appeared in the city, and one contemporary mentioned 'the manifold curses which the Brownists remaining in London have oft laid upon one another'.
Ten years later, the Bishop of Norwich counted eighty in the London area, led by 'cobblers, tailors, felt-makers and suchlike trash'.