His grandfather Alexander Brown emigrated from Scotland to Williamsburg, Virginia at age 15 and studied at the College of William and Mary before moving to Nelson County and marrying Lucy Shands Rives, of a long prominent family.

Their only son (together with several daughters), Robert Lawrence Brown (1820-1880) likewise married women from prominent families: first Sarah Cabell Calloway (1820-1849, who bore him two sons and a daughter before her death), and then William's mother Margaret Baldwin Cabell (1826-1877).

After graduation, Brown was ordained as a deacon by bishop Francis McNeece Whittle on June 26, 1891, and advanced to the priesthood on August 2, 1891.

Brown also expanded the Anglican presence in the country's then capital, Rio de Janeiro, where he had previously occasionally served at chapels permitted under an 1810 English/Portuguese treaty under the guidance of the Anglican Bishop of the Falkland Islands.

Brown helped found that state's first Brazilian congregation, the Church of the Redeemer, and soon established Trinity Chapel in Méier (then suburb, now a neighborhood).

[4] (the Anglican and Episcopalian congregations would only merge near 1965, when the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil or Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil became an independent member of the Anglican Communion) In 1914 Virginia's Episcopalians recalled Brown to serve as assistant bishop to Bishop Whittle's successor, Bishop Robert Atkinson Gibson, who had had a health scare.

During bishop Brown's episcopate, he became a major fund raiser for the diocese, and also built the vacation retreat called Shrine Mont in Orkney Springs, which was given to the diocese and consecrated by Bishop Brown in 1925.

The council elected Henry St. George Tucker, who like bishops Brown and Lloyd had been a missionary as well as related to the First Families of Virginia.

[9] Bishop Brown died of a heart attack while traveling in London, but his body was returned for interment in the cemetery of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Richmond.