Timothy 'Equality' Brown: A Radical Regency Life

By Abraham Marrache

This monograph celebrates the life of a remarkable man of Regency times – the banker, brewer, wine merchant and hop factor Timothy Brown. Its publication also serves to mark the bicentenary of his elevation to Master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers, in 1817. Brown was as well known for his advanced, reformist views in the politics of the day –earning him the soubriquet ‘Equality’ Brown – as for his acts of philanthropy and Radical patronage.

A self-declared deist, dissenter and anti-Hanoverian during the tempestuous early 1800s, he regularly hosted soirées for free-thinking politicians, philosophers and literati at Peckham Lodge, his London home. Brown counted among his friends and acquaintances such personalities as the controversial clergyman John Horne Tooke, the Rural Rides author William Cobbett, the anarchist William Godwin, the colourful reformist Sir Francis Burdett Couttsand the Whig advocates Lords Thurlow and Erskine.

With the constant threat of Napoleonic invasion hanging in the air, Brown regularly found himself under surveillance by the authorities on account of his known socio-political views and for subscribing to supposedly seditious foreign papers. Always discreet, however, he avoided arrest – and went on to accumulate considerable wealth and to finance publications such as ‘that organ of infidel philosophy’ The Theologica lInquirer and the third part oThomas Paine´s The Age of Reason.
This monograph celebrates the life of a remarkable man of Regency times – the banker, brewer, wine merchant and hop factor Timothy Brown. Its publication also serves to mark the bicentenary of his elevation to Master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers, in 1817. Brown was as well known for his advanced, reformist views in the politics of the day –earning him the soubriquet ‘Equality’ Brown – as for his acts of philanthropy and Radical patronage.

A self-declared deist, dissenter and anti-Hanoverian during the tempestuous early 1800s, he regularly hosted soirées for free-thinking politicians, philosophers and literati at Peckham Lodge, his London home. Brown counted among his friends and acquaintances such personalities as the controversial clergyman John Horne Tooke, the Rural Rides author William Cobbett, the anarchist William Godwin, the colourful reformist Sir Francis Burdett Couttsand the Whig advocates Lords Thurlow and Erskine.

With the constant threat of Napoleonic invasion hanging in the air, Brown regularly found himself under surveillance by the authorities on account of his known socio-political views and for subscribing to supposedly seditious foreign papers. Always discreet, however, he avoided arrest – and went on to accumulate considerable wealth and to finance publications such as ‘that organ of infidel philosophy’ The Theologica lInquirer and the third part oThomas Paine´s The Age of Reason.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pomegranate Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781907242663

Book preview

Preface

This monograph, written to coincide with the bicentenary of Timothy ‘Equality’ Brown´s installation as Master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers on 10th October 1817, was first conceived during a lunchtime conversation in London in 2009 with James Yeats Brown, his third great-grandson. Shortly thereafter, a lucky coincidence brought me into contact with Andrew Hearn, another third great-grandson, although descended not from Brown’s son Timothy, but from his daughter, Harriet. Of the children he had with his second wife, Sarah Lowndes, only those two siblings were to have issue. There is a third branch, descended from Brown and Alice Lloyd, the Marescaux side of the family, which is dealt with separately in the monograph.

After six years of intense and enjoyable collaboration, Andrew and I have jointly extended what is known about Timothy Brown, as outlined in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and have also managed to identify his presence more fully at the National Portrait Gallery. His is a life that deserves further investigation, on account of the influence he exerted – with determination, yet mostly great discretion – on life in Regency England. As a banker, brewer, hop factor and wine merchant, philanthropist, radical, deist and weekly host to an influential political and philosophical salon at his home, Peckham Lodge, Brown’s life weaved seamlessly through the society that surrounded him. Personalities of note, such as Sir Francis Burdett Coutts, Lord Erskine and John Horne Tooke mix in his company with the likes of the anarchist William Godwin and the printer Daniel Isaac Eaton, and from those discussions emanates a significant amount of his patronage of causes linked to both religious dissent and political radicalism.

I should like to thank Miles Jenner, Joint Managing-Director of Harvey’s Brewery and former Master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers, as well as his wife Sally, for the warm reception they gave to the monograph when I first approached the Company. My gratitude equally to Elizabeth Denlinger PhD, curator, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library; Anita Weaver at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the William Godwin archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford; Peter Frost, John Beasley and Derek Kinrade of the Peckham Society; Matthew Bailey at the National Portrait Gallery; and staff at the Guildhall Library in the City of London.

ASM

July, 2017

EARLY LIFE

In the year 1760, George III had just been crowned king of England. The country’s spirits were high after the previous year’s French naval defeats at the battles of Lagos and Quiberon Bay and the expulsion of Louis XV’s troops from Canada. Then aged 16, Timothy Brown left Scales Rigg in Kirkoswold behind him and found, stretching before him, both a journey of slightly more than three hundred miles and the challenge of forging a name and future for himself in London.

The farmstead of Brown’s yeoman family, built in 1734, was modest by comparison with some of the houses and halls that existed in its vicinity, but within two decades of leaving Cumbria his Browne cousins would be established at Tallantire Hall in Cockermouth, and Timothy himself would be a prosperous hop and wine merchant, living at St. Mary-at-Hill in London’s Bishopsgate.

The young Timothy Brown, painted by Samuel Medley and engraved by Nathan Branwhite.

It was at some undefined point during that sixteenth year that he reached the