This man's career appears is enigmatic; he features in several historical monographs** connected with the death of playwright, Christopher Marlowe, but there is no certainty as to who he was, in particular how the latter years of his life were passed. Clearly the arguments and research continue.
Part of his entry in Venn may be correct. As Baynes. Matric. pens. from CHRIST'S Nov. 1568; BA 1572/3; MA from GONVILLE AND CAIUS 1576. [The remainder of entry likely to be erroneous, and/or based on a non-extant ballad. Perhaps adm. at Middle Temple 1582 as son of Richard Baynes of Shrewsbury [he is said to be of Southwell, Notts]; hanged at Tyburn 6 Dec. 1594, crime unknown, Cooper II, 174; Peile, I, 108.]
A variety of sources and research then locate him at the English Seminary in Reims where dissident catholics were ordained/ educated to return to England to reconvert the country to Catholicism. Baines ordained there subdeacon, deacon, priest in 1581. However, he worked (not too effectively) as one of Walsingham's spies/ double agents, feeding back from the seminary; he was imprisoned in Reims for plotting to poison the seminary water supply and assassinate the principal. He was returned to England in 1583, appears to have met Marlowe around 1585, eventually preparing the 'Baines Note' detailing Marlowe's heresies and atheism which seems to have had a bearing on Marlowe's murder.
A fellow student of Baines' at Reims, also a native of Southwell, helped him obtain position of rector of Waltham, in the patronage of Dean and Chapter of Southwell, around 1587. The ordination record below seems to fit well, getting him back into the Anglican fold - it is not mentioned as yet in any of the writing on his life. He married Barbara Wentworth, of the Waltham branch of the Wentworth family, in 1590; they had two surviving children -twins (many others who did not), William and John, baptised at Waltham 1592. Barbara married in 1611 the rector who succeeded Richard Baines at Waltham after his death in 1610.
**E.g. R Kendal, 'Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Jounrey through the Elizabethan Underground' (2003); C. Nicholl, 'The Murder of Christopher Marlowe', (1992, rev. 2002); CB Kuriyama, 'Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life' (2010); et al.