Still there was grave risk of discovery from the noise made by the press, and from the number of extra men about the house, as to the fidelity of each of whom it was impossible to be absolutely sure.  Day by day the dangers thickened round them.  One evening, soon after their arrival, William Hartley, a priest and afterwards a martyr, who was helping in the work, and had then just come back from a visit to Oxford, mentioned casually that Roland Jenks, the Catholic stationer and book-binder there, was again in trouble, having been accused by his own servant.  Jenks was doubtless known to all Oxford men, indeed but three years before his name had been noised all over Europe.  He had been sentenced to have his ears cut off for some religious offence, when the Judge was taken ill in the court itself, and, the infection travelling with marvellous rapidity, the greater part both of the bench and of the jury were stricken down with gaol fever, and two judges, twelve justices, and other high officials, almost the whole jury, and many others, died within the space of two days.[7]

In mentioning Jenks’s new troubles Hartley probably did not realize the extent of the danger to the whole party which they portended.  Persons had in fact employed the very servant who had now turned traitor, to bind a number of books for him at his house near Bridewell Church, London, which with all its contents was thus in a perilous condition.  Early next morning an express messenger was sent in to town with orders to hide or destroy Persons’ papers and other effects.  It was already too late:  that very night the house had been searched, and Persons’ letters, books, vestments, rosaries, pictures, and other pious objects, had all fallen into the hands of the pursuivants.  Worse still, Father Alexander Briant, afterwards a martyr, and one of the brightest and most lovable of the missionaries, was seized next door, and hurried off first to the Counter, then to the Tower, where he was repeatedly and most cruelly racked to make him say where Persons might be found.

Information about his torture was brought to the Jesuits at Stonor, and one can easily see how grave and disturbing such bad news must have been.  “For almost the whole of one night,” says Persons, “Campion and I sat up talking of what we had better do, if we should fall into their hands.  A fate which befell him soon after.”

The Registers of the Privy Council inform us that their Lordships gave orders to have Jenks sent up to London on the 28th of April.  This settles approximately the date of the beginning of the printing at Stonor, and the book was not finished till nearly the end of June.  So the work lasted about nine weeks, a fairly long period when we consider the smallness of the Latin book, here reproduced.  It will, however, be shown from intrinsic evidence, that the stock of type was very small.  The printers had to set up a few pages at a time, to correct them at once, and to print off, before they could go any further.  Then they distributed the type and began again.  When all was finished they rapidly stabbed and bound their sheets.  Considering the fewness of the workmen[8] and the unforeseen delays which so often occur during printing, the time taken over the production does not seem extraordinary.