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Rh few images of alabaster and wood provided material for a bonfire ; of ' divers papistical books ' the ' worst and most portable ' were sent up to the Privy Council ; and there the matter apparently ended.

The increase of recusants from 1577 to 1586 was no doubt due to the activity of the Jesuits and seminary priests ; the names of half a dozen or so are mentioned as connected in different ways with this county. It is worth noticing that some of those who bore the worst characters in the official reports were harboured and countenanced by gentlemen of undoubted loyalty, and sometimes retained by them for years as domestic chaplains. The Dormers of Wing were never sus- pected of any treason, and indeed contrived to keep themselves out of the recusant lists of this county all through the reign probably by occasional conformity ; but they had in their house as a resident chap- lain a priest who had been associated with the Babington family, just as Lord Montague, another gentleman who never fell under suspicion, connected with the Dormers by a double marriage, harboured some traitors of the deepest dye, who were sought in vain for the prison and the gallows. Further than this, members of these very families, the Dormers and the Brownes, a Lee of Pitstone, and probably one of the Penns of Penn, were allowed to enter the Society of Jesus, their parents presumably knowing to what atrocities (if so it were) their vows would bind them, and the shameful death which they must face if they returned to England. These facts are capable indeed of a double inter-