BRINKLEY, STEPHEN

Printer, translator, and confessor; parentage and date and place of birth and death unknown; lost to view after 1586. Brinkley was a matriculated pensioner at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1562, and received the LL.B. in 1570. As "James Sancer," he dedicated his translation of Gaspare Loarte's Exercise of a Christian Life at Paris, on June 20, 1579, which was a deliberate subterfuge, since the book was really printed in London by William Carter. In 1580 a spy listed him among alleged papal pensioners "now in England." Brinkley offered his services to Edmund campion and Robert persons after their landing in June of 1580, and he organized and supervised their secret press at Greenstreet House, East Ham. The betrayal and torture of a servant caused the press's disbandment after completing (November to December 1580) Persons's Brief discours and two other books. Brinkley reassembled it to print Persons's Brief censure (January of 1581) in a house lent by Lord Montague's brother, Francis Browne. Three more books were printed before the press was moved to Stonor Park, Henley, where Campion's Rationes decem was finished during June. With other work at press, Stonor was raided on the Privy Council's orders; Brinkley and four workmen were seized (August 8) and committed to the Tower. Brinkley was released on June 24, 1583. He went abroad and visited Rome with Persons and later assisted Persons's secret press at Rouen. Books issued there included his translation of Loarte—then (1584) "newly corrected by the translatour"—which had inspired Persons's Christian Directory. Persons suggested (September of 1585) that Brinkley should become the duke of Savoy's intelligencer at Paris. He was last described (December of 1586) as a "factor for all the Jesuyts."

Bibliography: A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534 to the Present Time (London–New York 1885–1902) 1:298–300. Publications of the Catholic Record Society v. 2, 4, 39, 53. a. c. southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559–1582 (London 1950). a. f. allison and d. m. rogers, A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English … 1558–1640, 2 v. (London 1956). w. r. trimble, The Catholic Laity in Elizabethan England 1558–1603 (Cambridge, Mass. 1964).

[d. m. rogers]