The second volume appeared in 1751, and towards the end of 1753 the third volume, which brought down his history to the death of Pope Stephen II in 757. It was in 1754 that the first serious attack was made on the work, in a pamphlet by Alban Butler, published anonymously at Douai as Remarks on the two first volumes of the late Lives of the Popes; in letters from a Gentleman to a Friend in the Country. A controversial storm then broke over Bower. Letters addressed by Bower to the provincial of the Jesuits fell into the hands of Sir Henry Bedingfield, who asserted that they showed Bower was a Catholic. Bower maintained that these letters were forgeries by the Jesuits. Then, John Douglas published in 1756 a pamphlet supporting the genuineness of the letters; and testimony of a Mrs. Hoyles whom Bower had converted. There was a reply from Bower's side, and Douglas published a second tract, Bower and Tillemont compared (1757), in which he argued that the History of the Popes, especially the first volume, was in effect a translation of the work of Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont. In 1757 Bower brought out three long pamphlets, and Douglas followed with A Full Confutation of all the Facts advanced in Mr. Bower's Three Defences (1757), and A Complete and Final Detection of A——d B——r (1758), with documentation from Italy, and arguing that Bower was an imposter. David Garrick, once a friend of Bower, threatened to write a farce in which Bower was to be introduced on the stage as a mock convert. Bower replied with personal attacks and rebuttals. Before the controversy had ended, he published his fourth volume, and in 1757 an abridgment of the first four volumes of his work was published in French at Amsterdam. In 1761 Bower seems to have had a hand in the anonymous Authentic Memoirs concerning the Portuguese Inquisition, in a series of letters to a friend. Around the same time he produced the fifth volume of his History of the Popes, with a summary of his dealings with Catholics. The rest of his history did not appear till just before the author's death, when the sixth and seventh volumes were published together; but with the period from 1600 to 1758 covered in 26 pages. The History of the Popes was reprinted with a continuation by Samuel Hanson Cox, in