[2] His main role was setting up colleges to train English missionary priests with the mission of returning secretly to England to keep Roman Catholicism alive there.

Allen seems also to have been a canon at York Minster in or about 1558,[4] indicating that he had most likely received tonsure, the initial step towards ordination that conferred clerical status.

[5] During this period as a clandestine missionary in England, Allen formed the conviction that the people were not set against Rome by choice, but by force and by circumstances; and the majority were only too ready, in response to his sermons and ministrations, to return to Roman Catholicism.

Travelling to the Low Countries, he was ordained as a priest shortly afterwards at Malines in Flanders[3] and began to lecture in theology at the Benedictine College there.

In 1567, Allen went to Rome for the first time and conceived his plans for establishing a College where students from England and Wales could live together and finish their theological education.

The idea subsequently developed into the establishment of a missionary college, or seminary, to supply England with priests as long as the schism with the See of Rome persisted.

[5] The Pope appointed Allen to be a Canon in Courtray (now in West Flanders, Belgium, and known as Kortrijk), and he returned to Douai in July 1576, but there he had to face a new difficulty.

[7] From the College press came a constant stream of polemic, controversialist, and other Roman Catholic literature, which for obvious reasons could not be printed in England.

One of the chief works undertaken in the early years of the College was the preparation under Allen's direction of the well-known Douai Bible, a translation from Latin into English.

Under Allen's orders, the English College at Rome was placed under the control of the Society of Jesus, as part of a plan to send Jesuit missionaries to England by 1580.

[8] Under Allen's instructions, the first Jesuits to be sent, Parsons and Edmund Campion, were to work closely in England with other Roman Catholic priests.

The mission met with little success, as Campion was put to death only after a year's work, and Parsons again had to flee to mainland Europe.

His efforts to secure this were completely unsuccessful, and arguably made matters worse for supporters of the Church of Rome in England, Wales, and Ireland.

Returning to Rheims, Allen allowed himself to be drawn into the political intrigues of Parsons for the furtherance of Philip's interests in England and Ireland.

Allen wrote that all Englishmen were obliged, under the pain of eternal damnation, to follow that example, as Elizabeth was "no lawful queen" in the eyes of God.

[5] Allen helped in the planning of the attempted Spanish invasion of England, and would probably have been made Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor if it had been successful.

It had been due to his influence that the Society of Jesus, to which he was greatly attached, undertook to join in the work of the English mission; and now Allen and Parsons became joint leaders of the "Spanish Party" amongst the Roman Catholics in England and in Ireland.

[4] On the advice and recommendation of King Philip, Allen was created a Cardinal in 1587, and he was prepared to return to England immediately, should the invasion prove successful.

[5] Certainly, his political activities could give grounds and cause for Elizabeth's government to regard the English seminaries on the Continent as hotbeds of treason.