Exiled from England under the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, Dorman became a thought leader among the recusants, and was an early member of the English College at Douai.
He was also known to Thomas Harding, the Catholic scholar, then professor of Hebrew at Oxford, who took great interest in the boy and sent him to Winchester School in 1547.
During this period he engaged in controversy with the Anglican divines John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury and Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul's.
Alongside other recusant writers such as Harding, Thomas Stapleton, John Martiall, William Allen, Richard Shacklock, Nicholas Sander, Henry Cole, and John Rastell, Dorman protested the treatment of English Catholics, and argued for the authority of the Catholic Church over temporal monarchs.
[7] In 1569, at the invitation of Cardinal William Allen, Dorman joined the newly founded English College at Douai, which he assisted both by his services and his private means.