Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 01.djvu/333

Allen Allen was proclaimed a cardinal, and on the very day of his creation Sixtus V wrote with his own hand to the king of Spain: ‘This morning I have held a consistory and made Allen cardinal to satisfy your majesty; and though in proposing him I put forward a motive which was very far from likely to excite suspicion, nevertheless it is reported that throughout all Rome there arose forthwith a universal cry—Now they are getting things into order for a war with England, and this supposition was current everywhere. Therefore your majesty should not lose time lest those poor christians suffer greater injury, for if there be delay that which you have judged to be good will turn out evil.’ It was arranged that Allen should, after the conquest of the country, he despatched as legate to England and be made archbishop of Canterbury and lord chancellor. Philip, disregarding the advice of the pope, delayed taking action for a whole year, and the ‘Invincible Armada’ was hopelessly defeated. Several writers assert that Allen repaired to Flanders to accompany the army under the Duke of Parma to England. It is, however, certain that he remained at Rome. Prior to the sailing of the Spanish fleet from the Tagus a pamphlet was issued by ‘the cardinal of England,’ entitled ‘An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland, concerning the present wars, made for the execution of his holiness's sentence, by the king catholic of Spain.’ Allen was induced to put his signature to this violent and offensive document, which was probably printed at Antwerp. The language and manner are certainly not those of Allen in his published works, and the appellant priests asserted that the book was penned altogether by the advice of Father Parsons; but however this may be, the cardinal was certainly responsible for the contents of the tract. To increase the effect of this address, its substance was at the same time compressed into a smaller compass and printed on a broadside for more general distribution. The abridgment was called ‘A Declaration of the Sentence of Deposition of Elizabeth, the Usurper and pretensed Quene of England.’ When the expedition had failed, the copies both of this and of the ‘Admonition’ were destroyed, and few of either seem to have escaped. In the ‘Admonition’ Allen assured his countrymen that the pope meant ‘to pursue the actual deprivation of Elizabeth, the pretensed queen, eftsoons declared and judicially sentenced, by his holiness's predecessors, Pius Quintus and Gregory the XIII, for an heretic and usurper, and the proper present cause of perdition of millions of souls at home, and the very bane of all christian kingdoms and states near about her.’ Elizabeth was described as ‘an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin, of an infamous courtesan, Anne Bullen, afterwards executed for adultery, treason, heresy, and incest, amongst others with her own natural brother;’ and he authoritatively declared that those who adhered to her cause would be defending, to their own present destruction and eternal shame, ‘a most unjust usurper and open injurer of all nations, an infamous, deprived, accursed, excommunicate heretic, the very shame of her sex and princely name, the chief spectacle of sin and abomination in this our age, and the only poison, calamity, and destruction of our noble church and country.’

At this critical juncture the English catholics, forgetting the cruelty with which they had been treated, remained true to their queen and their country. With the memory of all they had endured and were still enduring, with the rack and the gibbet to reward their patriotism, they read the bull of deposition which had been published against their sovereign, they saw the shores of their country surrounded by an armament commissioned to enforce it; they felt that the moment had arrived when a breath might turn the balance in their own favour, and they generously flung aside the recollection of the past and the resentment of the present, and flew to the assistance of their country in her hour of danger (, Church Hist. ed. Tierney).

The college at Rheims continued to be under Allen's government until October 1588, when Dr. Richard Barret was appointed resident superior. The subsequent history of this famous seminary may be briefly traced. In 1593 the students returned to Douay. Just 200 years afterwards, in October 1793, the college was seized by the French, and its inmates were made prisoners. In 1795 they were set at liberty and proceeded to England. These last residents at Douay College became the founders and first members of the colleges of Old Hall Green, Ushaw, and Oscott, which were established shortly after the dissolution of Douay College and the return of its inmates to their native land. Many of the catholic nobility and gentry received their education at Douay College, which produced one cardinal (Allen), two archbishops, thirty-one bishops and bishops-elect, three archpriests, about one hundred doctors of divinity, 169 writers, many eminent men of religious orders, and 160 martyrs, besides a large number of other ecclesiastics, who either died in prison or suffered confinement or banishment for their faith.

In some of the reports sent home by the agents of Queen Elizabeth at Rome it is