William Allen

William Allen (born 1532, Rossall, Lancashire, England—died October 16, 1594, Rome [Italy]) was an English-born Roman Catholic cardinal and scholar who supervised the preparation of the Douai-Reims translation of the Bible into English and engaged in intrigues against the Protestant regime of Queen Elizabeth I.

Educated at the University of Oxford, Allen became principal of St. Mary’s Hall there in 1556. After the accession of Queen Elizabeth, he fell under suspicion for refusing to take an oath acknowledging the queen as head of the Church of England. Further government pressure caused him to leave England in 1565 for Mechelen (then in the Spanish Netherlands, now in Belgium), where he was ordained a priest. In 1568 Allen founded at Douai (then in the Spanish Netherlands, now in France) a seminary for training Englishmen as missionary priests and moved with it to Reims, France, in 1578. He was the president of and a lecturer at this seminary until 1585. The school gave its name to the influential Douai-Reims version of the Bible, translated into English primarily by Gregory Martin under Allen’s direction.

In 1579 Allen helped found the English College in Rome, and the following year he organized the first Jesuit missions to England, where Roman Catholic worship was prohibited. However, in subsequent years, he despaired of restoring Catholicism to his native country by peaceful means. He therefore called upon King Philip II of Spain to conquer England and assume the English throne. As a consequence, he was made a cardinal at Philip’s request in 1587. But England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) ended Allen’s political intrigues. In 1584 he wrote a tract defending English Catholics from charges of treason by William Cecil, Lord Burghley. From 1585 until his death, Cardinal Allen lived in Rome at the English College, where he helped in the revision of the Latin Vulgate Bible.