A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of Twelve Reverend Priests

William Allen built up the English seminary at Douai, which trained priests for the mission to England, and was later made a cardinal. His letters, quoted in the introduction to the edition linked here, show him writing the book in the summer of 1582 from information sent to him from England and sending out the finished print on 3 September of that year, nine months after Campion’s death. It gives the indictment, the conduct of the trial, and the speeches made on the scaffold.

It is the work of a party to the quarrel, as Acts and Monuments is on the other side. Allen’s argument is stated on his first page: the priests were put to death “under pretence of high treason” and in truth “for the Catholike Faith and religion”. The government’s position, that they died as traitors and not for their belief, is set out in the statutes of the reign, among them the Act against the Bringing In and Putting in Execution of Bulls from the See of Rome and, three years after Allen’s book, the Act against Jesuits and Seminarists. The editor of the 1908 reprint was himself a Jesuit and writes as an admirer of his subject.