A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics

William Allen1584

William Allen’s reply of 1584 to the English government’s Execution of Justice. It argues that priests and lay Catholics were put to death for religion under new statutes, and that those tried under the old treason law were innocent.

Allen wrote this book against the Execution of Justice in England, which he calls a libel. Its first chapter holds that many were condemned “for mere matter of religion” under statutes of Elizabeth’s own reign that turned cases of conscience into treason, and it names men executed under a statute of the thirteenth year of the reign and under one made in the latest Parliament. Its second chapter takes up Edmund Campion and those tried with him, who were arraigned under the statute of the twenty-fifth year of Edward III for compassing the queen’s death at Rome and Rheims, and argues that the charge was invented. The fourth chapter defends the answers that the priests gave when questioned about the bull of Pius V.

Allen is as much a party to the quarrel as the tract he answers. Campion consulted him at Rheims on his way to England, as Allen’s own A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of Twelve Reverend Priests tells. The year 1584 is the one given on the title of the 1914 edition.

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