The enterprise is begun. —Edmond Campion, 1580 Dr. William Allen and Francis Englefield believed heart and soul in the pope’s right to depose Elizabeth. With the expulsion of the seminary from Douai, Allen had procured papal approval for a second seminary at Rome where students reportedly flooded, “daily coming, or rather flying to the college.” Many were said to be the “best wits in England,” with several plucked from Oxford University.1 The seminarians’ sentiments were hardly a secret. What Elizabeth and her councillors needed to analyze, however, was the role that Gregory XIII, Philip II, and even the queen of Scots had planned for these missionaries in training. Allen’s correspondence with the pope and Philip had already been detected, but as yet, his friendship with Mary Stuart had only been widely assumed. After considerable consultation with Elizabeth, it was agreed that the threat to the realm was so palpable that infiltrators would need to be sent to the new college in Rome.
