Nicholas Owen

Life and Ministry

Nicholas Owen was a lay brother of the Society of Jesus and a carpenter by trade, born at Oxford about AD 1562 to a Catholic family of joiners, with two brothers who became priests and a third who became a Catholic printer. From the late AD 1580s until his arrest in AD 1606 he constructed the priest-holes — concealed hiding places in the houses of the Catholic recusant gentry — in which the mission priests escaped the pursuivants' searches. Working largely at night, often single-handed, he hollowed out chimneys, doubled walls, false floors, and stairwell voids in something like sixty-five English country houses, the surviving examples of which (at Harvington Hall, Baddesley Clinton, Sawston Hall, and elsewhere) still bear his work. He served continuously under successive Jesuit superiors — including Henry Garnet, John Gerard, and Edward Oldcorne — and was already a legend of the underground when he was finally caught.

Circumstances of Death

Owen was arrested at Hindlip Hall in Worcestershire on 27 January AD 1606 in the great government sweep after the Gunpowder Plot. Hindlip was one of his own constructions; he had built so many hiding places into the house that even after eight days of searching the authorities almost missed him. He gave himself up to allow the priests Garnet and Oldcorne to remain longer in their hides; both were captured shortly after. Taken to the Tower of London, he was subjected to the rack and the manacles, refusing to give the locations of any of his hiding places or to name the householders who had sheltered priests. He died in the Tower under torture on 2 March AD 1606; the official report claimed he had committed suicide, but the contemporary Catholic account, supported by the evidence of the man's known injuries, is that he died of internal injuries from the manacles after refusing in agony to speak. He was forty-four.

Legacy

Nicholas Owen is the patron of magicians, escape artists, and (in a very particular Catholic sense) of those who hide other people. Canonized in AD 1970 with the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, he is one of the few lay brothers in the entire Roman martyrology. His witness is the witness of the trade — that the carpenter's craft, sanctified, can be a sacrament of charity, that the hands which build hiding places are doing the same work as the hands that say Mass, and that the man who never spoke a public sermon nor wrote a treatise saved more priests' lives, and through them more souls, than any English Jesuit of his generation. He died with his hidden chambers still concealed; the persecutors went to their graves never knowing where he had put the priests.