In 1603, King James I succeeded Elizabeth. In the years before taking
power, he had dropped hints that he might tolerate Catholics. Indeed, his
Danish wife, Queen Anne, was a quiet Catholic. But upon becoming King of
England, James made it clear that there would be no relaxation of the
stringent anti-Catholic laws or their enforcement.
And this is where the hero Nicholas Owen enters the story.
Owen was born in approximately 1550 to a fervently Catholic family. When
Anglicanism was established as the state religion, the Owen family became
"recusants" — meaning that they paid hefty fines rather than attend
Anglican church services. Two of Owen's brothers became Jesuit priests. The
third, Henry Owen, ran a covert Catholic printing press. When he was sent to
prison for his continued recusancy, he managed a secret press from
prison.
Nicholas Owen was only a little taller than a dwarf. But this was only one
of his medical problems; because of a hernia, his stomach had to be held
together by a metal plate. After a packhorse fell on him in 1599, he was
further disfigured, and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.
Most Englishmen of Owen's time thought that a twisted body was an
outer sign of a twisted character. But as Antonia Fraser observes in her book
"Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot," Owen's "great soul and
measureless courage" offered "the strongest possible refutation of the
contemporary prejudice."
Trained as a carpenter and a mason, Owen became perhaps the greatest
builder of hiding places in man's history.
The English Catholic community needed , both for spiritual leadership,
and for administration of the sacraments. But harboring a priest was a
capital offense.
So in the large country mansions owned by England's crypto-Catholics,
Owen constructed ingenious hideouts for priests.
Mansions were built of stone in those days, making Owen's task
especially difficult. The English government's priest-catchers
(poursuivants) would carefully tap on walls, and a hollow sound would
immediately betray a room that was hidden through mere use of an empty
space.
Owen's hiding places were much more sophisticated. For example, at the
Baddesley Clinton mansion, Owen contrived secret trapdoors in the turrets
and stairways, connecting them with the mansion's sewer system. During a
1591 search, several priests stood up to their waists in water, hidden from
searchers for four hours. In some cases, priests survived several searches
of the same house.
Owen ran feeding tubes into the rooms, so that priests hidden therein
could receive food for the days or weeks they might spend inside.
Sometimes he built an easily-discovered outer hiding place which
concealed an inner hiding place.
While Owen completed scores of hiding places, the exact number is
unknown; some remained undiscovered until the 20th century, and others
still remain hidden. (Perhaps some of the hideouts that are still secret are
being used to conceal guns these days.)
So that the mansion's servants would not know about the hidden
chambers, Owen would do ordinary house carpentry work during the
daytime. But at night, Owen would build his secret spaces, always working
alone — thus minimizing the number of persons who would know about
a given hiding place, and be susceptible to revealing it under torture.
Breaking through heavy stone walls to build complex rooms would have
been difficult for any construction crew, but it was difficult in the extreme for
a small man working alone. He always worked for free, and received
communion before starting a new project. Nicholas Owen used a variety of
names to conceal his identity as he traveled around England: Little John,
Little Michael, Andrewes, and Draper.
Owen was chosen as one of the first laypersons to be inducted in the
Jesuit Order. When his fellow Jesuit Edward Campion was arrested, Owen
spoke openly about Campion's innocence, so Owen himself was then
arrested. He was arrested again in 1594, tortured on the infamous Topcliffe
rack, and hung for three hours from iron rings, with heavy weights on his
feet. But he revealed nothing, and was released after a wealthy Catholic
paid a ransom. The English jailers who took the bribe to let Owen go thought
him just an insignificant friend of a priest — rather than the master
builder of England's underground railroad for priests.
Three years later, Owen masterminded Father John Gerard's escape from
the Tower of London.
In November 1605, Guy Fawkes and a small band of Catholic conspirators
made plans to blow up Parliament, kill King James, and place James' Catholic
daughter on the throne. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot led to a
massive crackdown on all suspected Catholics, which led to Owen's arrest in
early 1606.
| Nicholas Owen was
recaptured in 1606. He was racked day after day, six hours at a time, and an
iron band was tightened around his hernia. Owen died from the torture on
March 2. He had never revealed a single fact about any of his hiding places.
|
|
Owen had been secreted in one of his hiding places for two weeks, while
poursuivants searched a Catholic home. But when he came out of hiding and
attempted to sneak off the premises, he was captured. Immediately he
claimed to be a priest — a claim which amounted to condemning
himself to death, but which he hoped would throw the poursuivants off
the trail of the priests who remained hidden in the building.
But this time, the English authorities knew that they had captured the
one person who knew enough to bring down the entire network of covert
Catholics in England.
At first, Owen was held under light confinement, with visitors allowed, in
the hope that some secret priests would reveal themselves by coming to
visit him. Owen, however, was too cautious to be tricked, and spent his time
in solitary prayer.
Soon, Owen was transferred to the infamous Tower of London, so that he
could be tortured. Yet he remained calm and fearless.
The English law of the time forbade torturing anyone to death. For this reason, any
person who was already maimed (as Owen had been since the horse fell on
him) was not supposed to be tortured at all, due to the risk of death.
Nevertheless, Owen was tortured in a particularly gruesome manner, in
light of his already-ruptured hernia.
Nicholas Owen was racked for day after day, six hours at a time, and an
iron band was tightened around his hernia.
While the reliability of confessions obtained under torture was dubious,
England's law-enforcement authorities never had a problem getting some
kind of confession from a torture victim. Except for Nicholas Owen.
He refused to answer the interrogators' questions about anything
important, and never revealed a single fact about any of his hiding places.
Instead, he constantly invoked the aid of Jesus and Mary.
Perhaps all the physical suffering which Owen had endured since the
birth of his deformed body helped him cope with tremendous levels of
pain.
Owen died from the torture on March 2. Since Owen's treatment had been
unconscionable even by the standards of the time, the government claimed
that Owen had committed suicide by stabbing himself twice with a dinner
knife. Actually, Owen's hands had been so disfigured by the torture that he
could not even hold a pen or a knife, or feed himself.
In 1970, Nicholas Owen was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.
His feast day is March 22, and he is counted as one of the Forty Martyrs of
England and Wales, from the time of the anti-Catholic persecutions.
Father John Gerard, one of England's leading secret priests, wrote that no
one had accomplished more than Owen: "I verily think that no man can be
said to have done more good for all those who laboured in the English
vineyard. For, first, he was the immediate occasion of saving the lives of
many hundreds of persons, both ecclesiastical and secular, and of the
estates also of these seculars, which had been lost and forfeited many times
over if the priests had been taken in their houses." (A hidden priest then, like
illegal drugs or guns today, was cause for forfeiture of an entire home.) The
modern edition of Butler's "Lives of the Saints" states, "Perhaps no single
person contributed more to the preservation of the Catholic religion in
England during penal times."
Regardless of whether one is Catholic, Protestant, or anything else, the
decision of England's Catholics to maintain their faith, no matter how grave
the threats from the government, was highly admirable. The Catholic who
illegally received communion, or otherwise resisted the government's effort
to stamp out his religion, affirmed that God and the individual were more
important than the government. The survival of Catholicism in England, and
the failure of the Church of England to establish a complete monopoly of
faith, helped sow the seeds for the long-run development of religious
toleration in England, and in the rest of the Western world.
Nicholas Owen was one of the pivotal figures of English history, and,
indirectly, one of the fathers of modern religious freedom. He was not born
to wealth or nobility or normality, and few people who stared at his small
and twisted body would have predicted that he would be remembered as
one of the greatest Englishmen of his time.
|
| |
