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Biography

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Nicholas Owen was an English Jesuit lay brother and martyr, remembered above all for constructing the ingenious hiding places known as priest holes during the penal era in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. He was born in Oxford to a recusant Catholic family; his father Walter Owen was a carpenter, and several of his brothers likewise suffered for the faith, two of them becoming priests and another working as a printer of Catholic books. Of notably small stature, he was nicknamed Little John. He trained in his father’s trade as a carpenter and joiner, skills he later devoted entirely to the clandestine support of the Catholic mission.

In the 1580s Owen began working with the Jesuits in England and was received into the Society of Jesus as a lay brother. For some two decades he travelled the country, often in company with the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet or the missionary John Gerard, building secret chambers, false walls, and hidden passages in the houses of recusant gentry. These constructions were executed with great technical skill and in complete secrecy, frequently at night, so that even members of the household would not know their locations. Many of the hiding places he created remained undiscovered for centuries and enabled priests to evade government searchers during raids.

Owen was arrested more than once. In 1594 he was imprisoned and tortured in the Tower of London yet revealed nothing; he was later released and resumed his work. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 the hunt for Jesuits intensified. In January 1606, following a prolonged search, he was found at Hindlip Hall in Worcestershire together with Garnet and others. Taken to London, he was again confined in the Tower and subjected to extreme torture on the rack, the authorities hoping he would disclose the names of priests and the locations of other hiding places. He died of his injuries in early March 1606. Official accounts claimed he had taken his own life, a charge rejected by Catholic contemporaries as an attempt to deny him martyrdom. His body was disposed of secretly and the place of burial is unknown.

Devotion to Owen persisted among English Catholics. He was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929 and canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970 among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. His feast is observed on 22 March. Because of his mastery of concealment he is invoked as a patron of illusionists and escapologists.

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