The Owens of Oxford

Abstract

During the last week of February 1606, the survival of Catholicism in England depended on whether Nicholas Owen could remain silent under prolonged and ruthless torture. A few months later, John Gerard wrote of him:He might have made it almost an impossible thing for priests to escape, knowing the residences of most priests in England, and of all those of the Society; whom he might have taken as partridges in a net, knowing all their secret places, which himself had made, and the like conveyances in most of the chief Catholics’ houses in England, and the means and manner how all such places were to be found, though made by others.