* The ‘pig-headed’ Catholic gentleman was almost certainly the Norfolk landowner Robert Downes, whose Melton estate lay just a mile west of Norwich. He was arrested in 1578 for his refusal to attend the Protestant Church. He lost his estates in Suffolk and Essex and in 1602 he surrendered most of his life interest in Melton to the Queen. He was still in Norwich gaol in 1598. He died in 1610.
* Catholics believed that though they could not enter a Protestant church where divine services were held, the nave of a cathedral was part of the general precincts of the building and therefore not sacrosanct.
* One eyewitness wrote of the vengeance taken against English Catholics following the Armada’s defeat: ‘When the danger of the war at sea was over, and the army conscripted upon land dispersed, our rulers turned their weapons from the foe abroad and plunged them into the bowels of their own nation. The hatred stored up against the Spaniards they are wreaking with a sort of bestial fury upon their own fellow citizens and subjects.’
‘If God himself on earth abode would make
He Oxford sure would for his dwelling take.’
(Sixteenth century)
ON 10 DECEMBER 1566, eight years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and twenty years prior to John Gerard’s secret Norfolk landing, Magdalen College acquired a new tenant for its property at 3 Castle Street, standing in the shadow of Oxford Castle. The tenant’s name was Walter Owen. He was a twenty-six-year-old carpenter with a wife and young family. In time, all four sons from this family would join the mission to save English Catholicism. Two would die for it. One, in death, would hold in his hands the life of almost every Catholic involved in it. His name was Nicholas Owen.1
Few facts are known about Nicholas Owen’s childhood: an approximate date of birth (some time between 1561 and 1564), a joinery apprenticeship (in February 1577) to Oxford’s William Conway, and the location of the Owen family’s house on Castle Street—little more. Across the road from this six-room, two-storey tenement stood the twelfth century parish church of St Peter-le-Bailey, a ‘very old little church and odd’. Four doors to the left of the house was 7 Castle Street, called Billing Hall or the Redcock. Here, in 1298, it was said a clerk had caused the Devil to appear. A few yards to the right of the house were the butchers’ shambles, a row of shops in the middle of the newly paved Great Bailey Street. Here, the blood and offal spilt from the freshly killed carcasses coursed over the gravel and into the drainage channel running down the centre of the road. Heaven, hell and the stench of blood: Nicholas Owen was raised within the axis of all three.2
Further still to the left, high up on the hill, stood the tall tensided keep of Oxford Castle, its walls as thick as a man was tall. Within that keep there stood another, its walls only slightly less thick, and inside that there was the well chamber, with a well shaft so deep you could not fathom the bottom of it. Walls within walls, chambers within chambers: Oxford Castle would provide plenty of inspiration for Nicholas Owen in his later life. Beyond the keep there lay the castle gaol and next to the castle gaol there stood the gallows.3
The castle was in a ruinous state by the time of Owen’s birth: the seat of Oxford’s civic power had long ago shifted to the city’s Council Chambers. But beyond the parish of St Peter-le-Bailey, to its west, lay evidence of a more recent power-shift still. Here were the remains of Oseney Abbey, lately Oxford’s cathedral. All that was left of it were the church walls, the dovecote and the outbuildings; the rest of the stone had been stripped from the site and carried over to the construction works at Christ Church College. Further to the south a similar process was at work as the Franciscan and Dominican friaries were dismantled piece by piece by city speculators and sold off to make new townhouses.4
The landscape of England was being re-drawn. The castles and manor houses of the old feudal aristocracy had shared their domination of the English countryside with the spires and steeples of the abbeys, priories and monasteries. They had stamped their authority on the public consciousness by the sheer scale of their physical presence. But both aristocrats and abbots had found themselves systematically stripped of that authority in Tudor England. And all those who had bowed to the seigniority of Nobility and Church, who had prospered under it or were sheltered by it, were left shivering in the brisk winds of change.
This was the birth of modern England, with a newly re-worked relationship between Parliament and monarch, and an increasing dependence on the unstoppable middle classes. Of course for some it had been an entirely unwanted pregnancy, but for many, many more across the nation, some with, some without a vested interest in the old order, but all of them sharing a strong desire for stability and the certainty of tradition, it would prove a difficult birth: bloody and unutterably painful. And nowhere was this truer than at Oxford.
On 3 February 1530, just over thirty years before Nicholas Owen was born, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, peremptorily thrust Oxford University into the centre of the controversy of the hour. He wrote to the Vice-Chancellor asking him and Oxford’s academics to provide a unanimous opinion on the validity of the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon.5
The request was as untactful as it was unwelcome: Cardinal Wolsey, the university’s wealthiest patron, had been arrested only the year before for failing to provide Henry with the verdict he was looking for. And now it must have seemed to those at Oxford, asked to enter after Wolsey into this most explosive of minefields, that the Cardinal’s downfall would soon be followed by their own. So Oxford dragged its heels. When Cambridge, to the same request, came quickly back with the answer Henry wanted, the relief in the fens might have been palpable but the spotlight now shone ever more brightly on the midlands. And still Oxford dragged its heels.6
In early April the King could wait no longer. His agents, led by the Bishop of Lincoln, descended on the university, hotly pursued by a strongly worded letter from Henry himself. While the bishop worked on Convocation, persuading them to hand the matter over to the university’s theologians, Henry reminded the ‘youth’ of Oxford precisely where their loyalties lay. This two-pronged attack produced the desired result. Though the Faculty of Arts grumbled that the Faculty of Theology had no right to speak for the university as a whole, the combination of manipulation and not so veiled threat had won the day. On 8 April Oxford University gave Henry the answer he was looking for: his marriage was invalid. But its tardiness in doing so was neither forgiven nor forgotten.* 7
In September 1535 Henry’s agents were back in Oxford as part of a whirlwind tour of the country in preparation for the dissolution of the monasteries and by now the bloodshed had begun. In July of that year one of Oxford’s most illustrious former scholars, Sir Thomas More, was executed on Tower Hill, a victim of the new Treason Act: