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The Owens of Oxford

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Michael Hodgetts
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 1999 , pp. 415 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1973

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References

Notes

1 Gerard, , Narrative, p. 187.Google Scholar

2 Foley 4 (1878), pp. 245–267.

3 S.P. 14/216/ii/121, printed in Worcestershire Recusant 47 (June 1986), p. 28.

4 Foley, pp. 245–6.

5 Gerard, , Narrative,, pp.182, 183, 184.Google Scholar

6 Caraman, , Garnet, pp. 217–8, 257Google Scholar. The first of these was omitted from my article in Recusant History,, October 1989, p.393, n.45,as it is not in Caraman’s index.

7 This is the date given by McCoog in C.R.S.75 (English and Welsh Jesuits, 1555–1650: Part II: G–Z), p. 256.

8 Tanner, , Vita et Mors, p. 74 Google Scholar; Foley, pp. 248–9.

9 Gerard, , Autobiography, pp. 5, 216, 237 Google Scholar, and refs. cited there; Acts of the Privy Council, 14 August 1581.

10 Morris, , Life of Gerard, pp. 478, 487, 488.Google Scholar

11 More, , Historia, pp. 31 Google Scholar; cf p.322: secundo subditus equuleo.

12 Gerard, , Autobiography, pp. 65, 72, 102–3 Google Scholar; Narrative, p.183.

13 Tanner, , Vita et Mors, p.78 Google Scholar; Foley, p.256.

14 Foley, pp.247, 260–1; cf Francis Edwards, S.J., ‘The Attempt of 1608 on Hugh Owen, Intelligencer for the Archdukes in Flanders’, Recusant History 17 (1984–5), pp. 140–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Foley, p. 187.

16 Godfrey, Anstruther, O.P, ‘Notes on English Martyrs’, The Ransomer 12/5 (Summer 1948), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

17 British Library, Stowe MS 168, f.364r. I am grateful to Mr. Philip Harris for checking the exact wording and spelling for me. Is the phrase ‘a great man among seminaries at Rome’ an echo of C.R.S. 53, p. 215 (the deposition of Charles Sledd, May 1580): ‘I being brought to the Hospital [the English Hospice in Rome], Morris the Custos of the said Hospital entertained me very well, and immediately after dinner came to me Nicholas Owen and Henry Smith, two Welshmen’?

18 P.R.O., Star Chamber 8/5/16.

19 The Ransomer 12/5, p. 12.

20 Anstruther, Vaux, p. 347.

21 Gerard, , Autobiography, p. 111.Google Scholar

22 S.P. 14/216/ii/194, printed in Foley, pp. 259–60.

23 Cal. State Papers Venetian 10 (1603–7), n. 498. This despatch was first printed in Andreas, Eudaemon-Johannes, Apologia pro R.P.Henrico Gameto (Cologne, 1610), p. 210 Google Scholar: Id quod ab ipso Rege accepisse sese Venetorum legatus ad suos in Italiam scripsit.

24 More, Historia,, p. 322.

25 Gerard, , Narrative, p. 185.Google Scholar

26 S.P. 12/177/3; Knox, T.F., Douai Diaries (1878), pp. 197, 362–3.Google Scholar

27 University Register, II, Part 2, p. 86; II, Part 3, p. 90.

28 University Register, II, Part, p. 392.

29 Valladolid Register (C.R.S.30), p.9; Knox, Douai Diaries,, pp. 199, 226, 228, 234.

30 Anstruther, 1, p. 264.

31 S.P.12/195/107.

32 Anstruther, , Vaux, p. 171 Google Scholar, from S.P. 12/195/27.

33 Anstruther, , Vaux PP.158–9 Google Scholar.

34 Anstruther 1, pp. 117–118; C.S.P.D. 1581–90, p. 240 (=SP 12/178/53, 14 May 1585); cf pp. 241–2, 83, 478.

35 C.R.S. 71, p.184.

36 V.C.H. Hampshire 5, p.73 and Speed’s map of 1611 facing p. 2; Pevsner, & Lloyd, , The Buildings of England: Hampshire & the Isle of Wight (1967), p. 693.Google Scholar

37 Anstruther 1, p. 370; Foley 4, pp. 574–82. The year that he spent in England from May 1591 to August 1592 includes the conference at Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, in October 1591, and I think it possible that he was one of the secular priests present: Gerard, , Autobiography, pp. 41–43 Google Scholar; Anstruther, Vaux, pp. 186–91; Caraman, , Garnet, pp. 128–35.Google Scholar

38 S.P.12/177/3/1; examinations of John Gardiner, Roger Brierton and Walter Treveven, 28 February 1584–5.

39 C.R.S.2, pp. 242, 243, 251, 277, 279; C.R.S. 5, pp.155, 159, 162.

40 S.P. 12/217/1, printed in The Rambler, April 1857, pp. 279–84.

41 Ibidem. (The Rambler, p. 281).

42 Ibidem. (The Rambler, p. 282).

43 Southern, A. C. ed., An Elizabethan Recusant House (1954)Google Scholar.

44 Anstruther 1, p. 263.

45 Caraman, , Garnet, pp. 217–18.Google Scholar

46 S.R.14/7/50, printed in Morris, , Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers 1 (1872), pp. 191–2.Google Scholar

47 Morris, , Troubles 1, p. 431.Google Scholar

48 Bryan Stapleton, Mrs., A History of the Post-Reformation Catholic Missions in Oxfordshire (1906), pp. 256, 337.Google Scholar

49 C.R.S. 75, p. 256.

50 V.C.H. Oxfordshire 7, pp. 170, 173.

51 H. E. Salter, ‘Recusants in Oxfordshire, 1603–1633‘ from City Archives M.4.2, ‘Husting & Mayor’s Courts, 1637–9’, in Oxford Arch. Soc. Reports 69 (1924), p. 16: ‘Domina Margareta Clarke de parochia sancti Thomae, uxor Willelmi Clarke de parochia predicta militis, £260’.

52 V.C.H. Oxfordshire 7, p. 170 and facing illustration; Pevsner, & Sherwood, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (1974), p. 818.Google Scholar

53 C.S.P.D. 1611–1618, pp. 548, 558.

54 Anstruther 1, p. 85; 2, p. 234.

55 Harmsen, p. 241.

56 C.R.S. 2, p. 285; Gerard, , Autobiography, pp. 102–3 Google Scholar. Gerard was in the Clink from 6 July 1594 to 12 April 1597: ibid., pp. 77n, 104n.

57 Harmsen, p. 241.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 C.R.S. 60, p. 134; cf C.R.S. 18, p. 260; 22, p. 109; 57, p. 126; 71, pp. 10, 21, 24, 29, 84, 94, 133, 139, 157.

61 V.C.H. Oxfordshire 6, p. 339.

62 Harmsen, p. 241.

63 C.R.S. 34, p. 5.

64 Harmsen, p. 241.

65 Harris, P. R., ‘The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605–1612’, Recusant History 8 (1965–6), p. 244 Google Scholar; cf pp. 205, 218, 219, 237.

66 Harmsen, p. 241.

67 Transcripts in Oxfordshire Archives, County Hall, Oxford.

68 Margaret, Waugh, Blessed Nicholas Owen (Office of the Vice-Postulation, Farm Street, London, 1961), p. 3.Google Scholar

69 University Register I, pp. 302—4.

70 Ibid.

71 Salter, H. E. ed., Oxford Council Acts, 1583–1626 (Oxford, 1928), p. 19.Google Scholar

72 Ibid., p. 160.

73 C.R.S. 60, pp. 222, 235.

74 Salter, H. E., ‘Recusants in Oxfordshire, 1603–1633’, Oxford Arch. Soc. Reports 69 (1924), pp. 18, 21 Google Scholar, from City Archives, M.4.2, Husting & Mayor’s Courts, 1637–39’, ff. 132 ff.

75 Thorold Rogers, J. E. ed., Oxford City Documents, 1268–1665 (Oxord Hist. Soc. 18, 1891), p. 293 Google Scholar: ‘that all common Bakers as well Priuiledged as others ought and haue vsed to grind at the Castle Mills’.

76 Oxfordshire Archives, W.I. 49/1/21

77 Oxfordshire Archives, W.I. 49/2/28.

78 Oxfordshire Archives, I. 299/3/26.

79 Oxfordshire Archives, W.I. 143/5/3. It was not proved until 1686.

80 Genealogists’ Magazine 25/11 (September 1997), p. 463; 26/2 (June 1998), pp. 59–60.

81 Gerard, , Narrative, p. 189.Google Scholar

82 V.C.H. Oxfordshire 3, map between pp. 36 and 37; Longmate map of 1773 in James, Stevens Curl, The Erosion of Oxford (1977), pp. 4–5 Google Scholar, and cf p. 83, Figs. 29–30.

83 V.C.H Oxfordshire 3, p. 337; 4, p. 403.

84 Pevsner, & Sherwood, , The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (1974), p. [4]Google Scholar; Christopher, & Edward, Hibbert, The Encyclopaedia of Oxford (Macmillan, 1988), p. 71 Google Scholar; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, The City of Oxford (1939), plan opp. p. 136.

85 Salter, H. E. ed., Oxford City Properties (Oxford, 1926), p. 203.Google Scholar The position of no. 5 Castle Street is shown on the plan in R.C.H.M., The City of Oxford, p. 136; cf. p. 175, no. 136.

86 Salter, H. E., Survey of Oxford (Oxford Hist. Soc. N.S. 20, 1969), pp. 121–2 Google Scholar, nos. 151–163.

87 Ibidem.

88 Information from Dr. Robin Darwall-Smith, archivist of Magdalen College.

89 Thorold Rogers, J. E. ed., Oxford City Documents, 1268–1665 (Oxford Hist. Soc. 18, 1891), p. 80.Google Scholar

90 V.C.H. Oxfordshire 4, pp. 92–93.

91 Oxfordshire Archives, W.I. 49/1/21.