by Malcolm Brennan

SAINT NICHOLAS was a carpenter who served his Maker by using his craft in the service of the Church. He was not only a skilled carpenter but a wise one. Nicholas was one of four sons of Walter Owen, a carpenter in the city of Oxford; two of the sons, John and Walter, became priests on the English mission, and another, Henry, became a clandestine printer of Catholic literature in Northamptonshire. Nicholas chose to follow the trade of his father, and of his Master.

When we first hear of Nicholas he was acting as a personal servant of Saint Edmund Campion during that hero's brief but glorious mission of 1580-81. Unlike his master, Nicholas was a man of few words, but those few were not minced, and certain of his remarks about the trial and death of Campion led to his arrest. However, since he was a person of little account, he was released after a short imprisonment.

Nicholas next appears as "Garnet's man." Father Henry Garnet was the Jesuit superior in England for nineteen years, and he probably came to know Nicholas through dealing with his brother, Henry, the printer. Nicholas accompanied Father Garnet on his endless rounds from shire to shire in the setting up of Mass centers, an organizational arrangement that shaped Catholic life in England for two centuries in the absence of episcopal governance. In addition to acting as Father Garnet's personal servant in these laborious and dangerous travels, Nicholas also—and this is his chief accomplishment—built hiding holes where the Mass centers were established and in other "safe houses," usually the homes of Catholic gentry.

Although it was not a crime, according to the statutes of the time, simply to be a Catholic, yet it was a crime to fail to attend Anglican services, to refuse to receive Anglican communion, to attend Mass, to receive the Sacraments, to be a priest, to say Mass, to assist or shelter a priest—and these crimes were all accompanied by severe penalties, including death. According to the "Elizabethan Settlement," it was legal to be a Catholic, as long as one acted like a Protestant. For a Catholic to practice his religion, then, was for him to be a criminal, and for this reason places of hiding were often necessary. Some of the priests who came early to England to help preserve the faith were quite naive. One turned up in Dover in his monastic robes, apparently thinking either that anyone who saw him would be converted on the spot or that he would immediately achieve the glory of martyrdom. By the 1580's. however, Catholics and priests who served them had learned to become wily evaders of the law, and indeed to develop a complete catacomb mentality. Not a few of them, sad to say, maintained their freedom by compromising their consciences, but thousands never sank to this stratagem and erred rather on the side of over-boldness. St. Edmund Campion, for example, felt ridiculous in the dandy's outfit that Nicholas Owen disguised him in, and it was probably Campion's failure in craftiness that led to his early capture.

The hiding holes, or "priest's holes," that St. Nicholas constructed were ingeniously concealed spaces in a house where one or several persons could hide while the house was being searched. Before beginning his work, Nicholas would customarily kneel for a period of silent prayer, and sometimes the plan for the hole would come to him during this spiritual exercise. Some of the holes were extremely cramped, some were small rooms with furniture and a place to store food. This latter provision was extremely valuable, because a search might last for several days or as long as two weeks, the priest-hunter simply moving in on the suspected family. Where possible, Nicholas often provided an additional secret passage for food.

Access to the hole was a major consideration. It first of all had to be inconspicuous, which usually meant small and in an unlikely spot and preferably hidden, as by a large piece of heavy furniture. Since the pursuivants often searched by banging their heavy staffs on floors, walls, ceilings, and stairs, to listen for hollow spaces, the access panel had to be just as solid as the surrounding areas, but not more so. It was no use trying to hit upon the ideal access panel, like the tread of a stair or a panel of a wainscoted wall, for the discovery of one hole would then teach the pursuivants where to look for others.

The holes themselves were equally ingenious. Sometimes Nicholas could construct a series of holes connected by a network of passages. In at least one case he constructed a hole, and then within it a concealed access to another, in hopes that if the first hole were discovered empty, the search might be called off, leaving the fugitive safe in the second hole.

It has been observed that the industrial revolution ruined the craft of carpentry because, with its invention of cheap wire nails, any unskilled dabbler could now fasten two boards together. Whatever the truth of that observation, St. Nicholas was a master craftsman back when carpenters were really carpenters, shaping their lumber by hand and fastening it with notches, pegs, tongues and grooves, and the like. Nor was he a carpenter only, for sometimes he was confronted with stone- or brick-work. More than one hole he constructed by bricking up half a large chimney, leaving one side for the passage of smoke and one for the hunted Catholic. On another occasion he redesigned a drainage system to make use of a large sewer under the house, and thus provided accommodation for twelve men. The poor occupants, however, often found themselves standing in ankle deep water that seeped in from the surrounding moat.

Not only did concealment have to be provided for the completed hiding hole, but secrecy also had to be observed in the construction of it. Saint Nicholas could not make use of the household staff of servants, for they might have been infiltrated by a government spy; and most members of the family had to be kept away from the work in progress lest the casual remark of a thoughtless child or a gossipy elder should give out the secret. For this reason Nicholas worked alone and usually at night. Because of his taciturnity, it is not possible to give any comprehensive account of his labors or his method of working, nor even to say with assurance that some particular priest's hole is his handiwork. Many of the holes were quite lost to memory until a number of them were re-discovered beginning in the last century, and it is only reasonable to suppose that some are yet to be found.

FATHER GARNET arranged to have Nicholas Owen professed as a Jesuit Brother at some unknown point in his career. Impressed with the carpenter's profound piety and his particular dedication to the Society of Jesus, Father Garnet was able to persuade his superiors that Nicholas should be professed even without being sent to a regular novitiate. This dimension of Brother Nicholas's life was also kept secret from most people who knew him—even from the priests for whom he worked.

Brother Nicholas—let us savor the title that he seldom heard pronounced—Brother Nicholas was arrested in London in the company of Father John Gerard in 1594. He was not then known to be the builder of priests' holes, but the authorities treated him as a source of information on the comings and goings of priests. They suspended him in the air by iron cuffs on his wrists, but after three hours, his limbs painfully distended, he had revealed nothing. Among the corruptions of the prison officials was a weakness for taking bribes, and through this means Brother Nicholas's freedom was obtained. Some time after this he met with a painful accident by falling from his horse and breaking his leg. He was put up in the inn where the accident occurred, and his friends were anxious that he might again be captured, immobilized thus among strangers. However, he so charmed his hosts that he was never in danger. They set his leg and, noticing that it was mending badly, they broke it again and re-set it—but even so he had a pronounced limp for the rest of his life, like his Order's founder. What he said to his hosts during his stay among them we do not know—no utterance of Brother Nicholas survives—but it is nice to know that there was another dimension to his personality besides his pious silence.

Saint Nicholas Owens's final imprisonment and his martyrdom came about as a result of the Gunpowder Plot. This was a scheme by some Catholic young men to blow up the Houses of Parliament while the King was present for the opening in 1605. It was devised in frustration and despair by men who had suffered for years from the anti-Catholicism in Parliament and who had listened for years to the king's empty promises that he would soon do something to lift the penal laws against Catholics— but it was not for those understandable reasons the less prudent.

The plan was betrayed to Robert Cecil, a king's minister who, seeing it as a way to bring discredit on Catholics, not only watched it progress secretly but actually fomented the scheme. Then at the last dramatic moment Cecil captured the plot's leader, Guy Fawkes, just as he was about to ignite a large store of gunpowder he had sequestered in the cellars of the Parliament building.

Cecil's counter-plot worked beautifully: all the principal conspirators were rounded up and executed and, since they were all friends of Father Garnet and other Jesuits, the whole scheme was said to have been master-minded by the Jesuits on orders from Rome. It was in the great dragnet for Jesuits which followed that Saint Nicholas Owen was captured, for he had known the young men, too, and had built hiding holes in their homes.

Nicholas and Father Garnet, along with Father Oldcorne and Brother Ralph Ashley, Jesuits all, took refuge in the home of Thomas Abingdon, Hindlip Hall. It had been built to provide refuge for priests, and Brother Nicholas had constructed no less than eleven hiding holes in it. Cecil, in pursuit of these master minds of the Gunpowder Plot, knew where they were, but he cunningly delayed their capture until the executions of the conspirators were complete, lest the testimony of these Jesuits should discredit the government's case concerning Jesuit complicity in the plot.

On January 26, 1506, when the conspirators were beyond reprieve, a hundred armed men surrounded and occupied Hindlip Hall. The two priests were quickly stowed away in one of the hiding holes and furnished with food for a long seige, but the two Brothers, caring more for their masters than themselves, found themselves in a small space with only an apple between them. For a week the pursuivants searched, banged, and poked; they tore down walls, ripped up floors, dismantled stairs, and exposed false ceilings; they brought in carpenters and masons to aid them, but all to no avail. Brother Ralph (who had also been professed secretly, and whose skill lay in administrative matters) and Nicholas had been cramped and starved for a long seven days when they thought up a ruse: they decided to come forth and pass themselves off as the priests, and thus save their masters by bringing the search to an end. Their scheme did not work, however, for one of the priest-hunters was a renegade priest who had known Father Garnet personally and could identify him. The search continued and the priests were eventually found.

When Robert Cecil realized that he had caught the famous maker of hiding holes, he expected to gain devastating intelligence against the Catholics, and he wrote his instructions accordingly: "No dealing now with a lenient hand. We will try to get from him by coaxing—if he is thus willing to contract for his life—an excellent booty of priests. If he will not confess, he shall be pressed by exquisite torture and we will wring the secret from him by the severity of his torments."

Robert Cecil was a clever, intelligent man, with a cunning cynicism that often gave him an advantage over others. But he had one blind spot: he did not know what sanctity is. The first part of his plan was carried out in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of the Marshalsea Prison, where the prisoner was allowed to have visitors and to write and receive letters—all under close surveillance, of course. After a time, when no hint of a secret was forthcoming, Saint Nicholas was sent to London Tower for part two of the program, the exquisite torture.

Nicholas was now quite ill, having ruptured an organ in the course of his work, but the torturers had no compassion. How many times they stretched him on the rack is not known, but they recognized the danger that the treatment would tear him apart, and so, not wishing him to die before the secrets were out, they devised some kind of an iron plate to fasten on him, a device that would increase the pain but decrease the danger of death. But still Saint Nicholas told nothing, for the Lord had set a watch before his mouth and a door round about his lips. The state to which the torturers reduced him, under Cecil's direction, is revealed by a jailer who was asked by a Catholic to let Nicholas write down a list of the things he needed. The jailer replied peevishly, "What would you have him write? He is not able to put on his cap, no, not to feed himself, but I must feed him." And still, like his buffeted Savior, he remained silent. Then, on March 26, 1606, the plate failed to do its work and, in the words of Father Gerard, "his bowels gushed out with his life."

Cecil, of course, knew how to avoid the embarrassment of having an unconvicted prisoner die in the torture chamber. He had a few words with the attorney general, Sir Edward Coke, and an inquest promptly produced the verdict that Saint Nicholas Owen had died by suicide—and printed ballads suddenly appeared on the streets of London commemorating the papist's shameful end and illustrating him in a kind of hari-kari.

"The truth was," Father Gerard later wrote of his servant and handy man, "that this man lived a saintly life. He is a glorious martyr of extraordinary merit."