Closing the Circle: Nicholas Owen and Walter Owen of Oxford

In her essay Blessed Nicholas Owen: Jesuit Brother and maker of hiding holes—a summary of the material on the soon-to-be saint held in the possession of the office of the Vice-Postulation, Farm Street— Margaret Waugh first identified Walter Owen, an Oxford carpenter, as the father of Nicholas Owen. Michael Hodgetts, in his article The Owens of Oxford published in this journal in October 1999, laid out all the known facts about Walter Owen and his family but stressed there was no conclusive evidence to support this identification. Although Nicholas Owen’s relationship to the printer Henry Owen, a former apprentice of Joseph Barnes (founder of Oxford University Press), suggested some connection between Nicholas and the city of Oxford— the information that Henry Owen was ‘brother to that Oven [sic] who ripped out his own bowels in the Tower, being imprisoned for the Gunpowder Treason’ comes on the authority of both the government informer William Udall, and John Gee, writing in 1624—there was still nothing concrete to link Nicholas to Walter Owen.