Today is the feast of one my favorite saints, St. Nicholas Owen, Martyr. From a previous All Saints post in which I discussed him:
Born into a Catholic family in Oxford in the 1560s, Nicholas Owen grew up learning the family trade, which was carpentry. Throughout his early life, the strictures imposed by Queen Elizabeth I against Catholics became increasingly heavy, and young Nicholas Owen became involved in helping priests who were evading the law. He served for a time as St. Edmund Campion's servant, eventually being thrown into prison for a while for protesting Campion's own imprisonment. Afterward, he began working with Fr. Henry Garnet, and began the work for which he has become most famous: constructing cleverly designed priest-holes in Catholic houses where priests could be hidden from authorities trying to find them. It was a truly extraordinary task. Not only did it require considerable skill and ingenuity of mind to find ways to hide rooms so that they could not easily be discovered from the outside, the work required such immense secrecy that Owen often had to do it entirely by himself. This was not a small matter, since Owen was very short, lame, and suffered from a hernia, and the work, which usually had to be done as quietly as possible in a single night, was gruelingly hard labor. But he did it, and he did it all for free. The quality of his work was unmatched, and his trade as a carpenter meant that he could move around the country fairly freely. He is generally thought to have been the person who was behind Fr. John Gerard's famous escape in 1597 from the Tower of London; they had both been arrested in 1594, but Owen had been set free because he gave up no useful information in torture and the authorities immediately involved didn't realize how important the physically unimpressive carpenter actually was. Owen was arrested again in 1606 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot; he deliberately put himself in the way of being arrested in an attempt to protect Fr. Garnet from being arrested by distracting the authorities. The distraction attempt did not work, and this time the authorities knew what a catch he was. He was tortured for information, but died during torture from complications arising from his hernia. He was canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.
He is popularly regarded as one of the patron saints of illusionists and other stage magicians.
Priest-holes that are large enough to hide a person are sometimes called 'conveyances', while those that were designed to hide relics, sacred vessels, etc., are sometimes called 'secret corners'; hence the title of this post.