The Priest Hunter's Nightmare: Nicholas Owen and the Hiding Places No One Could Find
Renaissance English History Podcast: A Show About the TudorsShow Notes
There is a Catholic saint whose actual job, canonized and everything, is patron of magic tricks. Escapologists. Illusionists. And he earned it the hard way: by spending nearly twenty years building hiding places so good that people still can't find them today, standing right next to them, with a guidebook in hand.
Nicholas Owen was a small, injured, entirely unremarkable-looking carpenter. He was also the most important man in Elizabethan and Jacobean England's Catholic underground, a one-man counter-surveillance operation who broke a priest out of the Tower of London, built hides that beat the hunters' own measuring tricks, and kept every single location locked in his head so it could never be tortured out of anyone else.
This is his story, the arms race he ran against the state, the night at Hindlip Hall when the escape artist chose to appear instead of vanish, and what happened to him in the Tower afterward.
Plus: a heads up on a free live illumination workshop I'm doing tomorrow with the wonderful Julia Bangert, teaching you to paint a Tudor rose in true medieval style. Link below.
🌹 Free illumination workshop w/ Julia, tomorrow 12pm ET: https://page.co/kxj56n Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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