He could not have found a better workman for this purpose. Father Gerard writes of him:--[203]"He it was that made our hiding-places; in fact he made the one to which I owed my safety." As he probably made the very curious hiding-places in Sir Everard Digby's house, I may claim to say something about him. Brother Foley calls him[204] "that useful, cunning joiner of those times," who "died a martyr for the faith, suspended from a Topcliff rack in the Tower of London, where he was divers times hung up for several hours together, to compel him to betray the hiding-places he had made, up and down the land; but not a word could they force from his sealed and faithful lips." "The authorities, shocked at their own cruelty, gave out that he destroyed himself."[205] A Protestant writer accordingly calls him[206] "that Owen who ript out his own bowells in the Tower." Father Gerard denies this story at great length,[207] stating that the poor man suffered from hernia, and that although "the civil law doth forbid to torture any man that is broken," the executioners "girded" the afflicted part "with a plate of iron to keep in" the portion which threatened to protrude, but that "the extremity of pain (which is most in that kind of torment), about the breast" and the seat of the hernia, "did force out" the interior, "and so the iron did serve but to cut and wound his body, which, perhaps, did afterwards put them in mind to give out that he had ripped his" part in question, "with a knife. Which, besides all the former reasons, is in itself improbable, if not impossible. For first, in that case, knives are not allowed but only in the time of meat, whilst one stands by, and those such as are broad at the point, and will only cut towards the midst." [203] _Life of Father J. Gerard_, p. lvii. [204] _Records, S. J._ Series I., p. 297. [205] _Ib._, p. 675, footnote. [206] _The Foot out of the Snare._ By John Zee, London, 1624. [207] _Gunpowder Plot_, p. 188-9. As to his skill in making hiding-places, a Jesuit, Father Tanner, wrote of him that[208] "With incomparable skill he knew how to conduct priests to a place of safety along subterranean passages, to hide them between walls, to bury them in impenetrable recesses, and to entangle them in labyrinths and a thousand windings. But what was much more difficult of accomplishment, he so disguised the entrances to these as to make them most unlike what they really were." "When he was about to design" a hiding-place, he commenced the work by "receiving the Most Holy Eucharist, sought to aid its progress by continual prayer, and offered the completion of it to God alone, accepting of no other reward for his toil than the merit of charity and the consolation of labouring for the good of Catholics." [208] _Collectanea S. J._ See _Records of the Eng. Prov. S. J._, Vol. iv. pp. 247, 248.