the month previously.]

The sanguinary laws against seminary priests and "recusants"
were enforced with the greatest severity after the discovery of
the Gunpowder Plot. These were revived for a period in Charles
II.'s reign, when Oates's plot worked up a fanatical hatred against
all professors of the ancient faith. In the mansions of the old
Roman Catholic families we often find an apartment in a secluded
part of the house or garret in the roof named "the chapel," where
religious rites could be performed with the utmost privacy, and
close handy was usually an artfully contrived hiding-place, not
only for the officiating priest to slip into in case of emergency,
but also where the vestments, sacred vessels, and altar furniture
could be put away at a moment's notice.

It appears from the writings of Father Tanner[1] that most of
the hiding-places for priests, usually called "priests' holes,"
were invented and constructed by the Jesuit Nicholas Owen, a
servant of Father Garnet, who devoted the greater part of his
life to constructing these places in the principal Roman Catholic
houses all over England.

[Footnote 1: _Vita et Mors_ (1675), p. 75.]

"With incomparable skill," says an authority, "he knew how to
conduct priests to a place of safety along subterranean passages,
to hide them between walls and 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