OWEN, Thomas (c.1580-1661), of Shrewsbury, Salop.

Owen was the son of a Shrewsbury alderman who served as bailiff, in the days before the charter of 1638 granted the town a mayor, on four occasions. As a mercer who had later joined the town’s drapers’ company, Edward Owen was also fully involved in Shrewsbury’s most prosperous and important industry, the cloth trade. After schooling at Shrewsbury grammar school, Thomas Owen was put to the law at Lincoln’s Inn, where he was probably the man of that name called in 1606. He was acting as clerk in the Shrewsbury town courts from 1610, and succeeded Thomas Dyos as town clerk in January 1624. He played only a small part in the four Parliaments in the 1620s in which he sat, but was active in securing the charter for the town in 1638.12HP Commons 1604-1629. At the request of the burgesses, Owen was deputed to answer the quo warranto which had been brought against the town by the privy council in 1637.13Salop Archives, 6001/290, 21 Apr. 1637. He went to London and returned with the new charter. This confirmed his position as town clerk, but it was at the expense of making him obnoxious to the puritan faction in Shrewsbury, of which Humphrey Mackworth I*, a retained legal adviser to the corporation, was an unofficial leader. The godly activists wished to restrict civic government more closely than the charter permitted. Owen invested a considerable amount of his own income into the campaign for the charter. In 1638, the tensions between him and Mackworth spilled over into legal action. Mackworth sued Owen in the court of chivalry in 1639, complaining that the town clerk had called him a ‘base fellow’ at a public meeting. He accused others, in league with Owen, of organising a shaming ritual against him, a ‘kind of ringing and beating with hammers’ by shoemakers, when he brought his new bride to Shrewsbury.14Cases in the High Ct. of Chivalry ed. Cust and Hopper (Harl. Soc. n.s. xviii), 175.

Owen’s conflicts with the godly party notwithstanding, the corporation retained sufficient confidence in him to return him to the first of the two Parliaments in 1640. The master, wardens and a committee of the drapers’ company met on 26 March to instruct their burgesses in Parliament to deal with the ‘grievances’ they encapsulated in a petition.15Salop Archives, Shrewsbury Drapers’ Company, Order Bk. 2, 1607-1740, f. 58. They must have intended Owen to deal with their complaints; his fellow-burgess, Francis Newport*, was 40 years his junior, only 20 years old and completely without any public experience. It was hardly Owen’s fault that he was unable in this Parliament of some three weeks to progress the drapers’ business, and it was unlikely to have been any wrong-doing on his part that prompted the electors to replace him with William Spurstowe as their burgess in the second Parliament of the year. In fact, the corporation retained both Owen and his enemy, Mackworth, on their list of legal advisers, and paid expenses to both men in 1640-1.16Salop Archives, 3365/584/18. The town also continued to pay interest to Owen on his layout on their behalf during the charter campaign, and this was a continuing charge on the corporation in 1643, after the town had become a redoubt of the royalists in Shropshire.17Salop Archives, 3365/585; 586/22; 587/3.

Owen was propelled into supporting the king during the civil war probably as a natural consequence of his quarrel with the Shrewsbury puritans, who took the side of Parliament. He remained in Shrewsbury, acting as a commissioner of array as well as town clerk, to be taken into custody eventually when the town fell to Parliament in 1645. He was then sent to Nantwich, where he remained until October 1646. He then made his way to London to appear before the Committee for Compounding, at Goldsmiths’ Hall. His so Edward, was an active officer in the king’s army. Both father and son took the Covenant, and in March 1647 Owen was fined £294, at one tenth of his estate’s value.18CCC 1613. The fine was to be reduced if Owen settled the tithes he held of Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, on the minister, and Owen soon claimed that the grant was made, and requested discharge. In 1654, however, the minister, John Bryan, claimed that the grant of tithes had never been made, and so Owen’s estate was sequestered again. In March 1655, Owen appealed, insisting that he had fully complied with previous orders to pay Bryan, and estimated his own annual income to be only £160. The case seems to have petered out inconclusively in June that year.19CCC 1614.

Owen seems to have retained the respect of Shrewsbury corporation, despite his private troubles with the agencies of penal taxation. Ironically, given his quarrel with Bryan over tithes, it was to Owen that the corporation turned in April 1655 to seek advice on the ownership of the abbey. Specifically, Owen was asked to adjudicate on whether the corporation or Sir Richard Prince had the older claim.20Salop Archives, 6001/290, 12 Apr. 1655. Owen had long since lost his town clerkship, to Humphrey Mackworth II*, but Mackworth presented Owen with a gift of £10 in October 1659, a gesture which was clearly intended to acknowledge Owen’s continued claim on the office.21NLW, Castle Hill 931, 25 Oct. 1659. It was probably also a recognition that Owen was financially hard-pressed; in 1657 his income was stated to be only £28 a year. When the king was restored, Owen was not reinstated as town clerk. The new clerk was instead Thomas Jones†, brother of William Jones*, who represented the Presbyterian interest in Shrewsbury that hoped to come to an accommodation with the monarchy. Owen petitioned in vain to become protonothary of the south Wales great sessions courts, and died in May 1661. He was buried at St Chad’s, Shrewsbury. There is no evidence to suggest that any of his descendants sat in Parliament.22Owen, Blakeway, Hist. Shrewsbury, i. 543; CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 47, 55; St. Chad’s, Shrewsbury, 286.