Monument to Thomas Goodwin and Thankful Owen, South Enclosure

Reasons for Designation

The monument to Thomas Goodwin and Thankful Owen is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
* It is a late-C17 chest tomb, commemorating two important figures in the religious history of the period, and retaining some memento mori carving.
* It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the south enclosure.

Details

635-1/0/10275 BUNHILL FIELDS BURIAL GROUND 21-FEB-11 Monument to Thomas Goodwin and Thankfu l Owen, South enclosure

GV II Chest tomb of Thomas Goodwin and Thankful Owen, c1681

LOCATION: 532752.6, 182243

MATERIALS: Portland stone with a Pennant stone lid

DESCRIPTION: The monument takes the form of a stone chest with a moulded Pennant stone lid; the base is buried. It has raised carved panels, much eroded, but on those to the north and west sides skulls, hourglasses and palm fronds can just about be discerned. The lid has a large crack, said to have been caused by a lightning bolt. On the lid are armorial bearings, carved in relief, and an inscription reading 'Thomas Goodwin DD'. The inscription was originally much longer and also commemorated Thankful Owen, but was no longer legible even when Light surveyed the Fields in 1915. Light records its form of words, presumably transcribed from archival material.

HISTORY: Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680) was a leading Puritan minister and theologian of the mid-C17. Educated at Christ's and St Catharine's, Cambridge, in 1620 he was elected fellow and lecturer at the latter college; ordained deacon in 1622, he was afterwards licensed as a university preacher, and in 1632 became vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge. However, his Puritan and Calvinist convictions, reflected in his extensive theological writings, put him increasingly at odds with Laudian Anglicanism: he resigned from Holy Trinity in 1633 and from his college fellowship in 1638, and later that year he emigrated to the Netherlands to take up a post as minister to a congregation of prominent English Puritans at Arnhem. He returned in 1640, and after the outbreak of civil war in 1642 he served on the Westminster Council of Divines, appointed by the Long Parliament to restructure the Church of England. Although his opposition to Presbyterianism made his position insecure during the later 1640s, after 1650 he rose to even greater prominence, becoming master of Magdalen College, Oxford and a close adviser to Oliver Cromwell; he is regarded as one of the principal architects of the Cromwellian religious settlement. Goodwin was with Cromwell when he died in 1658, and later testified that the Lord Protector had nominated his son Richard to succeed him. After the Restoration in 1660 he was ejected from his Oxford post and retired to London.

Thankful Owen (1620-1681) was an Independent divine. He attended St Paul's School, which granted him an exhibition to Exeter College, Oxford in 1636. He became a fellow of Lincoln College in 1642, senior proctor for the university in 1649, president of St John's College in 1650 and was added to the university list of preachers in 1651; he preached at Whitehall in 1659. Owen was ejected from his Oxford positions in 1660 and moved to London where he became joint editor, with John Barron, of the works of the aforementioned Thomas Goodwin. Following Goodwin's death in February 1680, Owen was chosen to succeed him as pastor of the Independent congregation in Fetter Lane, London, but he died suddenly at his house in Hatton Garden. He was buried with Goodwin in Bunhill Fields.

Bunhill Fields was first enclosed as a burial ground in 1665. Thanks to its location just outside the City boundary, and its independence from any Established place of worship, it became London's principal Nonconformist cemetery, the burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, William Blake and other leading religious and intellectual figures. It was closed for burials in 1853, laid out as a public park in 1867, and re-landscaped following war damage by Bridgewater and Shepheard in 1964-5.

SOURCES: Corporation of London, A History of the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (1902). A W Light, Bunhill Fields (London, 1915). T. M. Lawrence, 'Goodwin, Thomas (1600-1680)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10996, accessed 19 Feb 2010] Stephen Wright, 'Owen, Thankful (1620-1681)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21031, accessed 19 Feb 2010]

REASONS FOR DESIGNATION: The monument to Thomas Goodwin and Thankful Owen is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons: * It is a late-C17 chest tomb, commemorating two important figures in the religious history of the period, and retaining some memento mori carving. * It is located within the Grade I registered Bunhill Fields Burial Ground (q.v.), and has group value with the other listed tombs in the south enclosure.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

508644

Legacy System:

LBS

End of official list entry

All text content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 , except where otherwise stated. Any supplied maps are © Crown Copyright [and database rights] 2026 OS AC0000815036 and may not be reproduced without permission.