Monument To Thomas Goodwin And Thankful Owen, South Enclosure

Monument to Thomas Goodwin and Thankful Owen, South Enclosure

This chest tomb, dating to around 1681, commemorates two leading figures of the Nonconformist movement. It is constructed of Portland stone with a Pennant stone lid, though its base is buried. The monument displays raised carved panels, now much eroded, which once featured skulls, hourglasses and palm fronds—typical memento mori imagery of the period. The lid bears armorial bearings carved in relief and an inscription reading "Thomas Goodwin DD". The original inscription was considerably longer and also commemorated Thankful Owen, but had become illegible by the time A W Light surveyed Bunhill Fields in 1915; Light recorded its form from archival material. A large crack in the lid is said to have been caused by a lightning bolt.

Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) was a leading Puritan minister and theologian of the mid-seventeenth century. Educated at Christ's and St Catharine's Colleges, Cambridge, he was elected fellow and lecturer at the latter in 1620, ordained deacon in 1622, and licensed as a university preacher. In 1632 he became vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge. His Puritan and Calvinist convictions increasingly put him at odds with Laudian Anglicanism; he resigned from Holy Trinity in 1633 and from his college fellowship in 1638. Later that year he emigrated to the Netherlands to serve as minister to a congregation of prominent English Puritans at Arnhem. He returned to England in 1640 and, following the outbreak of civil war in 1642, 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 precarious during the late 1640s, after 1650 he rose to greater prominence as master of Magdalen College, Oxford and 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, where he died in February 1680.

Thankful Owen (1620–1681) was an Independent divine. He attended St Paul's School before being granted 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. Following the Restoration, 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 Thomas Goodwin. After Goodwin's death in February 1680, Owen was chosen to succeed him as pastor of the Independent congregation in Fetter Lane, London, but died suddenly at his house in Hatton Garden shortly after. He was buried with Goodwin in Bunhill Fields.

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