John Owen

Sir John Owen of Clenennau (1600–1666), was a Welsh landowner from Anglesey, who served with the Royalist army in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, during which he held various commands in North Wales. The Earl of Clarendon, in his history of the war, noted that Owen described himself as "a plain gentleman of Wales, who had been always taught to obey the King"; by contrast Cromwell referred to Owen in passing as "a violent man, now got into trouble enough". Following the Second English Civil War he was sentenced to death in 1649 for treason and the murder of a Parliamentarian official, William Lloyd, but was later reprieved. After the Stuart Restoration in 1660, he was made Vice-Admiral of North Wales, dying in 1666. Early life Owen was born in around 1600 in the commote of Eifionydd in north-west Wales. He was the eldest son of John Owen of Bodsilin, Anglesey (d.1613), secretary to Francis Walsingham. His mother, Elin Maurice, was the daughter of William Wynn Maurice of Clenennau and the granddaughter and heiress of the politician Sir William Maurice of Clenennau. After the elder John Owen's death, she remarried to Sir Francis Eure, a justice of the circuit court of North Wales.