On this date in 1679, 80-year-old Catholic priest John Kemble was martyred for the faith at Hereford.

Kemble had been discreetly performing the offices of his faith — still illicit, but less liable to get you killed at this late date — for over five decades since ordination.

Unhappily, Titus Oates and his tall tales of a Popish Plot to assassinate King Charles II came along at the end of that run. In the ensuing anti-Catholic spasm, Kemble was one of the unlucky ones rousted.

Even in the hysteria of the times, nobody could make an actual conspiracy charge stick against this ancient cleric, but in the hands of a sufficiently hostile judiciary, his demonstrable exercise of the priesthood could be enough to make him a traitor. And at his age, the opportunity to buy his life at the cost of his conscience didn’t look the bargain:

According to the course of nature I have but a few years to live. It will be an advantage to suffer for my religion and therefore I will not abscond.

He got the mild consolation of hanging to death before the unpleasant drawing-and-quartering bits were executed upon him, and calmly puffed a pipe and shared a bowl of wine with the sympathetic representatives of the law before it all happened. As a result, Herefordshire long called the comforts enjoyed before a parting a “Kemble pipe” and “Kemble cup”.

He’s been elevated to sainthood on the strength of his posthumous miracles, like healing the jailer’s daughter of throat cancer; the holy man’s severed hand, held at St. Francis Xavier’s in Hereford, is supposed to have saved a man from death as recently as 1995.

(The rest of St. John Kemble reposes at Welsh Newton, and is venerated at an annual pilgrimage.)

Kemble was among the last of the Forty Martyrs of England to die for the Catholic faith; a fellow-inmate, David Lewis, paid his own penalty just five days later.

On this day..

• 1946: Döme Sztójay, former Prime Minister
• 1651: Christopher Love
• 1936: Melquiades Alvarez, a liberal in a revolutionary time
• 1831: Edward Hogsden, rapist father
• 1972: The Trelew Massacre
• 1572: Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland and rebel
• 1879: Joseph Davidenko, Sergei Chubarov, and Dmitri Lizogoub
• 1814: John Ashton, Lord Wellington, at Horace Cotton's first hanging
• 1700: The Rev. Thomas Hunter, M.A.
• 1851: Two men hanged and one lynched in Sacramento
• 1468: Charles de Melun, governor of Paris
• 408: Stilicho, whose execution let in the barbarians