June 23, alas, was the end of the line for Jesuit Thomas Garnet, martyred on that date in 1608 for Catholic proselytizing in England.

Now accounted a saint and one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, Garnet was the nephew of Henry Garnet, a priest executed in 1606 for complicity in the November 5, 1605 Gunpowder Plot.

Thomas, too — then about 30 years old — was arrested during this same backlash, and put to torture for evidence against uncle Henry. Thomas had been exercising his covert ministry in England since 1599, after slipping English custody once before.

As a result of the Gunpowder Plot hubbub, Thomas Garnet was among 47 Catholic clerics shipped across the English Channel to Flanders in July 1606, where they were warned that they faced execution should they ever again be caught in England.

Thomas Garnet returned, of course. He was betrayed within weeks by another priest named Rouse — whom Garnet publicly forgave while being drawn, hanged, and quartered on this date in 1608. (His faith was treasonable because he refused to swear an oath of allegiance demanded of Catholics post-5.11.)

Garnet’s remains were translated back to his Catholic school on the continent. In more tolerant times, long after Garnet’s death, this English Jesuit school finally had liberty to relocate back to England proper. While Garnet’s relics were destroyed in the French Revolution, he remains the protomartyr (the first martyr associated with a place) of the venerable Stonyhurst College, now in Lancashire.

On this day..

• 1939: Toribio Martinez Cabrera
• 1915: Carl Frederick Muller, fluent in languages but not in espionage
• 1865: Thomas King, heartstabber
• 1505: The Val Camonica witches
• 1784: Fifteen crooks hanged at Newgate
• 1886: John W. Kelliher lynched in Becker County, Minnesota
• 1977: Jerome Carrein, the second-last in France
• 1954: George Robertson, the last hanged in Edinburgh
• 1786: David Nelson, but not William Horbord
• 1989: Sean Patrick Flanagan, self-hating gay man
• 1592: Roger Ashton
• Unspecified Year: Justine Moritz, Frankenstein family servant