In the days just before his execution in 1615, a Scots Jesuit penned an account of his ordeal that was smuggled out of his Glasgow prison, page by page, and told his story of betrayal, torture, hope, humor, and forgiveness.

"Hand these documents to the Rector of the first Jesuit College you come to, and ask him to send correctly made copies to Aquaviva, and to pray for me. The danger of being caught writing does not allow me ... to go into details." So begins John Ogilvie's "Relatio," the brief account of his imprisonment in Glasgow in 1615. Shackled in his cell, he wrote the account day by day, slipping the pages under the door to people visiting other prisoners, who in turn smuggled them out. Eventually the pages did find their way into the hands of the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Claudio Aquaviva -- but not before Ogilvie had been hanged.

Born a Calvinist in Scotland in 1579, John Ogilvie converted to Catholicism while studying abroad, became a Jesuit in 1599, and returned to his homeland to serve fellow Catholics in 1613. King James I's persecution of Catholics resulted in Ogilvie's torture and hanging in Glasgow Cross in 1615, a public square dominated by Tolbooth Steeple. Illustration courtesy of James Conlin.

Who was this man who willingly gave up his life in his mid thirties rather than abjure his faith? Like many youth during the time of the English persecution of Catholics -- first under Queen Elizabeth I and then under her successor, James I -- he received most of his early education in Belgium. The rector of the Scots College in Louvain was himself a Jesuit, and Ogilvie's uncle on his mother's side was also a Jesuit-so it is not surprising that, after his early conversion from Calvinism, he too decided to enter the Society. He made his novitiate in the same Jesuit college in Bohemia where, 25 years before, the English martyr Edmund Campion had been a novice.

A few years after his ordination, Ogilvie returned to his native land, where he celebrated mass in secret and reconciled lapsed Catholics to the Church. Following a brief return to the Continent, he entered Scotland again, disguised as a horse dealer. Because the Protestant authorities were on watch for priests, disguises were an accepted necessity; Campion had arrived in England as a jewelry merchant. And like Campion, Ogilvie had barely a year of ministry before his arrest in Glasgow. It is at this point that his narrative begins.

It opens with a description of his betrayal to the authorities by a man pretending to desire reconciliation with the Church. At the man's prearranged signal while he stood talking with Ogilvie in the street, officers forced Ogilvie to the nearby house of the local magistrate. Hearing of the arrest of a priest, the Protestant archbishop of Glasgow hurried over and, striking him on the face, said: "You are an over insolent fellow to say your Masses in a reformed city." Not one to be easily cowed, Ogilvie replied: "You do not act like a Bishop, but an executioner in striking me" -- a response that presaged his eventual end.

Ogilvie's curt answer to the archbishop ignited the anger of others in the room. As Ogilvie describes the scene, "They shower their blows from all sides upon me, the hair is plucked from my beard, my face is torn with their nails." His attackers then stripped him in search of incriminating possessions; besides a breviary, they found a small reliquary. But discovering articles like these and others in the inn where he had been staying (including a relic of St. Ignatius) did not necessarily prove that he had celebrated mass on Scottish soil-a treasonable offense. The discovery, however, together with the issue of the pope's spiritual jurisdiction in religious matters, was the basis of most of the questioning that began at the episcopal palace the following morning, while he was still "ill ... from the blows of the previous day, with an unusual trembling still upon me."

The trembling was also from the cold. At length he was allowed to warm himself at a fireplace. A hostile highlander, observing his shivering, angrily remarked: "If it were not for the respect I have for ... the Episcopal Palace, I would send you straightaway into the burning fire." To this Ogilvie cheerfully rejoined: "If you should decide to put me into the fire, it could never happen more conveniently than now, for I am very cold." Even under such adverse circumstances, he was able to maintain a sense of humor that caused others in the room to laugh at the highlander's expense. During the periods between the daily interrogations, he describes himself as being "fastened with two rings about a lump of iron of about two hundred pounds, shaped like a pole, so that I could only sit and lie on my back."

Scholar, martyr, saint-Edmund Campion was another Jesuit of the period who paid the ultimate price in England, his homeland, for refusing to abjure his faith. He was tortured and hanged in London in 1581. He and Ogilvie are among 24 Jesuit martyrs of England, Scotland, and Wales.

In time, a letter came from the government ordering that Ogilvie be transported to Edinburgh for further questioning. When he was taken out into the street, a group-relatives of the other Catholic prisoners in Glasgow-awaited him, angered by a rumor put forth by the authorities that Ogilvie had incriminated their loved ones in his testimony. Of this encounter outside the prison, he says: "Whilst I am being led through the crowd of friends and wives of the condemned, I am greeted with mud, snow and curses." One woman, the mother of Robert Heygate-a Catholic initially sentenced to death-cursed "my ugly face." But instead of replying in kind, Ogilvie's gentle answer was: "The blessing of Christ on your bonnie countenance." It was this same Robert Heygate who, with fellow prisoner Robert Mayne, would later take the "Relatio" to the Continent after their death sentences were commuted.

The focus of the interrogation in Edinburgh was again on the prohibition against celebrating mass and on the supremacy of the king in spiritual and temporal matters. To the latter line of questioning, Ogilvie posed his own question by way of a rejoinder: "Whether Christ or the King is rather to be obeyed, judge you." At length, unsatisfied by his refusal to provide the answers they wanted, the examiners decided on torture. Sleep deprivation was the primary means: "For eight days and nine whole nights they forced me to keep awake with styles, pins, needles, and pinchings." As in some Latin American countries during the dictatorships of the 1970s, doctors present at Ogilvie's ordeal periodically examined him to determine how far the torture could go without causing death. Only when they agreed that he was within three hours of dying did it end. Shortly before Christmas he was taken back to Glasgow and again shackled in his cell, "fastened by both feet to my iron pole."

It is approximately at this point that Ogilvie's account ends, but the story of his last hours continues in the printed version of the "Relatio" through information provided by fellow prisoners and others present at his execution. As he was being taken to the scaffold, some of the same prisoners' relatives who had previously pelted him with mud and imprecations were on hand to witness his death. Finally aware that he had betrayed none of their loved ones, they now blessed him. On the scaffold, he embraced the hangman, saying he forgave him and bidding him to be of good heart. He knelt and began praying quietly to himself.

It was into the hands of Claudio Aquaviva, Jesuit superior general at the time, that Ogilvie's Relatio Incarcerationis, his account of his imprisonment, was delivered. The manuscript is still in the Jesuit archives in Rome.

Some sense of the sharp division of feeling between Catholics in the crowd and the officials can be seen in an incident that occurred as he rose from his prayer. Robert Scott, the Protestant minister of Glasgow, realizing that the sympathies of the crowd were shifting in favor of the condemned Jesuit, told the spectators that Ogilvie had been sentenced to death not for religion but for treason. To this Ogilvie replied, "He doeth me wrong." At this, a friend, John Abercrombie, who was also standing on the platform, said to Ogilvie, "No matter, John, the more wrongs the better"; that is, in terms of his final reward. Incensed, one of the officials shot back: "Why should a traitor like you befriend another traitor?" Abercrombie was then shoved off the platform into the crowd.

Ogilvie took the opportunity to assert -- as many English martyrs had done before him while awaiting their executions -- that he had never meant harm to the king and that he was going to his death for religion alone. Asked by another person on the platform whether he was afraid to die, he said: "In so good a cause, I am not more afraid to die than you are of the dishes when you go to supper." His final prayers, now spoken aloud, consisted of a litany of the saints, recited first in Latin and then, for the bystanders, in English. Finally the hangman toppled him from the ladder; as an act of mercy meant to shorten Ogilvie's sufferings, he went down and pulled on his legs to hasten the end. The body was buried outside the city in a place used for criminals.

Fr. George Anderson, SJ, an associate editor at America magazine. His background in prison ministry is reflected in his book With Christ in Prison: Jesuits in Jail from St. Ignatius to the Present (Fordham University Press).

With their sentences commuted to exile, Robert Heygate and John Mayne made their way to France with Ogilvie's handwritten pages. They handed them over to a Jesuit in Bordeaux who had at one time been superior of the Scottish Mission. Besides the initial cover letter, they also gave him a letter Ogilvie had written a fortnight before his execution, addressed to Fr. Albers, who had received him into the Society: "You will learn from John Mayne, the bearer of this letter, how I am situated ... I commend me to your prayers. Written from Glasgow prison in which I am loaded with 200 lbs. iron weight and where I look forward to death."

John Mayne and Robert Heygate went on to Wurzburg, where they eventually became Benedictine monks. As first-class witnesses thirteen years later, both gave testimony before the bishop of Wurzburg concerning Ogilvie's life, imprisonment, and martyrdom. Their evidence, along with that of another banished Scotsman who had known Ogilvie, coupled with the Relatio, prompted Urban VIII to order that his cause be introduced. He was beatified in 1929 and finally canonized by Paul VI in 1976.