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Biography

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Thomas Garnet was born in 1575 in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames opposite the City of London, into a recusant Catholic family during the penal years of Elizabeth I. His father, Richard Garnet, had been a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and had converted to Catholicism; his uncle was Henry Garnet, later superior of the Jesuits in England. In a period when the Mass was forbidden and seminary priests were liable to charges of high treason, Thomas received his early schooling at the grammar school in Horsham, Sussex. Determined on the priesthood, he left England for the Continent, studied at the Jesuit college of Saint-Omer, and then at the English College in Valladolid, Spain, where he was ordained.

He returned to England as a missionary priest in 1599 and ministered in secret among recusant Catholics. He was soon arrested and imprisoned in the Gatehouse at Westminster and afterwards in the Tower of London. In 1601 he was banished from the realm with other priests. He went to the Spanish Netherlands and entered the Society of Jesus. After Jesuit formation he returned to England in 1604 to resume clandestine pastoral work.

The Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, and the arrest and execution of his uncle Henry Garnet the following year, brought a fresh wave of searches. Thomas Garnet was taken into custody again. He was not charged with any part in the conspiracy, of which he denied knowledge, but was prosecuted under the statute that made it high treason for a priest ordained abroad to enter or remain in England. He refused the Oath of Allegiance of 1606, which many Catholics held to be incompatible with their faith. Condemned for his priesthood, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on 23 June 1608.

He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, men and women who suffered for the Catholic faith between the 1530s and the late seventeenth century. His individual feast is 23 June, the anniversary of his martyrdom; he is also commemorated with the Forty Martyrs. He is venerated as a Jesuit priest and martyr of the English Reformation.

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