Many Catholics will rejoice at news that a plaque has finally gone up at Oxford Castle to commemorate the life — and horrible death — of the Blessed George Napier, the missionary priest who was hanged, drawn and quartered there 400 years ago this month.

The blessing of the site of his execution — which occurred on November 9, 1610 — by the Archbishop of Birmingham, Bernard Longley, last week follows the unveiling of a plaque in 2007 at 100 Holywell Street of another plaque commemorating four other Oxford Catholic martyrs executed there in 1589: priests Richard Yaxley and George Nichols, their gentleman helper Thomas Belson, and an inn servant called Humphrey Pritchard — apparently killed simply for being a Catholic and for sheltering the priests.

The new plaque will be seen as further step towards redressing an historical imbalance in Oxford between Catholics and Protestants. After all, ever since 1841 Sir George Gilbert Scott's splendid Gothic Martyrs’ Memorial in St Giles has commemorated the Protestant martyrs, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer, burned to death during the reign of Mary I; yet until recently, nothing at all has commemorated the city’s Catholic martyrs, executed during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I.

The Blessed George Napier (sometimes called Nappe, beatified in 1929) was born at Holywell Manor, Oxford, in 1550, the son of Edward Napper, a former Fellow of All Souls. He entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as an undergraduate in 1565-6 but was ejected in 1568 for being a recusant Catholic. He attended the English College in Douai, France, in 1596 and then returned to England in 1603 as a missionary — charged with the task of helping to re-establish the Roman Catholic church here.

He was arrested in Kirtlington early in the morning of July 19, 1610, with priestly paraphernalia, including holy oils, two consecrated hosts and a small reliquary, about his person.

It was his particular misfortune to be captured only five years after the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, desperadoes who had planned to commit the most momentous act of religious terrorism in English history, namely blowing up King and Parliament, were discovered. The lantern Guy Fawkes was holding, incidentally, when apprehended in the cellars beneath Parliament on November 5, 1605, is now in the Ashmolean Museum.

Oxford had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot too, when plotters were discovered at the Catherine Wheel, a pub which formerly stood on a site now occupied by part of Balliol, and was also, interestingly enough, the scene of the arrest of the four martyrs mentioned above and executed in Holywell Street in 1589.

Oxford, unlike Cambridge, was seen as a hotbed of Catholicism in Elizabethan and early Jacobean times and it was Napier’s misfortune that the authorities decided to make an example of him as a warning to other Catholics in the city.

All the same, his friends had hopes that his sentence would be commuted to banishment; but his fate was sealed when a highwayman named Faulkner, who had been imprisoned with Napier, announced at his own execution that the priest had reconciled him to the Catholic Church. According to the 17th-century Oxford historian Anthony Wood, Napier’s “head and quarters were set upon the four gates of the city, and upon that great one belonging to Christ Church next to St Aldate’s Church,to the great terror of the Catholics who were then in and near Oxford”.

Clare Smith, the deputy headteacher of the Blessed George Napier School, in Banbury, said at the unveiling ceremony: “All the staff and students will celebrate the occasion. The whole point is to remember his life and what he did.”