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Good morning. A Welsh drama group make their final appearance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe today. Their play tells the story of Richard Lewis, also known as Dic Penderyn. The young miner was convicted of wounding a soldier during the Merthyr Rising of 1831, a key event in the struggle for political reform and against poverty.

Someone in authority decided that at least one of the rebels must die, and at 8 in the morning on 13th August - a hundred and ninety-one years ago today – Lewis was hanged outside Cardiff jail, despite much unease at the verdict, high profile interventions from public figures, and a petition with more than 11,000 signatures. Years later, one witness admitted lying under oath, and the man who’d wielded the blade, confessed on his own death bed.

Richard Lewis’s last words were: ‘O Lord, here is iniquity’, and the play is named Iniquity. The plain injustice screams still. In the past seven years, two petitions calling for a posthumous pardon have been delivered to Parliament, and a fresh one is in circulation.

What’s the point? It all happened so long ago, countless millions have suffered terrible injustice since, and we don’t even know their names. True. But we do know this man’s name and what he was striving for, and he’s rightly honoured.

Christian churches have always looked to those who’ve been martyred directly because they stood for Jesus Christ and followed his way; and they’ve drawn strength and inspiration from their witness. I know how challenging and humbling it can be to meet believers who’ve paid a heavy price for remaining faithful under repressive regimes: they’ve proclaimed and lived out their faith when expediency might have counselled silence. ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of right,’ taught Jesus, ‘the kingdom of heaven is theirs.’

But persecution ‘for the cause of right’ is not confined to members of any one religious community. It’s the experience of people of all faiths and none who stand for justice, make peace, share what they have with suffering communities and often share the pain too when they themselves are regarded as dangerously subversive. It’s right to remember such people, and go on allowing ourselves to be challenged by their stories, and their vision of what the world could look like.

Richard Lewis’s story is far from unique. Jesus Christ was also executed on trumped-up charges which served powerful political interests. There are too many parallels today – and not only among the regimes widely denounced as tyrannical. Iniquity might be a very old-fashioned word for gross injustice and plain wickedness. But it’s not hard to recognise, and it still needs to be called out, and its victims listened to.

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