Spain was so deathly afraid of Jose Rizal that, in snuffing out his life past 7 a.m. on 30 December 1896, it assembled several companies of soldiers, eight of which it arrayed behind his back to carry out the death sentence by firing squad.

After cutting short Rizal's trip to Cuba, where he offered to serve as a field doctor to treat Spanish soldiers trying to quell a parallel revolution there, Spain formed a kangaroo court with the sole purpose of convicting him.

The charge: Masterminding or, at the very least, inspiring the rebellion started by Gat Andres Bonifacio and his Katipunan, with the revolutionaries sometimes using Rizal's name as a password during their clandestine meetings.

Prevented from presenting his witnesses, Rizal was found guilty after a one-day trial, and on the morning of 29 December, or 24 hours before his appointed time to meet his Maker at Bagumbayan (presently the Luneta or Rizal Park), he would be informed of his sentence.

Rizal's family and Jesuit professors from the Ateneo came to snatch whatever time they could with the condemned man, thereby providing him the chance to hand to a sister his poetic masterpiece, Mi Ultimo Adios, hidden inside an alcohol burner.

Floated, too, was the off chance that the Jesuits might just convince the civil authorities to stay his execution if he would turn his back on freemasonry, return to the bosom of the Catholic Church, and retract all that he had written and said against Spain.

Indeed, a retraction would be published belatedly in a Spanish newspaper, something that Rizal's detractors would say was proof that he was a lesser hero, if he was one at all.

A forgery, perhaps? Certainly, that had been vigorously posited for decades after his death, with a handwriting expert from the National Bureau of Investigation even tasked with authenticating it, without arriving at a definitive conclusion.

Aside from the controversial retraction, it would be claimed by no less than Josephine Bracken, with whom Rizal had a stillborn child while in exile in Dapitan, that they had a Catholic wedding hours before his death. The "officiating" priest would back Bracken's claim.