The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  Torment or question, which is used by the order of the civil law and custom of other countries, to put a malefactor to excessive pain, to make him confess of himself, or of his fellows or accomplices, is not used in England … [as] the nature of our country is free … and beatings, servitude, servile torment and punishment it will not abide.

  Sir Thomas wrote this – undoubtedly in all honesty – despite the fact that at no time, nor in any place, in history has torture been more commonly in use than in sixteenth-century England. So how did it come to pass that a long string of English monarchs, and their governments, tortured their subjects while steadfastly denying that they did so? Simple. Torture was only allowed when the reigning monarch approved of it and since monarchs were technically above the law, their word superseded any and all written laws. An interesting example of how one man tried to overcome this technical ‘glitch’ in English law, and at the same time foil his torturer, took place during the reign of King Charles I (1625–49).

  In April, 1628, John Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham to death, was arrested and, as the English politely put it, ‘put to the question’. There was no doubt of Felton’s guilt; he committed the act in full view of a large crowd which subdued him after the murder and held him until he could be formally arrested. The question facing the court was whether or not Felton had acted alone or as part of a larger conspiracy. As was usual in such cases, the court assumed that while Felton had acted alone in carrying out the deed, he must have had help in the planning. During his initial questioning by the Earl of Dorset, Felton was threatened with the rack unless he named his accomplices. Felton then told the Earl: ‘I do not believe, my Lord, that it is the King’s wish for he is a just and gracious prince and will not have his subjects to be tortured against the law.’ Then, with more courage than most people could have mustered in his tenuous situation, he added: ‘Yet this I must tell you, by the way, that if I be put upon the rack, I will accuse you, my Lord Dorset, and none but yourself as my accomplice.’ Obviously Dorset was faced with a terrifying dilemma; confessions under torture were accepted as absolute truth and he had no desire to join Felton in his meeting with the executioner. Still, he approached King Charles who immediately grasped the situation and ordered Felton to be ‘tortured to the furthest extent allowed by law’. Since His Majesty had not specifically approved of torture, the matter was referred to a panel of twelve jurists who ruled: ‘Felton ought not by the law to be tortured on the rack, for no such punishment is known or allowed by our law’. Felton had pointed out one of the great fallacies of life in Merry Old England and saved himself from a horrible torture but it did not save his life. On 28 November 1628 he was hanged for his crime.

  Despite the fact that it was useless in discovering the truth, torture nearly always loosened people’s tongues. The side effect this process may have had on a person accused of committing a criminal act, or even a perfectly innocent bystander who might have information concerning some crime, was completely irrelevant. It is results that count. What the ancient and medieval torture masters may have been unaware of is how the psychology behind the process of torture actually works. As we have already seen, one of the first steps in convincing a prospective victim to talk is to show them the instruments with which they will be tormented. This, along with the actual process of torture, and the fact that the presiding authority – be it a civil judge or a clergyman of the Inquisition – always remains one step removed from the application of torture, have become recognised as integral parts of what has become known as the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Named for a hostage situation which took place in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973, when two bank robbers held four people hostage for a period of six days, the Stockholm Syndrome has identified the process by which an individual’s will is broken down to the point whereby the victims come to cooperate with their captors. This process involves two distinct steps, the first of which rearranges the normal mind-set of the prisoner as follows:

  The captive comes to believe that escape is impossible and they are made to believe – rightly or wrongly – that their survival depends on the whims of their captors.

  The captor gains the confidence of their captive by showing them small, often irrelevant acts of kindness.

  The prisoner is kept isolated from all contact with the outside world.

  Once the victim has been sufficiently disoriented and realises that their life depends on the good graces of their tormentor, they are subjected to the next level of the interrogation process; the one intended to make them confess or provide whatever information their captors desire.

  The victim is subjected to physical (or sometimes sexual) abuse, thus making them feel still more vulnerable.

  The captive is deprived of a proper sense of time and place; usually by keeping them in a dark dungeon or cell.

  The victim is deprived of privacy. Their guards can walk in on them at any moment for whatever reason.

  The prisoner is only fed and given water when, and if, their captor feels like it.

  Thus having lost all sense of control over their own life, the prisoner is kept in these conditions and tortured at unpredictable intervals. Always standing off to one side, ready to listen to their ‘confession’ is the person who controls both the prisoner and the torture masters. This individual is not only the source of all pain, but also the only means through which the pain can be made to stop. As soon as the victim is willing to answer the inquisitor’s questions, the torture master will be told to stop inflicting pain.

  By slowly building on this process, from capture through imprisonment and being shown the process by which a person’s body will be slowly crushed, burned, boiled or torn to shreds, it is often unnecessary to actually subject the victim to torture. Their fear does what it might, theoretically, be impossible for the torture master to do. A personal account of how this process works comes to us from the journal of Fr. John Gerard, a Jesuit priest who was arrested as a subversive in 1605 in connection with Guy Fawkes’ failed gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill the entire government of England and the royal family of King James I. It was not Gerard’s first brush with the law; in 1597 he had been arrested on similar charges during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, so he was already familiar with the official interrogation process. His description of how suspects were first encouraged to tell what they knew is one of the best surviving first-hand accounts of the torture chamber in the Tower of London during that era.

  This image depicts the interior of a late medieval torture chamber. Tortures of the rack, the pulley, the stocks, the funnel, and the bilboes are visible among other objects. This is probably intended to depict an Inquisition chamber owing to the two prominent crucifixes on display and the ledger for recording confessions.

  We went to the torture room in a kind of solemn procession, the guards walking ahead with lighted candles. The chamber was underground and dark, particularly near the entrance. It was a vast shadowy place and every device and instrument of human torture was there. They pointed out some of them to me and said that I [w]ould have to taste of them. Then they asked me again if I would confess. ‘I cannot’, I said.

  For his obstinacy, Father Gerard was racked and tortured but he managed to escape and make his way to the safety of the continent.

  Some implements of torture. Both commonplace and exotic, these inert objects seem impotent in their state of disuse. Clockwise from top left we can see what appear to be a flail or scourge, a ‘cat’s paw’, a chastity belt (upside down) a dismembering axe, funnels, rope, shackles, pincers, knee splitter, shears, a spiked ball and chain, galley shackles, and a spiked belt or barbed flail.

  Only five years after Father Gerard’s adventure, King Henry IV of France was murdered by a man named François Ravaillac. Like his predecessors, Felton and Gerard, Ravaillac was automatically assumed to be a part of a larger conspiracy. In this case, however, Ravaillac was tried and sentenced to death before the names of his suspected accomplices were tort
ured out of him. As he was already condemned to death, he had no hope that naming his associates would spare him from execution. Lacking any incentive to speak, the only reasonable course of action was to subject him to enough pain to loosen his tongue. Despite swearing before the court that he had acted alone, Ravaillac was taken to the torture chamber and subjected to a torture known as the ‘brodequin’ – an excruciating procedure where heavy wooden wedges were driven into the muscles of the legs with mallets. According to the records of the court, when the second wedge was driven into place, Ravaillac screamed: ‘I am a sinner, I know no more than I have declared, by the oath I have taken, and by the truth I owe to God and the court: all I have said was to the little Franciscan [Priest, in the confessional], which I have already declared… I beseech the court not to drive my soul to despair.’ The torture continued, but Ravaillac steadfastly insisted he had acted alone. Finally, too crippled to walk to his execution, François Ravaillac was put to death for the crime of regicide.

  This scene depicts the torture of peine forte et dure. The victim is forced to lie across a sharp rigid edge which is placed just below his shoulder blades. A board is then placed upon his chest and more and more weight is added until he tells his torturers what they wish to hear. Note also the chap in the background with his feet in the stocks or inversion chair – perhaps awaiting his turn under the crushing weights.

  Once the process of actual, physical torture had begun, only those with an unimaginably strong will, the deranged mind of a fanatic, or a masochist who enjoyed becoming a martyr to their particular cause, could prevent themselves from admitting to anything the inquisitor wanted to hear. In societies where torture was routine, everyone knew that if arrested they would, sooner or later, confess. When Baron Scanaw was arrested in the mid-sixteenth century, in Bohemia, on charges of heresy, he was told that if he did not willingly offer up the names of his confederates he would be racked until he decided to talk. When the guards came to haul Scanaw to the torture chamber they found that he had cut out his own tongue. Beside his unconscious body was a note which read: ‘I did this extraordinary action because I would not, by any means, or any tortures, be brought to accuse myself, or others, as I might, through the excruciating torments of the rack, be impelled to utter falsehoods.’ The brave Scanaw might have saved his friends from meeting a similar fate, but he could not save himself. Since he could no longer talk, he was simply racked to death.

  One of the simplest, and most bizarre, forms of torture designed specifically to induce a suspect to talk was that of ‘pressing’. According to medieval and renaissance law, a suspect could only be properly tried if they openly confessed to their crime. Instances where prisoners refused to enter a plea were particularly galling because only once they admitted their guilt could their property be confiscated by the state. If they simply refused to plea, there was always enough possibility of innocence that their property would pass on to their legitimate heir. For the government to get as much satisfaction (and profit) as possible out of executing an enemy, they must confess their guilt. To this end the practice of pressing was introduced. It was extremely simple. A subject was laid on the floor of their cell or the torture chamber, a door was laid on top of them and more and more stones (or other weights) were piled on top of the door. In less than a minute breathing became difficult, then nearly impossible. As this was specifically a torture of inducement, the weight was increased very slowly: if the victim died before confessing, their estate remained in the family. Smothering is a terrible death and only the strongest willed could withstand both the crushing weight, the inability to breathe and the sure knowledge that all they had to do to make it all go away was talk. The last recorded case of pressing to extract a confession took place during the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials in 1692; in that case, like so many others before it, the victim chose not to confess to a crime of which they were wholly innocent.

  No matter how effective, or ineffectual, torture might be at making a person confess their guilt or betray their accomplices, real or imagined, torture when used as a means of punishment was guaranteed 100 per cent effective. It may not have deterred other criminals, slowed a constantly rising crime rate or even reformed the person being punished, but it was completely effective in the sense that punishment had been extracted as prescribed by law and, in almost every case, the punishment had been carried out in full view of a public who demanded constant reassurance that their government was ‘getting tough on crime’.

  Defining precisely which forms of punishment qualify as torture, and which do not, is slightly more problematic than when dealing with torture as a means of extracting a confession or information. Any time information is forcibly extracted from a prisoner there is a high probability that some form of torture has been involved because the innocent have no information to give and the guilty are unlikely to willingly offer whatever information they possess. Punishment, on the other hand, by its very nature, implies that the convict is being disciplined to some greater, or lesser, extent; the degree of punishment being determined by the severity of the crime. No matter what the crime, when the rules of the society in question have been broken, some form of retribution must be exacted if the law of the land is to be satisfied and the public is going to be reassured that their government is doing its job. Failure to follow this simple concept would lead to a state of chaos and, inevitably, to the collapse of society.

  So when does punishment become torture? Undoubtedly, when a convict is executed slowly and in an excruciatingly painful manner, it is safe to say that they are being tortured to death. Whether lesser punishments can be legitimately considered torture can only be judged by the prevailing mores of the society. In the ancient world, where life was harsh and brutal even in its quietest moments, there were only three primary kinds of punishments: whippings, imposed for minor crimes; ‘an eye for an eye’ retributionary punishments for more serious, but not capital, crimes and finally, at the top of the list, execution. Since petty crime is always more prevalent than serious crime, whippings were the most common form of punishment meted out in almost all ancient societies. Whether the whipping was inflicted with a stick, a heavy rod, a simple leather whip or a cat-o-nine tails with sharp slivers of metal braided into the thongs, were determined by the seriousness of the crime and how brutal the standards of the society were.

  Here we see a public flogging taking place. This would have been a fairly commonplace scene throughout Europe until well into the eighteenth century. The victim here (apparently a woman) is being flogged with bundles of sticks (although being hung by the wrists is certainly unpleasant enough). It could well be that the man flogging her is in fact her husband and that he was legally entitled to this recourse for her shrewish behaviour or infidelity, but only if the flogging was administered publicly.

  Hand-in-hand with the concept of whippings and other minor, public punishments was the concept of shame and humiliation which inevitably accompanied the punishment. The whole concept of shame has virtually disappeared from modern society, due largely to the anonymity of overpopulated cities and the breakdown of community and family life. Things were different in the past. Small communities, where everyone knows everyone else and knows all about their business, are a perfect platform for imposing soul-crushing levels of shame. In the tiny, isolated communities that existed from the dawn of civilization through the late eighteenth century, when friends, neighbours and family refuse to talk to, or do business with, someone who had stepped beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour, it was a truly shattering experience. Add to this the fact that the offender had been whipped, or otherwise punished, in full view of the entire community and they would have probably been more than happy to exchange the experience for a few months in a nice gloomy prison where they could suffer in private.

  As was true with minor crimes, the punishment for more serious offences was determined largely by how civilised, or how barbaric, the individual society happened to be. The time period in whic
h the society existed had surprisingly little to do with how ‘civilised’ the punishments were. As we shall discover in the next section of this book, ancient Egypt was fairly civilised but 4,000 or 5,000 years later the punishments imposed during the Dark Ages and early medieval period were unbelievably horrific. Branding, dismemberment, scalping, ripping tongues out by their roots, throwing people from cliffs, skinning them alive and ripping their entrails from their still-living bodies were all commonly imposed punishments used in early European societies. So why did society seemingly deteriorate? In reality, it did not deteriorate at all. As we saw earlier, stable societies are less likely to fall victim to the paranoia that creates brutal punishments than are unstable societies. The Egyptians had a stable, well-organised society ruled by an ancient system of royalty and priests who were not in constant fear of being toppled. The societies of the dark and early Middle Ages, on the other hand, were tremendously unstable and tended to be led by whichever warrior had the biggest sword at the time. To such fearful leaders every lawbreaker offered a perfect opportunity to set an unmistakable example. As late as the Renaissance, punishment throughout Europe was at least as brutal as it had been under the yoke of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. A single example should serve to illustrate this point.

  These ankle restraints are from the eighteenth or nineteenth century when somewhat more humanitarian concerns affected attitudes towards imprisonment or incarceration. These have obviously been designed for prolonged use as they have been shaped to make them more comfortable and less irritating, and yet maintain restraint.