The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  Precisely how many people died for the sin of holding fast to their faith during Bloody Mary’s five years on the throne is unknown. What is known is that in London alone, between 1553 and 1558, 113 men, women and children were consigned to the flames; eighty-nine of them sent there by Bishop Edmund Bonner. For his part in this crime spree, when Mary’s sister Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1558, she sent the former bishop to the Tower where he spent the ten years until his death contemplating his sins.

  When compared with the rest of her family, Elizabeth I had an amazingly enlightened outlook on how she intended to govern her kingdom. In a land exhausted by three decades of religious turmoil her first task was, obviously, to heal the festering wounds of fanaticism. In her maiden speech to Parliament, Elizabeth said: ‘There is one God and one Christ Jesus, and all the rest is a dispute over petty trifles’. Although she reverted England to the Protestant religion established by her brother, Edward, and imposed a tax on Catholics, she would not allow them to be persecuted. In an honest, and startlingly progressive, move to deal with the poverty brought on by her father’s decimation of the country and the Wars of the Roses of the previous century, she established work houses for the poor, hospitals for the ill and extended and improved the prison system. None of this is to imply that she did away with either torture or plentiful executions. Indeed, torture to collect information probably reached its height during her reign and the annual number of executions hovered around 800 per year when Elizabeth assumed the throne and climbed steadily throughout her reign. Elizabeth might well have reversed this trend despite the fact that her Privy Council, and particularly her spy master, Sir Francis Walsingham, used torture as a routine method of discovering desirable information. She might have reversed the trend, that is, had it not been for one thing: her meddlesome cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland.

  Mary, herself, was more French than Scot. Her mother was French and Mary was the widow of a French king and only returned to Scotland following her husband’s death. After the glories and grandeur of the French court, Scotland must have come as something of a shock. Hard, cold and unforgiving, Scotland bred people as tough as its climate. Brutal tortures were routine in Scotland. Thieves and forgers had their hands struck off, branding on the hands, face and body were common and whippings and scourgings were carried out for the smallest offences.

  Here we witness a victim who has been staked out and is about to be broken on the wheel. Further torments undoubtedly await this unfortunate wretch.

  One of the more decorative forms of execution popular in Scotland (as it was in France and Germany) was being ‘broken on the wheel’. The wheel in question was not the elaborate drum used by the Romans, but a simple cart wheel. The condemned was tied, spread eagle, to the wheel and his limbs and joints were then smashed with a mallet or an iron bar. Next, great pieces of flesh were torn from his body with red-hot pliers and only then was his head struck off with an ax. All of this, combined with the religious fanaticism of John Knox, head of the Scottish Presbyterian Church who openly referred to the new queen as a ‘bloody Catholic whore’, made Mary feel a little uncomfortable. All she wanted was a nice, relatively civilised country to rule – preferably one that was Catholic, or one that she could convert to Catholicism. England seemed an ideal choice. Escaping across the Scots/English border, Mary demanded that her cousin Elizabeth provide her with political refuge. Being no fool, Elizabeth complied, but the sanctuary came with a price – perpetual imprisonment. Both Elizabeth and her Privy Council knew that Mary, like her mother, Marie de Guise, was an inveterate plotter and England was full of ardent Catholics who would have loved to see the kingdom revert to the Church of Rome.

  Elizabeth’s advisors and Spy Master, Sir Francis Walsingham, begged the Queen to have Mary executed. For seventeen years they begged her, but Elizabeth had no intention of being the first monarch in modern history to order the death of another. At least not until the late summer of 1586 when Walsingham informed his queen that he had uncovered a plot by Sir Anthony Babington, a high-born English Catholic, wherein Mary had agreed to Babington’s suggestion that he and his friends kidnap and murder Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. There is little doubt that Walsingham had carefully amended Mary’s letter to make her seem more complicit than she actually was, but in the world of political manoeuvring it is results that count. Elizabeth went into the kind of rage that seems to characterise a Tudor monarch. In a letter to Walsingham, she wrote: ‘In such cases there is no middle course, we must lay aside clemency and adopt extreme measures. If they shall not seem to you to confess plainly their knowledge, then we warrant you cause them to be brought to the rack and first to move them with fear thereof … Then, should the sight of the instrument not induce them to confess, you shall cause them to be put to the rack and to find the taste thereof … until you shall see fit’. Mary was hustled into seclusion and Babington and fifteen co-conspirators were hauled to the Tower. Two were released because they were actually Walsingham’s spies but the remaining fourteen were found guilty of high treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

  Before being put to ‘the question’ the victim would be shown the various tools of their destruction. This was known as questioning in the first degree. The sight of these horrific implements and the ability of the victim’s imagination to picture their use would often be enough to elicit any cooperation that the torturers required.

  It may be an indication of the changing times that these were the first such gruesome judicial killings to be ordered during the twenty-eight years Elizabeth had so-far spent on the throne. On 20 September 1586, Babington and six of his companions were publicly executed in the manner proscribed, each one watching the others being hacked open, gutted and chopped to pieces before their own turn came. The public reaction to this grim spectacle is marginally reassuring: the crowd was appalled at the brutality of the entire affair. So was Elizabeth. The following day the remaining seven traitors were simply hanged in public. It was the last time anyone would be hanged, drawn and quartered in Great Britain. The following February Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded inside the walls of Fotheringay Castle. No members of the public were permitted entrance.

  The Babington plotters and the Scottish Queen were not the only ones to suffer under Queen Elizabeth I. Throughout her reign, the rack, the gibbet and the noose seldom stood idle and petty offenders of every type were persecuted mercilessly. Cutpurses or pick-pockets lost an ear for a first conviction, the other ear for the second, and when they ran out of ears they were hanged. Prostitutes, too, lost one ear at a time and a third offence meant the loss of their nose.

  In 1584, only two years prior to the discovery of the Babington plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, a more successful attempt was made on the life of Prince William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands. William had just successfully ousted the Spanish who had held the Dutch as virtual political and religious vassals since the beginning of the century and, in the process, made himself one of the most popular rulers in Europe. Woe-betide then, Balthazar Gerard, a fanatical Catholic, who murdered Prince William in 1584. Seized by an enraged mob even before the local guard could arrive, Gerard was beaten half to death, had salt rubbed into his cuts and wounds and wrapped in a cloak soaked in vinegar and brandy before he could be rescued and hustled off to a prison. Over the ensuing eighteen days Gerard was tortured and racked mercilessly, this punishment commencing when he was hauled onto a public scaffold only to have the hand which had struck the fatal blow thrust into a cauldron of boiling oil. Amazingly, Gerard never showed any sign of experiencing pain. The following day he was returned to the scaffold only to have the hand chopped off. Again, Gerard remained so calm that his only reaction was to kick his severed limb off the platform. For the next eleven days Gerard was publicly mutilated, the skin ripped, piece by piece from his body, with red-hot pliers. On the eighteenth day he was tied to a burning stake but instead of letting the flames do their work, after a few minutes the
fire was doused and Gerard was cut down – his flesh charred and blackened – only to be broken on the wheel, slowly, over the next six hours. Finally he was strangled to death.

  It would be nice to say that this episode ended both judicial brutality and religious conflict in Europe. The fact is, however, that at this time, and for centuries both earlier and later, religious intolerance was one of the biggest businesses in Europe; particularly in Spain, where the Holy Office of the Inquisition did its mighty best to purge the world of anyone who would not submit to its authority.

  What has become known as The Inquisition did not begin in Spain, nor was it intended as an instrument of religious and social terror. The word ‘inquisition’ simply means an official, judiciary inquiry; in this instance, an inquiry by the Roman Catholic Church into possible instances of heretical activity. As late as 1139 the only punishment sanctioned by the Church for such activities was excommunication, and it is unlikely that excommunication would have held much weight for die-hard heretics. There were instances where secular authorities, or mobs of angry Christians, killed suspected heretics but such activities were as likely to be as roundly condemned by the Church as was heresy itself. In fact, even as respected an authority as St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) said: ‘Faith is to be produced by persuasion, not imposed by force’. Somehow, this tolerant attitude began to disappear shortly after St Bernard’s death.

  This is the sort of ‘rosary’ as worn by penitents and recalcitrant sinners. Whether voluntarily adorned as a demonstration of faith or prescribed as penance for some perceived sin, this would have been worn while on pilgrimage or in a religious procession. Note the spiked chain which would have supported its weight about the neck of the devotee.

  In 1198, Pope Innocent III began exhorting his flock to seek out and destroy heretics on the grounds that heresy was as much a crime against God as treason was against the State. He did not, however, suggest that the Church should become involved in such activities; that did not take place until 1229 when Pope Gregory IX proposed the formation of a body of monks, learned in heretical matters, which he called the Inquisitores haereticae pravitatis, or Private Investigators of Heresy. Four years later, Gregory sent out letters to bishops in France informing them of the inquisition’s existence and urging them to cooperate with its work. Even at this point, however, the inquisitors had no intention – and indeed, no authority – to inflict physical damage on convicted heretics.

  Standard punishments included such humiliating penances as being forced to go on pilgrimage to a holy site or having the image of a cross sewn onto one’s gown. As soon as the condemned had recanted their sins and done appropriate penance, the stigma was rescinded and they were reunited with the Church. Only in those rare cases when the heretic refused to acknowledge the error of their ways, or when they insisted on repeating their heresies (estimated as something less than 10 per cent of those convicted on such charges) were they handed over to secular authorities for judicial trial and punishment. Even among the educated Franciscans and Dominicans who formed the new inquisitional tribunals, the question of just what constituted a punishable heresy and how severe the penance, or the recommended secular punishment, should be was a matter of great debate. Enter Bernardo Gui.

  Gui (chillingly portrayed in the film Name of the Rose by F. Murray Abraham) was a Dominican monk and inquisitor who, between 1307 and 1324, passed sentence on upward of 1,000 accused heretics and detailed his methods of examination in a 394-page tome entitled ‘The Conduct of Inquiry Concerning Heretical Depravity’. The book is divided into five chapters, the first three of which deal with procedural matters such as interrogation of prisoners and how the tribunal should be organised. The fourth is a recapping of relevant papal proclamations defining the inquisitor’s powers and the final chapter deals with what, precisely, constituted heresy at that time – at least according to Bernardo Gui. The most interesting thing about this early ecclesiastical bestseller is the way in which the inquisitorial panel is taught how to phrase the questions they put to suspected heretics. As any good trial lawyer today knows, a witness should never be allowed to get the upper hand. Questions should be designed so even one false word can make the innocent look guilty and confusion is paramount in keeping the witness off balance. This one book, as much as any other single factor, set the tone for inquisitions to come.

  While Gui was just beginning to toil away on his book, Pope Clement V was ordering the arrest and trial of the Knights Templar on charges of heresy – mostly because they were too rich and too powerful for the comfort of either the Church or the King of France. While King Philip IV of France (known as Philip the Fair), who owed a lot of money to the Templars, was arresting, torturing and burning Templars in an orgy of destruction, King Edward II of England took a more reasonable approach – he refused to cooperate. The Pope was having none of it and sent a letter to Edward in which he said: ‘We hear that you forbid torture as contrary to the laws of your land; but no state can override Canon Law, Our Law; therefore I command you at once to submit these men to torture.’ Ominously, the Holy Father added: ‘You have already imperiled your soul as a favourer of heretics.’ Reluctantly, Edward caved in and ordered the arrest of English Templars, but managed to give most of them ample warning and time to escape to the safety of Scotland.

  Here we see heretics being executed at an auto-de-fe by the Spanish inquisition. Two naked men supported on iron spikes have been or are about to be garroted, while two other heretics wearing robes and hats which indicate their offences are led away for their own executions or punishments.

  By 1401, three-quarters of a century after the destruction of the Templars, the burning of heretics had become legalised in England and an international pattern for inquisitional justice had taken shape. Suspected heretics were arrested by Church authorities and subjected to questioning by secular authorities: the Church still wanted to keep its hands clean of causing physical harm to anyone. The procedure was eminently simple. When found guilty of heresy, the head of the ecclesiastic court sentenced the condemned by saying: ‘Since the church can do nothing with a heretic of your stamp, we do hereby abandon you to the secular courts; recommending them nevertheless, as strongly as we may, according to the prescription of Canon Law, to preserve your life and limbs from the perils of death …’ Then came the clincher: ‘so long as you fully admit the charge of heresy laid against you.’ There could be no doubt that the accused would eventually confess; if they did not, they would be tortured until they did.

  When the suspect had ‘freely’ confessed their sin, they were sent back to the Church for an ecclesiastical trial, but the Church still had no power to inflict any punishment greater than excommunication. Once convicted of heresy, however, the condemned was again passed back to secular authorities where they would be tried again and (unless the court wanted to risk the wrath of Rome) end their lives tied to a stake with a pile of brushwood heaped around their feet.

  The institution of the burning post as the most popular means of dispatching unwanted heretics came about as the result of a legal opinion written by an Italian jurist named Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313–57). According to Sassoferrato, this unspeakable death was sanctioned by Christ, Himself, in the Gospel of John. In John 15:16 are the words: ‘If a man abide not in me he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them and cast them into the fires and they are burned’. The mind-set that allows Jesus’ parable of comparing non-believers to brushwood to be taken so literally is beyond modern comprehension, but the Holy Office of the Inquisition seemed all too pleased to adopt it. If nothing else, it certainly drove home the point that failure to submit to official dogma would not be tolerated under any circumstances. Whether it increased church attendance is unknown, but there is no question that it put people everywhere in fear of their lives and their immortal souls. As the penalties for (and fear of) opposing the Inquisition spread across Europe, an ever greater variety of applications were found for the heresy l
aws – particularly in multicultural Spain.

  During the High Middle ages, Spain was a fractured, polyglot society peppered with numerous small states, competing monarchs and peoples of many races and religions. Beginning in the early eighth century, much of Spain had come under the control of the Moors – Moroccans who followed the Islamic faith. Immediately, the Christian Spanish began to fight back, but it was not until 1492, when the city of Granada was reclaimed, that the Moors were finally defeated. During their more than seven centuries of occupation, the Moors had welcomed a large influx of Jews into their Spanish territories, adding to the complex cultural mix of the country. As the Moors were slowly driven from power they and the Jewish population were either expelled or forced to convert to Christianity. Naturally there was always the sneaking fear that they only pretended to convert and were really practicing their various religions in secret. Anxious to complete the process of cleansing their country of all those ‘foreigners’, as early as 1478 dual-monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella (the same ones who funded Christopher Columbus) asked Pope Sixtus IV to allow them to establish their own, home-grown, version of the Inquisition. The suggestion was probably Isabella’s and had most likely originated with her personal confessor, a fanatically xenophobic Dominican monk named Thomas de Torquemada. Bowing to the pious monarchs’ request, and the recommendations of Torquemada and the Archbishop of Seville, the Pope issued the necessary Papal Bull. The Spanish Inquisition had commenced and Thomas de Torquemada was placed at its head.