The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  By the late 1650s, England had grown tired of witch hunting, Puritans and Oliver Cromwell’s brand of law and order. Cromwell himself died in 1658 and Richard Cromwell, his son and heir, known even to his father as ‘Tumble Down Dick’ was unable to hold the Puritan government together. In 1660, King Charles II was recalled from exile and meekly handed his late father’s crown. Being a fun-loving sort of guy himself, Charles repealed the Puritanical laws against gambling, drinking, dancing and general merry-making. He also had the rotting bodies of Cromwell and his cohorts exhumed and hanged as an example to others who might feel the urge to chop off a monarch’s head. In a move toward religious tolerance, he severely limited the power of courts to try people on charges of blasphemy, heresy and other religious offences. The British court system in general, however, was still weighted heavily against anyone brought before the bar. Defendants were not permitted to present witnesses on their behalf nor have counsel to represent them – that was supposed to be the judge’s job – and only the crown had a prosecutor to plead its case. Unfortunately, in far too many instances the judge did little more than bolster the case for the prosecution.

  All too aware that the cards were stacked against the accused, juries often leaned as far in the defendant’s favour as the court leaned toward their conviction. To prevent conviction, and the subsequent imposition of some unspeakably nasty punishment of a defendant, juries were likely to massively underrate the seriousness of a crime or the value of goods stolen in a robbery. Perjury, it seems, became a full-time profession with professional ‘witnesses’ and jurors vying to sell their services and testimony to the highest bidder. Known as ‘Straw Men’ these paid, expert witnesses wandered up and down in front of courthouses with bits of straw tucked into their shoe buckle – a subtle but easily recognisable form of advertising. Naturally, judges were well aware of such goings on, and were quick to sequester juries and threaten them with incarceration and starvation if they returned a verdict not to the court’s liking. This process of brow beating juries into cooperation reached its height during the short-lived reign of James II, Charles II’s younger brother, who ruled between 1685 and 1688. James’ court system, along with much of the government, was run by Judge George Jeffreys. The best description of the horrible Jeffreys came from the late King Charles, who had once said the judge possessed: ‘no learning, no sense, no manners and more impudence than ten whores’. King James, on the other hand, loved him.

  Like a scene from some cheap horror movie, Jeffreys draped the walls of his courtroom with scarlet tapestries and accepted only one plea: ‘guilty’. Anything else was a complete waste of the court’s precious time. Even minor offences brought horrific punishments. Anyone foolish enough to stand up to Judge Jeffreys went to the block. Anyone impious enough to disagree with King James was sent down to Jeffreys, who sent them to the block. Anyone accused of petty crime would inevitably meet the hangman. When Jeffreys sentenced Sir Thomas Armstrong to the block without the benefit of trial, Armstrong demanded his right to due process. Jeffreys snapped back: ‘Then that you shall have, by the Grace of God.’ Turning to his bailiff he added: ‘See that [the] execution be done on next Friday following the trial’. When the handsome and popular young Duke of Monmouth accused King James of poisoning King Charles to grab the throne, Jeffreys went after Monmouth and his supporters, hunting them down and dispatching them to the noose or block by the hundreds.

  At 10 a.m. on 15 July 1685, an armed guard escorted the Duke of Monmouth from the Tower to Tower Hill where he was to mount a scaffold draped in black bunting especially for the occasion. Along the route, more than 3,000 of the young duke’s supporters had gathered to witness the grisly spectacle. So fearful was the king of an attempt to rescue his nephew that he had ordered the guard to shoot Monmouth dead if there were any disturbances in the crowd before the execution was complete. For a man about to die, the duke’s manner was unnervingly calm and composed. When the entourage mounted the scaffold, the two bishops who accompanied the condemned man began a prayer. Although Monmouth dutifully repeated their words, he refused to pray for the salvation of the king, only muttering ‘amen’ when they had finished. In a break with established custom, he refused to make a final speech, handing a prepared statement to one of the bishops to read to the crowd. As he approached the block, he also refused the customary blindfold.

  Before kneeling to place his head on the block, Monmouth calmly bent down and pulled the executioner’s axe from under a pile of straw. Lifting it up, he ran his finger along the edge and turned to the headsman, the notorious Jack Ketch, asking if he thought it was sharp enough to do the job properly. Staring at his victim with disbelief, Ketch was even more astonished when Monmouth handed him the exorbitant sum of 6 guineas, saying: ‘Pray, do your business well. Do not serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; if you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir.’ He then turned to one of his servants and told him that if Ketch did a clean job he was to receive six more guineas. With that, he knelt down and placed his head on the block.

  Ketch, unnerved by Monmouth’s calmness and casual attitude, completely bungled the job. When the first blow only grazed the back of the duke’s head, he turned his blood-covered face upward, staring directly into Ketch’s eyes. Two more blows had still not finished the horrid job and in anger and frustration Ketch threw down the axe, declaring that he would pay 40 guineas to anyone in the angry crowd who could do the job better. It was only when the Sheriff of Middlesex, who was standing on the platform, demanded that Ketch finish his job or be killed on the spot, that he retrieved the axe and struck another ill-aimed blow. According to an eyewitness, ‘the butcherly dog did so barbarously act his part that he could not, at five strokes sever the head from the body’. Finally, in exasperation, Ketch used his belt knife to sever the duke’s head from his body and put the condemned man out of his misery.

  By now, the crowd’s anger had turned to fury. Their young hero had been butchered. Pushing and shoving their way past the ring of guards, they stormed the scaffold, dragging Jack Ketch to the ground, threatening to tear him limb from limb. Before the guards could control the situation and rescue the executioner, dozens of people had dipped their handkerchiefs in Monmouth’s blood as though he were a holy martyr to the Protestant cause. To make the already grotesque situation even worse, Monmouth’s family now realised that the duke had never had his portrait painted. After retrieving the body, they had the head sewn back on the stump and propped up long enough for an artist’s rendering to be made. Only then was the body returned to the Tower of London for burial in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula.

  When a man named Titus Oates was arrested on charges of perjury in the summer of 1685, Jeffreys sentenced him to be paraded around the courts of Westminster and the Royal Exchange with a placard around his neck describing his crime. Then he was flogged through the streets from Newgate Prison to Tyburn. As if this weren’t enough, on every 9 August, for the rest of his life, Oates was to be locked in the pillory at Westminster; on every subsequent 10 August he was to be pilloried at Charing Cross and on 24 April at Tyburn.

  In mid-December of that same year, Jeffreys passed sentence on a woman convicted of petty theft. As she was hauled from the court, Jeffreys addressed the executioner who was about to lead her to Tyburn. ‘Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man; scourge her till the blood runs down. Tis Christmas, and a cold time for madame to strip; see that you warm her shoulders thoroughly.’ For such gross judicial misconduct the king rewarded Jeffreys with the title of baron, a seat in the House of Lords and the post of Lord Chancellor. By 1688 it had all become too much for Parliament to bear. King James was ousted from the throne and George Jeffreys was clapped in the Tower of London. A few months before he drank himself to death the following year, Jeffreys made a telling comment about justice under King James II. Defending his own reign of terror, Jeffreys said: ‘I was not
half bloody enough for him who sent me hither.’

  When James was replaced on the throne of England by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, the dual monarchs took the first, tentative steps on the long road to judicial reform. Many of the cruellest forms of corporal punishment were outlawed and at least reasonable proof was required before a person could be sentenced to the gallows. Tragically, leniency, like severity, did nothing to deter criminals from committing crimes, and public humiliation still retained an important role in setting an example as to the cost of transgression.

  The English legal system, along with all its flaws, was carried to the American Colonies by those who left the mother country to build a new life in the New World. Because so many of those who settled in the New England colonies were adherents to the severe, Puritanical belief system that dominated England in the 1600s, the laws in that region dealing with morals, Godliness and, not surprisingly, witchcraft, were more stringent than they were in the more southerly colonies of Virginia and the Carolinas. Although the immigrants insisted they fled Britain and Europe to escape religious persecution, the religious freedom they sought was only to extend as far as their own small group; those of other beliefs were hounded and tortured mercilessly. When Quakers moved into Massachusetts and settled beside the Puritans, they were welcomed as warmly as the Conversos and Moriscos were in inquisitional Spain.

  Burning a hole through the tongue.

  When a Quaker named William Bond was arrested for his faith he was, according to an account written down in 1703 and purportedly taken from a deposition made by Bond’s jailer:

  put in irons, neck and heels … and so kept in irons for the space of sixteen hours … and all this without meat, whilst his back was torn with whipping … yet [the jailer] laid on him with a pitched rope twenty blows over his back and arms, with as much force as he could drive, so that with the fierceness of the blows the rope untwisted and [the jailer’s] arms were swollen with [the effort] … presently the jailer … got a new rope [and] gave [Bond’s] broken, bruised and weak body fourscore and seventeen [ninety-seven] blows more, foaming at the mouth like a madman … he gave him in all 117 blows with a pitched rope, so that his flesh was beaten black, and as into jelly, and under his arms the bruised flesh and blood hung down, clotted as it were, in bags.

  In seventeenth-century Massachusetts (which was a particular stronghold of Puritanical faith) idolatry, blasphemy and adultery were all punishable by death. Anyone in Massachusetts who denied the existence of God was subject to having a hole bored through their tongue with a hot iron and even such trivial transgressions as smoking tobacco and wearing unseemly clothes could lead to a fine and turn in the stocks or pillory. When a certain sea captain named Kimble returned from a three-year voyage he was immediately arrested and clapped in the stocks for being so lewd as to kiss his wife on the doorstep of their home: they were outside, so the kiss had been public and, to compound the offence, it had taken place on a Sunday. But all these things are trivial when compared to what happened in the sleepy village of Salem, Massachusetts in the spring of 1692.

  The affair that came to be known as the Salem Witch Trials began when two bored, nasty-minded teenage girls accused the local minister’s West Indian slave of being a witch. They posed in grotesque positions, made ugly faces, jerked and twitched and swore up and down it was all Tituba’s fault. It got the adults’ attention and probably seemed like fun. Soon eight of the girls’ friends were imitating their posturing and pointing fingers at several other old women in the village. It might have gone no further than that, but when the girls’ accusations were backed up by one of their mothers, a member of the prominent Putnam family, it all got completely out of hand. Now the centre of attention and being pressed for details, the girls’ well-rehearsed performances soon had their mothers convinced that they, too, had seen witches flying across the sky on broomsticks. Obviously the girls could not admit they had been lying all along, so they kept accusing more and more people of being witches and the accused were rounded up and locked in chains.

  Word of such accusations spreads quickly and it was only a matter of weeks before Massachusetts Governor Phips had appointed well-known Puritan fanatic Cotton Mather to assemble a special court of enquiry. Mather and three close friends sat on the five-judge panel which was headed by one of the most rabidly superstitious witch hunters in history, William Stoughton. The only member of the court not among Mather’s cronies was Nathaniel Saltonstall and after only a few sessions he walked away in disgust at the way the proceedings were being handled.

  This illustration by Howard Pyle shows the arrest of an old woman in Salem Massachusetts on the charges of witchcraft. It was the result of an hysteria which swept through the small community like the plague and left a legendary trail of destruction in its wake.

  By the time the court convened, more than 100 people had been arrested and incarcerated on charges of witchcraft; among them were Sarah Good and her four-year-old daughter Dorcas. They were thrown into a tiny cell together and the young girl (Dorcas) was chained to a wall – possibly because she was small enough to slip between the narrow gaps between the bars of the cell.

  Another was eighty-year-old John Proctor who had been arrested because he dared protest the entire proceeding; if he denied that the accused were witches he must also be a witch. Bravely, Proctor refused to enter any plea to the absurd charges and was sentenced to the gallows. Another man who refused to plea was Giles Corey. Corey refused to answer any plea – either guilty or not guilty. The prosecutors were determined to make him talk. So in an effort to force him to confess, Corey was pressed to death under an old door on which more and more stones were heaped. Periodically he would be asked whether he was ready to enter a plea, but with utter contempt, he merely replied ‘… more weight …’ And so more weight was added until Corey’s old ribs eventually shattered.

  The trials dragged on from mid-June through most of September and before they were over, nineteen women and one man had been hanged, and four women had died in prison. Four-year-old Dorcas Good, whose mother had been hanged, went insane and never recovered. Two dogs were also hanged, having been convicted of being witches’ familiars.

  The story of Salem is similar to those in Ellwangen, Germany and Essex, England with one notable exception. None of those accused of witchcraft, with the notable and tragic exception of Giles Corey, were tortured into making a confession. They were undoubtedly badly treated and poorly housed, but they were not beaten, pricked, starved, racked, or subjected to any of the other tortures previously associated with witch hunts in Great Britain and Europe. There was also a considerable, and immediate, backlash against what happened in Salem. Cotton Mather’s own father, Increase Mather, denounced the court in a pamphlet entitled ‘Cases of Conscience’, wherein he said: ‘It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned’. Massachusetts minister John Hale had a similar reaction. ‘It can not be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small [a] compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil’s lap at once.’ Thanks to the public outcry, the remaining women awaiting trial were released in January 1693 and by the middle of that month the General Court of Massachusetts ordered a day of fasting, prayer and soul-searching in memory of what had taken place at Salem. In 1702 the proceedings of the special court at Salem were declared unlawful and four years later, Ann Putnam Jr, one of the girls who had instigated the hysteria, publicly apologised for the suffering she had caused a decade earlier. Half a century later, Salem was officially renamed Danvers.

  This seventeenth-century piece comes from a castle in Emilia and has been in a private collection in Italy since 1978. It currently resides in the Museum of Medieval Torture in San Gimignano, Italy. The victim who would be forced to sit in this chair would suffer horribly from the first instance. Their suffering would be worsened as the spiked panel covering the shins was tightened. Many of these chairs had spiked iron
seats so that braziers of hot coals could be placed beneath it to contribute to the victim’s agony.

  The case of Salem, Massachusetts may have been the first instance in which individual reason actually helped halt the public insanity of a witch hunt, but it is important to note that there have always been a few brave souls willing to risk the noose or the stake to stand in opposition to accusations of witchcraft and the torture associated with this, and most other crimes. As early as 1563, Dr Johann Weyer, physician to the Duke of Cleves (who was, in turn, the nephew of Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves) wrote a treatise entitled ‘To Prevent a Shipwreck of Souls’, in which he said:

  these wretched women, whose minds have already been disturbed by the delusions and arts of the devil and are now upset by frequent torture, are kept in prolonged solitude in the squalor and darkness of their dungeons, exposed to the hideous specters of the devil, and constantly dragged out to undergo atrocious torment until they would gladly exchange at any moment their most bitter existence for death, are willing to confess whatever crimes are suggested to them rather than be thrust back into their hideous dungeons amid ever-recurring torture.

  Nearly a century later, Lutheran minister Johann Faber of Esslingen, Germany wrote that the ‘almost inhuman practice of torture might force even the innocent to confess …’