Torture has been largely used in many countries as a judicial instrument for extracting evidence from unwilling witnesses, or confessions from accused persons, and in the despotisms of the East is still so used; the callousness of torturers and tortured being almost equally remarkable. In ancient Athens slaves were regularly examined by torture. Under the Roman Republic only slaves could be tortured; under the Empire torture, besides being much used in examining slaves, was occasionally inflicted even on freemen, to extract evidence of the crime of lesa majestas. Cicero and other enlightened Romans wholly condemned its use. Until the 13th century torture seems to have been unknown to the canon law; about that period the Roman treason-law began to be adapted to heresy, the notions on which the Ordeal (q.v.) was based contributing to promote its use. At a later period torture came to be largely employed by the Inquisition, and it was only in 1816 that it was prohibited by a papal bull. Its use was universal in the witchcraft trials, and accounts for the strange uniformity in confessions.
From the civil law torture became a part of the legal system of most European countries. It was adopted early, and to a large extent, by the Italian municipalities. In Germany elaborate apparatus for its infliction existed, not merely in the dungeons of the feudal castles, but in the vaults beneath the town-halls of Nuremberg and Ratisbon. Horrible tortures were constantly inflicted in the 16th and 17th centuries; the ‘second degree’ included crushing the thumbs, feet, or head in iron apparatus, and the ‘third degree’ burning the sides, arms, and finger-nails with fire or red-hot irons and pincers. Torture continued to be practised in many of the prisons of Germany when they were visited by Howard in 1770; but in Prussia it was abolished in 1740–54, and the example of Frederick the Great contributed greatly to its final suppression. In Hanover it was not formally abolished till 1840. The torturing of prisoners was carried to a great height in the Low Countries under Philip II. Savonarola and Galileo are amongst famous men who suffered torture. In France it was part of the judicial system till 1789, and in
Scotland it was still in frequent use after the Restoration, and was only abolished in 1708. Torture in its most pitiless form was a characteristic feature of the atrocious Templar trials in France. Amongst enlightened men who denounced the worthlessness of confessions secured by torture Bayle, Thomasius, Voltaire, and Beccaria deserve mention. In Naples torture was in use in 1860.
The use of torture seems always to have been repugnant to the genius of the law of England: though occasionally used by an exercise of prerogative, it may be doubted whether it was ever recognised as lawful in the ordinary course of the administration of justice. It was employed by royal warrant in the Templar trials (1310), and we are told that till that time it was unknown in England. During the Tudor period the Council assumed the power of directing torture-warrants to the lieutenant of the Tower, and other officers, against state prisoners, and occasionally also against persons accused of other serious crimes; and similar warrants were at times issued under the sign-manual. Under James I. and Charles I. torture was less resorted to, and only in state trials. In 1628, in the case of Felton, the assassin of the Duke of Buckingham, the judges declared the examination of the accused by torture, for the purpose of discovering his accomplices, to be illegal. Torture was inflicted in England as late as 1592, in the case of the Jesuit Southwell (q.v.), in 1640 on Archer, who took part in an attack on Laud’s palace, and as late as 1646 on witches. As late as 1806 Sir Thomas Picton (q.v.) was tried for having, as governor of Trinidad, permitted a woman to be tortured under old Spanish laws. Torture is now disused in all countries of Europe, and is universally acknowledged to have been a most unsatisfactory mode of getting at the truth; often leading the innocent, from weakness, to plead guilty to crimes they had not committed.
The instruments of judicial torture have been various. The most celebrated is the Rack, the Boot, and Thumbscrew. More ingenious instruments were such as the Scavenger’s Daughter (rather ‘Skeffington’s Daughter,’ from a lieutenant of the Tower under Henry VIII.), a spiked iron frame, which closed its victim in a deadly embrace. The Peine Forte et Dure (q.v.) was a terrible form of torture. From torture for the sake of extracting evidence must be distinguished cruel punishments and modes of putting to death by lingering tortures—mutilation, breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake, disembowelling, &c. (see EXECUTION). Notable instances of such were the tortures inflicted on the murderers of James I. of Scotland in 1437; on Damiens (q.v.), the would-be assassin of Louis XV. in 1757; and on Jean Calas (q.v.) in 1762. See also FLOGGING, PILLORY, STOCKS. Prison discipline was formerly little short of torture, including the use of bilboes and other dreadfully heavy irons; as also was the management of the insane; and the school punishments of comparatively recent times would now be regarded by many as falling under the same head. Powell’s American Siberia (1892) describes a state of things in the convict-camps of the United States down till 1875 which may fairly be regarded as amounting to cruel torture—including the stringing of convicts up by their thumbs. The marvellous collection of instruments of torture (including the ‘Iron Maiden,’ resembling the ‘scavenger’s daughter’) once used with hideous effect, and long on show as curiosities in Nuremberg, was bought by Lord Shrewsbury, and exhibited in London in 1891.
See INQUISITION, and works cited; WITCHCRAFT; BOOT, RACK, THUMBSCREW; Jardine, Torture in the Crim. Law of England (1837); Lecky, Rationalism in Europe (1865); Lea, Superstition and Force (Phila. 1866; new ed. 1878).