TORTURE TORY. 



647 



the purpose of obtaining confessions ; but, in all its 

 applications, the practice of torture shocks every 

 principle of reason, justice, and humanity. Among 

 the Romans, slaves were tortured when their mas- 

 ters were found murdered, for instance, by being 

 stretched on a machine called equulcus ; their arms 

 and legs being tied to it with ropes, they were 

 raised upright and their limbs were stretched by 

 means of screws ; to increase the pain, pincers, fire, 

 &c., were applied to them. The belief of the mid- 

 dle ages in the immediate interference of God for 

 protection of innocence and the exposure of guilt, 

 xvhich gave rise to the ordeal, and judicial combat, 

 contributed much to extend the use of torture, by 

 inculcating the notion, that Divine Providence 

 would aid the innocent to endure pains which the 

 guilty would be unable to sustain. The church, 

 which, in other respects, gave a new form to the 

 system of judicial process, set the example in this 

 practice also ; and, when the old superstitious means 

 of discovering guilt (as by trial by fire and water) 

 lost their efficacy, torture became general in Europe. 



It has been said, that in England torture never was 

 practised ; but this is a great error ; for, though it is 

 true, that the law never recognized the use of tor- 

 ture, yet there were many instances of its employ- 

 ment, as late as the reigns of Elizabeth and James, 

 when prisoners were examined, to use the expres- 

 sive words of an English writer, " before torture, in 

 torture, between torture, and after torture ;" and, 

 notwithstanding the judges, when consulted by 

 Charles I., as to the legality of putting Felton, the 

 assassin of Buckingham, to the rack (1628), de- 

 clared that the law of England did not allow the 

 use of torture, instances of its application occur 

 through the reign of that prince. 



In Scotland, the practice of torture was not 

 wholly disused till very near the close of the seven- 

 teenth century. Every reader is familiar with the 

 horrid tortures inflicted on many of the covenan- 

 ters, by means of thumbikens, bootikins, &c., in 

 order to discover alleged hiding-places, and the like. 

 A striking, yet not overcharged scene of this kind is 

 given in the tale of " Old Mortality." 



In France, the question preparatoire was employed 

 during the progress of the trial, to induce the accused 

 to confess (but his endurance of the pain without 

 confessing, did not necessarily save him from condem- 

 nation), and the question prealable, to extort from a 

 condemned criminal, previous to execution, the con- 

 fession of his accomplices, or the disclosure of some 

 circumstance which had not been explained or re- 

 vealed on trial. In 1574, the count of Montgomery 

 (q. v.) was subjected to the torture before his exe- 

 cution, although he had only been the innocent cause 

 of the death of Henry II., by an accident at a tour- 

 nament. Louis XVI. abolished the question prepara- 

 toire, by a decree of Aug. 24, 1780 ; but the question 

 prealable subsisted till the time of the revolution. 



In Germany, the incapacity of the criminal judges 

 (ignorant baillies, burgomasters, &c.) could suggest 

 to them, notwithstanding their official obligations, 

 no better or shorter method of proceeding, than that 

 of beginning every examination with torture, and 

 terminating it by capital execution ; and it was the 

 great merit of the Carolina (q. v.), that it esta- 

 blished these two important principles of criminal 

 jurisprudence, that no man should be punished with- 

 out confession, or a direct and full proof, and that 

 no man should be tortured without strong grounds 

 of suspicion ; and the opinion of learned jurists was 

 required to be taken as to the sufficiency of these 



grounds. With these restrictions, torture conti- 

 nued to be practised in the German states till the 

 close of the last century, and, in some of them, is at 

 present rather disused than abolished. The mere 

 threat of torture is termed territion, and is distin- 

 guished into verbal territion, in which the accused 

 is given up to the executioner, who conducts him 

 to the engines of torture, and describes, in the most 

 appalling manner possible, the sufferings which he 

 may endure, and the real territion, in which he is 

 actually placed upon the machine, but is not sub- 

 jected to torture. Thomasius, Beccaria, Voltaire, 

 and Hommel were the great promulgators of the 

 better views which led to the abolition of torture. 

 See Criminal Law. 



The instruments of torture are very various ; 

 human ingenuity seems to have been exhausted in 

 inventing the means of inflicting the most exquisite 

 and prolonged sufferings. The following kinds of 

 torture were chiefly employed in the Tower of Lon- 

 don : The rack is a large open frame of oak, under 

 which the prisoner was laid on his back, upon the 

 floor, with his wrists and ancles attached by cords 

 to two rollers at the end of the frame. These rol- 

 lers were moved by levers in opposite directions, 

 till the body rose to a level with the frame ; ques- 

 tions were then put, and, if the answers were not 

 satisfactory, the sufferer was gradually stretched, 

 till the bones started from the sockets. The rack 

 is said to have been introduced into England by the 

 duke of Exeter, under Henry VI., and is there- 

 fore familiarly called the duke of Exeter's daughter. 

 The scavenger's daughter is a broad hoop of iron, 

 consisting of two parts, fastened together by a hinge. 

 The prisoner was made to kneel on the pavement, 

 and contract himself into as small a compass as pos. 

 sible. The executioner kneeling on his shoulders, 

 and having introduced the hoop under his legs, com- 

 pressed the victim close together, till he was able 

 to fasten the extremities over the small of the back. 

 The time allotted to this kind of torture was an hour 

 and a half, during which the blood commonly started, 

 by force of the compression, from the nostrils, and 

 sometimes from the hands and feet. Iron gauntlets, 

 which could be contracted by a screw, were used 

 to compress the wrists, and to suspend the prisoner 

 in the air, from two distant points of a beam. He 

 was placed on three pieces of wood, piled one on the 

 other, which were successively withdrawn from un- 

 der his feet, after his hands had been made fast. 

 The little ease was a fourth kind of machine, made 

 of so small dimensions, and so constructed, that the 

 prisoner confined within it could neither stand, walk, 

 sit, or lie at full length, but was compelled to diasv 

 himself up in a squatting posture, and so to remain 

 several days. Besides these there were manacles, 

 thumb screws, Spanish boots, &c. Several degrees 

 of torture are distinguished. In France there were 

 two, the question ordinaire, and extraordinaire ; and 

 in Germany we find mention of the first, second, and 

 third degree. 



TORY. The following account of the original 

 use of this term, as a party name, so distinguished 

 in the political history of England, is given by a 

 contemporay whig, Defoe, in his Review, (vol. vii.) 

 published in 1711 : " The word tory is Irish, and 

 was first used in Ireland at the time of queen Eliza- 

 beth's war, to signify a robber who preyed upon the 

 country. In the Irish massacre (1641), you had 

 them in great numbers, assisting in every thing that 

 was bloody and villanous ; they were such as chose 

 to butcher brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, 



