Note 45 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

To make out these charges, for the last of which there seems to be no evidence whatever, Gruet was put to the torture many times during many days “according to the manner of the time,” says one of Calvin’s biographers.45 In reality such unmeasured use of torture was in Geneva a Calvinistic innovation. Gruet, refusing under the worst stress of torture to incriminate anyone else, at length, in order to end it, pleaded guilty to the charges against him, praying in his last extremity for a speedy death. On July 26, 1547, his half-dead body was beheaded on the scaffold, the torso being tied and the feet nailed thereto. Such were the judicial methods and mercies of a reformed Christianity, guided by a chief reformer.