Note 260 — Chapter XVI

Torture, though always illegal, was used to a great extent during the rule of the Tudors and the two first Stuarts. In the single year 1581 there are no less than six warrants entered in the Council Book. It was possible for persons to obtain, as a favour, warrants from the king or the council, to sanction, even in ordinary criminal cases, the illegal employment of torture, so that murder, embezzlement, and horse-stealing are found amongst the imputed offences for which torture is to be used. Since the end of Elizabeth’s reign no instances have been found of its application to other than State crimes. The last warrant issued was in 1640, the year of the meeting of the Long Parliament. “In the days of the prerogative,” says Jardine, “Magna Charta was an empty name, and trial by jury a mockery and a farce, when, upon the authority of a royal warrant, a man could be carried away to the prisons of the Tower, and after his body had been duly attenuated, and his spirit broken and subdued by the horrors of ‘Little Ease’ and the ‘Dungeon among the rats,’ be brought into court to make a formal answer to evidence extracted by the cruelties of the rack, or the manacles, or the ‘scavenger’s daughter.’” The use of torture was not abolished in Scotland till 1708; in France till 1789; in Russia till 1801; in Hanover till 1822; in Baden till 1831.—Jardine on the Use of Torture.