APPENDIX K. (p. 173).
Reading edition
APPENDIX K. (p. 173).
The Use of Torture.
There can be no doubt that torture was freely employed to extract evidence from the conspirators and others who fell into the hands of the government.
The Earl of Salisbury, in his letter to Favat, of December 4th, 1605, clearly intimates that this was the case, when he complains "most of the prisoners have wilfully forsworn that the priests knew anything in particular, and obstinately refuse to be accusers of them, yea, what torture soever they be put to."
About the middle of November, Lord Dunfermline wrote to Salisbury [Dom. James I. xvi. 81] recommending that the prisoners should be confined apart and in darkness, that they should be examined by torchlight, and that the tortures should be slow and at intervals, as being thus most effectual.
There is every reason to believe that the Jesuit lay-brother, Nicholas Owen, alias Littlejohn, actually died upon the rack. [Vide Father Gerard's Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, p. 189.]