TH PAINS AND PENALTIES. PART II. HAT Mutilation should ever have been adopted as a penalty by the Christian Church,' one finds it difficult to believe; yet the ecclesiastical authorities inflicted it for comparatively trivial offences, and several councils emphatically attempted to suppress it. Thus the 13th canon of the Council of Merida, in 666, deprived bishops and priests of the right of mutilating the servants of the Church. The 6th canon of the Council of Toledo, in 675, while forbidding bishops to exercise exclusive jurisdiction in offences involving the capital penalty, also interdicted them from ordering mutilation of the limbs, even in the case of their own serfs; and ordained that bishops violating this law should be deposed, excommunicated, and denied the last rites of the Church when in articulo mortis. The 18th canon of the Council of Frankfort, in 794, forbade abbots to blind or mutilate their monks, whatever might be the offence. Michelet cites a law of William the Norman which prohibited his nobles from inflicting the punishment of death, but allowed them to pluck out the eyes of offenders, to castrate them, to dismember them of their feet and hands, "afin qu'il ne reste plus de lui qu'un tronc vivant en mémoire de son crime." According to the custom of Avignon, in 1243, false witnesses were deprived of nose and lips, a punishment reserved in Switzerland for blasphemers. What could be done by the barbarity of man in the way of mutilation was brought to hideous perfection by the Indian tribes of North America, who probably have never been surpassed in this direction by any other savage tribes. They displayed a truly demoniacal skillbeyond even that of a mediæval inquisitor-in protracting the agony of their victims. It was a favourite mode of punishment with Oriental princes, and also with the Roman and Byzantine princes. A plate of noses was an offering gratefully accepted by the Emperor Constantine V., "whose reign was a long butchery of whatever was most noble or holy or innocent in his empire." Eugene Sue, in his once-famous romance "The Mysteries of Paris," which, I suppose, would nowadays be considered deficient in interest by the public which patronises "The Shilling Shocker," proposed that deprivation of sight should be substituted for the penalty of death. Had his suggestion been adopted, persons born blind, or rendered blind by accident or disease, would have been obliged, to distinguish themselves from malefactors, to have secured a certificate of character similar to that of the Arabian grammarian Zamakhschair, who died in 1444. Having had one of his feet frozen while travelling in the Kharasm, he always carried about him an attestation of the fact, signed by numerous celebrated personages, that he might not be suspected of having had it amputated in punishment for some offence. The heads of criminals, as is well known, were exposed after death for a more or less considerable period according to the nature of the crime or their rank and influence. Old London Bridge, the City gates, and Temple Bar enjoyed a sad pre-eminence in this respect. The head of Councillor Layer, a Jacobite, executed for treason in 1722, was exhibited on Temple Bar, until replaced in 1746 by the heads of two gentlemen, Francis Townley and George Fletcher, who had joined the army of Prince Charles Edward. These remained until 1772, when one of them fell down, and the other was shortly afterwards dislodged during a gale. Dare I repeat the familiar anecdote of Johnson and Goldsmith? The former, who made no secret of his Jacobite proclivities, had quoted to Goldsmith, among the poets' memorials in Westminster Abbey, the line from Ovid: Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis, and when, on their homeward way, they passed under Temple Bar with its grisly trophies, Goldsmith happily repeated the quotation: Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis. In 1326, Hugh Spenser, the favourite of Edward II., having been put to death at Bristol, his head was sent to London, and his body, divided into four quarters, to the four chief towns of England. The heads of the Flemish patriots, Counts von Horn and von Egmont, whose execution at Brussels in 1568 has been so powerfully described by Mr. Motley, were placed in basins and exposed for two hours. A stirring story is told by Agrippa D'Aubigné, in his lively "Mémoires." He was passing with his father, who had been implicated in the Huguenot "Conspiracy of Amboise" against Francis II. and Catherine de Medicis (1560), through Amboise on a market day, when the elder D'Aubigné caught sight of the heads of his fellow-conspirators, elevated upon posts. Their features were still recognisable, and D'Aubigné was so deeply moved that he cried out, in the hearing of the crowd, "They have beheaded France, the murderers!" (Ils ont décapité la France, les bourreaux !), and set spurs to his horse. "I rode close up to him," says his son, "perceiving on his countenance the signs of extraordinary emotion; whereupon he put his hand on my head and said, 'My son, thou must not spare thy head after mine to avenge those leaders, full of honour, whose heads thou hast just seen; if thou sparest thyself, my curse will befall thee.' Though our retinue consisted of twenty horsemen, we had considerable difficulty in saving ourselves from the hands of the populace." When the wise and witty Sir Thomas More was beheaded, his head was stuck on a pole on London Bridge, where it was exposed for fourteen days, much to the grief of his daughter, Margaret Roper, who resolved to secure it. "One day," says Aubrey, "as she was passing under the bridge, looking at her father's head, she exclaimed, 'That head has lain many a time in my lap; would to God it would fall into my lap as I pass under!' She had her wish, and it did fall into her lap!" Probably she had bribed one of the keepers of the bridge to throw it over just as the boat approached, and the exclamation was intended to avert the suspicion of the boatmen. At all events, she got possession of it, and preserved it with great care in a leaden casket until her death, and it is now enclosed in a niche in the wall of her tomb in St. Dunstan's Church, Canterbury. Sir Walter Raleigh's head, in a red bag, was carried to his wife, who caused it to be embalmed, and kept it with her all her life, permitting favoured friends, like Bishop Goodman, to see and even to kiss it. His son, Carew Raleigh, afterwards preserved it with similar piety. It is supposed now to rest in the church of West Horsley, Surrey. During the struggles of the Iconoclasts to put down imageworship in the eighth century, the hands of the artists employed in painting images were burned with red-hot irons. The Emperor Theophilus, who continued the persecution (829-842), was distinguished by the severities of his religious zeal, resorting to mutilation, scalding with boiling pitch, or to the stake, in order to convince the image-worshippers of their error. Two monks, Theodorus and Theophanes, having journeyed from Jerusalem to maintain their dogma at Constantinople, the Emperor ordered them to be brought before him, and after engaging in a learned discussion, caused them to be branded on the forehead with some caustic verses, to the effect that these wretches, driven from Palestine for their offences, had taken refuge at Constantinople, whence they had been banished for new crimes. In 1209, when King John was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III., Geoffery, Archdeacon of Norwich, was rash enough to express his opinion that it was no longer safe for priests to act as the officers of an excommunicated prince. The king immediately threw him into prison, where a few days afterwards he was compelled to assume a leaden cap, the weight of which speedily killed the unfortunate ecclesiastic. Impalement, though common enough as a punishment among Orientals, has rarely been resorted to by Europeans; but an instance, according to Lalanne, is recorded by Guillaume de Nangis. The Count of Acerra, to whom Charles, King of Sicily, had entrusted the administration of Provence, having been found guilty of sodomy and treason, was impaled on a red-hot iron and afterwards burnt, in 1294. Juvenal mentions it as in use at Rome, and it is still practised in Turkey and Arabia. The reader will probably remember the sensation produced in England at the time of the Bulgarian massacres (1876) by the statement that the Turkish authorities had impaled alive many of the unhappy peasants. The torture known as Peine forte et dure was practised in England as early as the reign of Henry IV. It consisted in piling heavy weights on the chest of the sufferer until he confessed or expired. Sometimes criminals were put to death in this way, as, for example, Juliana Quick, 1442; Margaret Middleton, 1586; Anthony Arrowsmith, 1598; Walter Calverley, 1605; Major Strangeways, 1657. There was a case as late as 1741. In 1772 it was abolished. Margaret Middleton's punishment took place as follows. After she had performed her devotions one of the sheriffs ordered the executioners to strip her. She and the four women attending her prayed on their knees that, for the honour of the sex, this indignity might be dispensed with ; but their prayer was refused. Then she asked that her maids might be permitted to undress her, and that the officials meanwhile might turn their faces in another direction. Accordingly her women removed her clothes, and put upon her a long linen robe; after which she calmly lay down upon the ground, her face covered with a handkerchief and her body mostly concealed by the linen vestment. A plank was laid upon her. She had folded her hands over her face, but the sheriff gave orders for them to be bound. Two sergeants therefore separated them and tied them to two posts. Then the weights were piled on the plank, and as soon as she felt the pressure she gasped out: "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! have mercy on me!" These were her last words, but the death agony was protracted over fifteen minutes. An angular stone as big as a man's fist had been placed under her back, and upon her body were heaped seven to eight hundredweights, which, breaking her ribs, forced them through the skin. The instrument of torture called the Rack was a wooden framework, in which the victim was fastened, and by means of ropes and pulleys his arms and legs were violently stretched until the tension. lifted his body several inches from the floor. According to Coke, it was first introduced into the Tower by the Duke of Exeter (1467), whence it was called, in grim jocularity, "The Duke of Exeter's Daughter." It was freely used-especially as a punishment for heretics-in the Tudor reigns. In 1546 Anne Askew, accused of Lutheranism, was racked in the Tower, as thus. First, she was led down into a dungeon, where Sir Anthony Knevet, the lieutenant, commanded his jailor to pinch her with the rack; which being done so far as he thought sufficient, he was about to remove her, supposing that she had suffered enough. But Wriothesley, the Chancellor, displeased that she was so speedily released when she would make no confession, commanded the lieutenant to bind her on the rack again. And when Knevet, less brutal than his superior, refused, and urged the victim's weakness as a reason, the Chancellor threatened to report his disobedience to the King. Then he and Mr. Rich, throwing off their gowns, must needs play the tormentor themselves, first inquiring whether she was with child. To which she nobly answered, "Ye shall not need to spare for that, but do your will upon. me;" and so, "quietly and patiently praying unto the Lord, she abode their tyranny till her bones and joints were almost plucked asunder, so that she was carried away in a chair." When the torture was ended Wriothesley and his colleague left. In the reign of Elizabeth the rack was still used, though torture was not known to the common law of England, and was exercised only by virtue of the royal prerogative. Several of the young Jesuit priests concerned in the Jesuit Invasion of 1580 were racked to make them reveal the names of their leaders. The Tower rack stood in the long vaulted dungeon below the Armoury. Under a warrant signed by six of the Queen's Council, and in the presence of the Lieutenant of the Tower, whose duty was to direct and modify the application of the pains, these men were laid at various times, |