The Tower of London: Instruments of Torture
One of London's most distinctive landmarks, the Tower of London has the reputation of being a place of execution and torture in times past. Some of the instruments used can still be seen there.

Before the 17th century torture of prisoners was a regular part of the routine at the Tower of London. There were many horrific instruments used to force a confession or elicit information from the victims.

The Rack
Probably the most infamous and most widely used instrument of torture, the rack is to date back to the ancient Greeks. There are few records of its use before the Middle Ages but during the Spanish Inquisition from the middle of the 13th century onwards there was an increase in its use.

At the Tower of London the rack was sometimes claimed as the invention of the Duke of Exeter, a 15th-century Constable of the Tower and so in the 16th-century it was nicknamed The Duke of Exeter's Daughter although other sources called it 'the brake'.

It was standard procedure to show the prisoner the rack first, and then to repeat the questions: only if the prisoner remained obstinate should the rack actually be used. Some people did stay silent and were then tortured.

During the religious ferment that gripped England in the 16th-century, the rack was used freely not only by the Catholic Queen Mary, but by those monarchs who had broken with Rome - Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth I.

Although many variations of the rack have been used throughout the centuries, the basic principle has always been the same - to stretch the victim's body. Eventually if the torture is continued, the limbs will be dislocated and finally torn from their sockets.

Under Queen Elizabeth I, one of the chief interrogators was Thomas Norton. On 27 March 1582 he wrote to the man credited with creating the English secret service, Sir Francis Walsingham: 'None was put to the rack that was not at first by some manifest evidence known to the Council to be guilty of treason, so that it was well assured beforehand that there was no innocent tormented. Also none was tormented to know whether he was guilty or not, but for the Queen's safety to know the manner of the treason and the accomplices.'

The Scavenger's Daughter
Less well-known than the rack, the Scavenger's Daughter, or Skeffington's Irons, was the brainchild of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London in Henry VIII's reign, Sir Leonard Skeffinton or Skevington - hence, by corruption, its popular name.

The Scavenger's Daughter was conceived as the perfect complement to the Duke of Exeter's Daughter (the rack) because it worked the opposite principle to the rack by compressing the body rather than stretching it.

The Scavenger's Daughter is rarely mentioned in the documents and the device itself was probably not much used. The best-documented use is that on the Irishman Thomas Miagh, charged with being in contact with rebels in Ireland. It may be in connection with Scavenger's Daughter that Miagh carved on the wall of the Beauchamp Tower in the Tower of London, "By torture straynge my truth was tried, yet of my libertie denied. 1581. Thomas Miagh."

The Manacles
Manacles are iron handcuffs fastened around a victim's wrists, from which he could be hung with his feet off the floor. A prisoner held in this way for a long period of time experienced extreme pain and might have difficulty using his hands for a time afterwards.

As the reign of Elizabeth I progressed, the ruthless use of the rack, particularly on Jesuit priests such as Edmund Campion and Alexander Briant, provided ammunition for overseas critics of the English regime. This may partly explain why in the 1590s, more writs were issued specifying the use of the manacles. This could also be a product of the rise of the inquisitor Richard Topcliffe, who seems to have favoured this method of torture.

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