2 - Torture and truth

Summary

To know our enemies minds we rip their hearts;

Their papers is more lawful.

King Lear (4.6.257–8)

Scratched on a wall in the Tower of London there is an inscription:

Thomas Miagh which lieth here alone

That fayne wold from hens begon

By torture straunge mi trouth was tryed,

Yet of my liberte denied.

1581 Thomas MYAGH

It was Myagh's misfortune to find himself suspected of complicity in Irish rebellion during the relatively short period, roughly the last half of the sixteenth century, when English authorities resorted to interrogatory torture in criminal investigations, as Sir Edward Coke was to write, “directly against the common lawes of England.” An aberration in English juridical practice, the use of torture in Elizabethan England was a brief departure from a legal tradition that abhorred and ridiculed the highly organized practice of judicial torture on the Continent. The immediate purpose of much English torture was political repression. Like modern torture, it was a form of official terrorism, used to crush perceived dangers to the Elizabethan state, particularly, although by no means exclusively, the persistence and spread of Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, the goal of torture was characterized in the official warrants as the acquisition of knowledge; its purpose was the “discoverie of the truth,” “manifestation of the truth,” or, most frequently, “the boultinge forth [sifting out] of the truth.” These characterizations of torture are not merely official euphemisms, for, as I shall argue, the appetite for knowledge of the Elizabethan torturers was intimately related to their agenda of repression.