Decline of Routine Torture

In the early modern period, the torture of witches became commonplace. Countless people were targeted and tortured for imaginary relationships with the devil.

In England the trial by jury developed considerable freedom in evaluating evidence and condemning on circumstantial evidence, making torture to extort confessions unnecessary. For this reason in England a regularise system of judicial torture never existed and its use was limited to political cases, except under the short-lived Puritan regime.

When the papacy was trying to find (or create) evidence against the Knights Templa

it encouraged monarchs throughout Europe to torture Templars to gain confessions. Torture was applied and the confessions obtained in most countries, but His Holiness was shocked to discover that the civil authorities in England were not prepared to apply torture. When two Inquisitors were sent to England in 1310 to extract confessions from Knights Templars, they insisted on using torture . The king allowed some torture to be applied "according to ecclesiastical law", but apparently not enough to satisfy the Inquisitors. The Pope wrote to the King:

We hear that you forbid torture as contrary to the laws of your land; but no state can override Cannon Law, Our Law; therefore I command you at once to submit these men to torture...Withdraw your prohibition and we grant you remission of sins

(Letter from Pope Clement V to King Edward II of England. Regestum Clementis Papae V, nunc primum editum cura et studio Monachorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, (Rome, 1885-92) year 5, no. 6670, pp 84-6. . The English translation is quoted from G. G. Coulton, Medieval Panorama, (CUP, 1947) p 380.

Although torture was not permitted under English Common law, in Tudor and early Stuart times it was applied, with the King's warrant, under certain conditions. The confession of Marc Smeaton at the trial of Anne Boleyn was presented in written form only, perhaps to hide from the court that Smeaton had been tortured on the rack for four hours, or because Thomas Cromwell was worried that he would recant his confession if cross-examined.

When Guy Fawkes was arrested for his role in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 he was tortured until he revealed everything he knew about the plot. This was not so much to extract a confession, which was not needed to prove his guilt, but to extract from him the names of his fellow conspirators. By this time a special warrant from King James I was needed before he could be tortured. The wording of the warrant shows concerns for humanitarian considerations, the severity of the methods of interrogation were to be increased gradually until the interrogators were sure that Fawkes had told all he knew. In the end this did not help Fawkes much as he was broken on the only rack in England, in the Tower of London.

Torture was abolished in England around 1640 (except peine forte et dure, which was abolished in 1772).

In 1613 Anton Praetorius described the situation of the prisoners in the dungeons in his book Gründlicher Bericht Von Zauberey und Zauberern (Thorough Report about Sorcery and Sorcerers). He was one of the first to protest against all means of torture.

In the 17th century the number of incidents of judicial torture decreased in many European regions. Johann Graefe in 1624 published Tribunal Reformation, a case against torture. In 1764 Cesare Beccaria, an Italian lawyer, published "An Essay on Crimes and Punishments", in which he argued that torture unjustly punished the innocent and should be unnecessary in proving guilt. Voltaire (1694-1778) also fiercely condemned torture.

While in Egypt in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to Major-General Berthier that the
barbarous custom of whipping men suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognised that this method of interrogation, by putting men to the torture, is useless. The wretches say whatever comes into their heads and whatever they think one wants to believe. Consequently, the Commander-in-Chief forbids the use of a method which is contrary to reason and humanity. (Napoleon Bonaparte, Letters and Documents of Napoleon, Volume I: The Rise to Power, selected and translated by John Eldred Howard (London: The Cresset Press, 1961), p 274.

European states abolished torture from their statutory law in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sweden and Prussia was the first to do it in 1722 and 1754, respectively; Denmark abolished it in 1770, Austria in 1776, France in 1780, and the Netherlands in 1798. 

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