Torture in Early Modern Scotland

When we discuss crime and punishment in the past, we often instinctively think about torture. Grisly images of broken, brutalised bodies worm their way into our imaginations, especially when we’re thinking about Scotland, whose judicial system is popularly assumed to have been particularly bloodthirsty. In reality, however, the use of torture in Scottish History has been much more limited, and much more controversial, than we might expect.

 

The use of torture

While there are some suggestions that torture was used during the Middle Ages – the assassins of King James I (d.1437) may have undergone it, for example – the ‘golden age’ of judicial torture in Scotland was the early modern era, and in particular the 17th century. But even during this period, its use was heavily regulated. In order to torture a suspected or convicted criminal – or at least, in order to do so legally – you needed to have a specific warrant from Parliament or the Privy Council. And these were rarely granted: between 1591 and 1708, only 39 warrants were issued, covering fewer than 50 individuals.

Why was torture so comparatively rare in Scotland? In part, no doubt, it was to do with exactly the same ethical qualms that animate people today – although, given how ready the Scottish judicial system was to inflict vicious physical punishment on criminals, this should not be pushed too far . More pertinently, the authorities were often sceptical about how effective torture was as a judicial tool. As George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, a prominent late-17th-century lawyer and twice Lord Advocate, put it: ‘Some obstinat persons do oftentimes deny the Truth, whilst others who are frail, and timorous, confess for fear, what is not true’. The ineffectiveness of torture was particularly stark, Rosehaugh and others felt, when it was being used to extract confessions, the evidential value of which was widely regarded as suspect.

 If judicial torture was felt to be so problematic, why was it used at all? We can get a good sense of this from considering one case from 1680, when two men, John Spreull and Robert Hamilton, were put to torture. They were accused of plotting to murder the king, Charles II, and in particular the government was looking for answers to three questions. One: who had recruited them into the plot? Two: did the plot herald a coming rebellion? And three: Who were their co-conspirators? What the torturers were not asked to do was to extract confessions from Spreull and Hamilton, and indeed the government was at pains to point out that they were being subjected to torture only after they had freely confessed to involvement in the plot. What this case neatly reflects is that torture was generally seen not as a means of solving crimes, but as a tool of last resort for uncovering urgently-required information, to be used only when weighty matters of state or security were at stake. In that sense, torture in Scotland was less a judicial tool than a political one.

 

Judicial torture was particularly associated with the Restoration (1660-89), a period during which concerns about order and security, not least in the face of Presbyterian opposition, were especially acute. Indeed, torture was listed as one of the ‘grievances’ justifying the deposition of James VII in 1689, and it seems to have been used rarely, if at all, thereafter. The practice was formally outlawed as part of the Treason Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1708.

Methods of torture

Torture thus had a limited, highly-regulated place within the Scottish judicial system. But what did it actually look like in practice? Anybody who has visited a place like the Edinburgh Dungeon will be painfully familiar with all the weird and wonderful methods of torture that governments of the early modern period came up with: water torture, strappado, stretching on the rack, nail-removal, rat torture – the list is a long one. In Scotland, though, torture, on the rare occasions it was sanctioned, was rather less theatrical, with two devices predominating. The first, and marginally less terrible of these, was the thumbscrews, or as they were sometimes known in Scotland, the ‘thumbikins’. This form of torture generally involved trapping the victim’s thumbs in a vice and then slowly tightening it, squeezing and, eventually, crushing both digits. The precise design of thumbscrew apparatus could vary widely, but the basic principle remained the same, providing a simple but very effective means of inflicting pain.