3-034-879 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Holiday Sights: the torture in Her Majesty's Tower, 1871. Beefeater demonstrating thumb screws in the Tower of London. '...the most interesting, as well as the most ancient, part of the fortress is the Keep, usually called the White Tower...Mounted figures in armour,...firearms,...and tastefully-arranged trophies and emblematic devices, composed of weapons, on the walls and ceilings. But, ah! what have we here? Ancient instruments of torture and punishment - thumb-screws, and other dainty devices, by which contumacious prisoners were made pliable, and truth or falsehood...was wrung from racked victims. Our major-domo,...becoming a "philosopher and friend" as well as a "guide," shows the use, up to a certain point, of the thumb-screw to a fair girl of the party - papa the while improving the occasion, and telling Miss Rosebud how thankful she ought to be that she was not born in the dark ages, when she might have been racked, and (who knows ?) perhaps burnt at the stake for truth's sake. The young lady does not seem alive to the privilege of living in the nineteenth century, and looks upon the thumbscrew as a toy, though victims as graceful and innocent as she have writhed and groaned and fallen into a dead faintness under its use'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.