himself might not considered to be true to the Church; so the unfortunate prisoner was left alone, deserted, without a single friend to help him. The routine of the Inquisition and the officials who carried it out were as follows: There were, first, familiars to arrest any suspected person against whom any infor mation had been laid. The tribunal before which the accused appeared consisted of three inquisitors, three secretaries, an alguazil (constable;, three receivers and assessors, together with familiars and jailers. To ob tain the post of inquisitor a man had to be of a good family, no members of which had ever been before the courts. The accused then was arrested, or if not found, judged in default. If arrested, he was thrown into a dark prison, where, if he confessed, he was released as a penitent, but he himself was dishonored and all his kindred with him. Should he refuse to confess, he was subjected to the three grades of torture, — the cord, the water, and the fire; if under the question he then con fessed, he was further tortured to give mo tives of his confession, and again to betray his accomplices, and after that was regarded as a penitent. Should all the degrees of torture prove ineffective, he was thrown into worse prisons, of which there were again three grades, — public, intermediary, and se cret; and following these prisons, came con demnation and death, — death by burning or by some even more horrible manner. Such, in brief, was the routine of the Inquisition, which sought by every means at every step to break down its unfortunate victim, so that when he did come to trial he would be a broken-down creature, incapable of any defence., In England, we are told, torture was never general, it being reserved as the prerogative of the crown; which gives rise to the discus sion whether it was not the worse for that, for it tended to make the application of tor ture secret, and therefore the more terrible. One punishment, however, was inflicted by common law, but that was originally insti
tuted from a sense of humanity. In very early days if a man accused of crime refused to plead, he was starved to death. By refus ing to plead he could not be judged and con demned, and therefore his property could not be escheated. Early in the fifteenth century the English people becoming more humane, the punishment of the " peine forte et dure " was substituted for the starving. This was the sentence : " That the prisoner shall be remanded to the place from whence he came, and put in some low, dark room, that he shall lie without any litter or any thing under him, and that one arm shall be drawn to one quarter of the room with a cord, and the other to another, and that his feet shall be used in the same manner, and that as many weights shall be laid on him as he can bear and more. That he shall have three morsels of barley bread a day, and that he shall have the water next the prison, so that it be not current, and that he shall not eat the same day on which he drinks nor drink the same day on which he eats, and he shall so continue till he die." This pun ishment was law up to a very late period. There is a small collection of relics in London at the Tower, — relics of that torturechamber described by Ainsworth in " Guy Fawkes." As Mr. Ainsworth was always at great pains to make his descriptions correct, we may take it that the descriptions are fairly accurate. The first description is of the torture of Viviana when she refused to answer questions as to what she knew of the plot; and the torture-chamber is described as "a square chamber, the roof of which was supported by a heavy stone pillar, while its walls were garnished with implements of torture. At a table on the left sat the lieu tenant and three other grave-looking person ages. Across the lower end of the chamber a thick black curtain was stretched, hiding a deep recess." To this recess, again refusing to give any information, Viviana is taken. "The recess was about twelve feet high and ten wide. It was crossed near the roof, which was arched and vaulted, by a heavy
