“Let the poor lad be taken to his cell and all kindness shewn him,” added the governor.
So the pleasant party broke up.
FOOTNOTES
[36] Witness their Oubliettes, which the writer has seen, shaped like a bottle, the only opening the neck, wherein, when torture had done its worst and no more revelations were to be hoped of the criminal, he was dropped, to perish of his injuries in unseen agony, in cold, hunger, and filth. Witness, too, the recent discoveries at Baden Baden—the statue of the Virgin, which the victim was told to kiss, whereupon a concealed trap-door, on which he stood, fell, and dropped him upon wheels set with revolving knives. Such refinements appal the imagination, and constrain us to ask what manner of men invented such atrocities?
[37] Unless the reader can comprehend the intense way in which obedience and loyalty to the King, right or wrong, swayed the people of England in that day, he cannot comprehend the history of Bloody Harry, and why he was permitted to work his will. The anarchy of the preceding century, when the Wars of the Roses had drenched the country in blood, and helped to foster the sentiment, and to make the throne the central pillar of the edifice, the supposed bulwark of the nation.
All things should first be tried, but an incurable wound
Must with the sword be cut out, lest the sound part be affected.
[39] In John Knox’s house at Edinburgh the writer examined a similar implement, as also at Sir Walter Scott’s house at Abbotsford.