“During a residence in Germany, some years ago, chance threw me in the way of hearing much of this engine, without being able clearly to understand what it was, excepting that it exercised the functions of executioner in the form of the Virgin Mary, and exterminated its victims by hugging them in arms furnished with iron blades. Thus they were soon deprived of life. It was said to have existed in many towns and castles, and even convents. Some represented it to be an image of the Virgin Mary, which the culprit was told to kiss, and which, on being touched by him, was set in motion by inward machinery, which caused the figure to fall down and crush him. Others said, that its arms expanded and clasped him to a breast, out of which poniards protruded. Others, again, represented it merely as an emblem of Justice, placed above a trap-door, on which the culprit trod, as he advanced to pay her his homage, and which, being left unbolted, sank underneath his weight, and precipitated him into an abyss.
“The difficulty of obtaining evidence respecting it, and the contradictory and, consequently, unsatisfactory nature of the little that I did for some time obtain, made me begin to treat the stories which I had heard as the result of popular error. Added to this, I found almost all the members of the modern school of philosophy prepared to treat the thing as an old woman’s tale; and one of them told me that the whole affair was a mere monkish lie.
“Discouraged as I was by the result of my inquiries, I could not altogether hold the thing as utterly without basis. And being loath to treat as mere idle rumour that which had been heard of by every German, and was believed by the great majority of the people, I was tempted to take a middle course between belief and unbelief, and to conclude that the Virgin must have been the plank, or German guillotine. The conclusion which I arrived at was, however, disturbed by a passage which I accidentally met in a book, entitled, ‘Materialen zur Nürnber-gerisehen Geschichte herausge geben von D. T. C. Siebenkees, Nürnberg, 1792.’
“The passage in question is represented to have been extracted from a Chronicle (which the author has not indicated), and may be thus rendered in English:—‘In the year of our Lord 1533, the Iron Virgin was constructed, for the punishment of evil-doers, within the walls of the Frogs-Tower, opposite the place called Die Sieben Zeiler—that is to say, the Seven Ropes; so, at least, it was publicly given out, to justify the thing. Therein was an iron statue, seven feet high, which stretched abroad both its arms in the face of the criminal, and death by this machine was said to send the poor sinner to the fishes. For, so soon as the executioner moved the step on which it stood, it hewed, with broad hand-swords, the criminal into little pieces, which were swallowed by fishes in hidden waters. Such secret tribunals existed formerly in many countries.”
Mr. Pearsall pursued his inquiries with indefatigable industry in the German cities, and made many discoveries in secret “torture chambers.” “Many persons of the better class,” he remarks, “to whom I spoke on the subject, denied that the Virgin had ever existed in Austria; but my laquais de place, and others of the lower class, told me, that when they were young, it was said to be standing in a tower which hangs over the canal that runs through Vienna into the Danube, and that whenever the water there looked a little red (as was usually the case after a storm), nothing was more common than to hear people say, ‘So, the Virgin has been at her work again.’”
Mr. Pearsall made important discoveries at Nuremberg. There he was aided by Dr. Mayer, keeper of the archives of the city. “Dr. Mayer told me,” says he, “that the passage from the Chronicle, quoted by Siebenkees, was no fable; that the machine had formerly stood in a vault near to the Sieben Zeiler, and that he himself had seen part of the machinery which belonged to it, although the figure itself had disappeared. ‘The figure,’ said he, ‘stood at the brink of a trap-door; and when the individual who had suffered by its embraces was released from them, he fell downwards through it on a sort of cradle of swords, placed in a vault underneath, and which were arranged so as to cut his body in pieces, which dropped into running water, over which the machine stood.’
“Desirous of seeing the spot where the Virgin stood, I procured permission to visit it from the city architect, who sent me the keys by a man named Kiefer. This man has been a long time in the employment of the magistrates, and he accompanied Dr. Mayer and myself to the spot in question. He was a stranger to Dr. Mayer; but he had himself, many years back, been in the vault. He found no stream of water there, although the place was extremely wet and damp; and on one side of the vault, which was drier than the other, there was a sort of grave, in which were many human skulls and bones. He told me that in his youth he had known an old man, named Kaiferlin, who had seen the machine in a perfect state. He stated, also, that Kaiferlin told him, that two or three days before the entry of the French into Nuremberg, the Virgin and all the instruments of torture formerly kept in the place where she was, were taken away by night in a cart, and that neither she nor they had ever been heard of since.”
Mr. Pearsall at length found this Virgin in the Castle of Feistritz. Baron Diedrich informed him, “I bought it of a person who obtained it, with the left hand, during the French revolution, and had with it a great part of the contents of the arsenal of Nuremberg. From him I received it in a cart, with several things which had formerly belonged to that arsenal. It came to me rusted and in bad condition, deprived of its machinery, but accompanied by the pedestal on which it now stands, and which seems to have been made for it.”
“The construction of the figure,” says Mr. Pearsall, “was simple enough. A skeleton, formed of bars and hoops, was coated over with sheet iron, which was laid on and painted, so as to represent a Nuremberg citizen’s wife of the sixteenth century. The front of the machine opened like folding doors, the two halves of the front part of it being connected by hinges with the back part. On the inside of its right breast are thirteen quadrangular poniards. There are eight of these on the inside of the left, and two on the inside of the face. These last were clearly intended for the eyes of the victim, who must have, therefore, gone backwards into it, and have received, in an upright position, in his breast and head, the blades to which he was exposed. That this machine had been formerly used cannot be doubted; because there are evident blood-stains yet visible on its breast, and on the upper part of its pedestal. How it was worked is not known, for the mechanism which caused it to open and shut is no longer attached to it; but that there was some such mechanism, is clear from the holes and sockets which have been cut out on the surface of the pedestal, showing the points where parts of the apparatus intended to work it must have been inserted. It stands, at present, on castors, and there are two iron springs, which its present proprietor has caused to be placed in it, for the purpose of making its sides to open whenever it is moved forward; but this is done to startle, by way of pleasantry, those who see it for the first time.”
Mr. Pearsall traces the origin of this machine to Spain, and in connexion with the Inquisition. He says, “In the year 1835, I met at Liege with a very well educated and accomplished man of letters; he was a Frenchman by birth, and had been attached to the court of Joseph Buonaparte, when he was promoted by his brother Napoleon to be king of Spain. There, my informant told me, that he had an opportunity of inspecting the chamber of the Inquisition at Madrid, and that, among other instruments with which it was provided, he found an image of the Virgin Mary, composed partly of wood and partly of iron. This engine was called ‘Mater Dolorosa,’ and with it was administered the last and severest degree of torture. Its ordinary position was that of a woman standing erect, with her arms crossed on her bosom; but there was a contrivance by which she was made to expand her arms, and then the inside surfaces of them were seen to be garnished with a number of small points or stilettoes. The person to be tortured was placed opposite to her, breast to breast, and then her arms were brought round his back, and by means of a powerful screwing implement made to grasp him tightly, so as to inflict great pain, and to render it impossible that he could fall from her gripe. Whilst she held him thus firmly, a trap-door was opened under his feet, so as to cause him to hang in agony over an abyss. In this position he was importuned to confess his guilt, while the arms of the machine were slowly and gradually screwed tighter and tighter, till life was squeezed out of his body. The corpse was then released, and fell through the trap-door into a sort of oubliette. Now, I am much inclined to think that the machine in the possession of Baron Diedrich was made to do its inhuman duty somewhat in the same manner as the machine in the Spanish Inquisition.”