The last exhibition of this kind was in 1820, when Thistlewood and four others, some of them victims of a plot fostered by the Government, were hanged outside Newgate, their heads being afterwards publicly cut off by a masked man suspected to be a surgeon. The bodies were not quartered. The thing had by this time degenerated into a brutal and bloody farce. TORTURE AND PEINE FORTE ET DURE. Sir Thomas Smith (1513-77), Secretary of State to Elizabeth, wrote a book, “De Republica Anglorum,” not published till 1583. In it the author says: “Torment or question, which is vsed by the order of the ciuill lawe and custome of other countries, to put a malefactor to excessiue paine, to make him confesse of him selfe, or of his fellowes or complices, is not vsed in England, it is taken for seruile.… The nature of our nation is free, stout, haulte, prodigall of life and bloud: but contumelie, beatings, seruitude, and seruile torment and punishment it will not abide.” The statement that torture was not used in England is amazing, as it is beyond doubt that Smith himself racked prisoners in 1571.[50] It is, however, true that he expressed extreme reluctance to be put on such work. Hallam is undoubtedly correct in saying that “the rack seldom stood idle in the Tower for all the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign.”[51] Indeed, there is a tract, attributed to Lord Burghley, defending the manner in which torture had been applied to prisoners.[52] It was published about the same time as Sir Thomas Smith’s book. But torture, frequently as it was practised, never had the sanction of the law of England. Coke, in the Third Part of his “Institutes,” written in 1628 (first published in 1644), declares: “There is no one opinion in our books, or judiciall Record (that we have seen or remember) for the maintenance of tortures or torments.” “So as there is no law to warrant tortures in this land, nor can they be justified by any prescription, being so lately brought in.” It would be idle to speculate as to the amount of alleviation the reflection that torture was illegal may have brought to Southwell, for instance, who was racked ten several times. A kind of torture, not however applied for the purpose of extracting confessions, was recognised by the law. This was the Peine Forte et Dure, “one of the most singular circumstances,” writes Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, “in the whole of the criminal law.” It certainly is this: it is moreover, a practice as to which even writers on our criminal law have gone astray, not excepting Sir James himself. It is a most remarkable example of judge-made law; the successive stages of its growth can in some measure be traced. Its very name betrays the change made in the punishment, as it is agreed that peine forte et dure was originally “prison forte et dure.” The statutory basis of the punishment is found in an Act, 3 Edward I. (1275), c. 12:—