The Earl of Warwick and the three brothers Dudley were here. The Duke, the eldest of the three, was beheaded, and the others mercifully starved to death. A gentleman named Gyfford was put to the rack in the Tower, and finally consenting to answer the questions put to him--your rack was a rare persuader--was probably dismissed. But doubtless the headsman got him. Dr. Stohr, who refused to deny his religion--he was a Catholic--was imprisoned here, and was released only to suffer a cruel death at Tyburn. Being a Catholic, and murdered by Protestants, we may draw from his history the useful lesson that persecution was not, strictly speaking, confined to the Catholic church, as is popularly supposed. The Protestants, when in power, knew the uses of the rack, and thumbscrew, and stake, just as well as the Catholics, and they were just as handy with them. [Illustration: THE OVERWORKED HEADSMAN--FIFTY IN ONE DAY.] [Sidenote: INTERESTING RELICS.] The Brothers Poole wanted Mary to be the Queen, and they went the long road from here. But the list is too long for these pages. [Illustration: THE PERSUASIVE RACK.] That you may be perfectly sure of the accuracy of these things, the identical headsman's block is carefully preserved, with the ax he used and the mask he wore when engaged in his delightful duty. The ax is shaped very like a butcher's cleaver, and the mask is about the most fiendish face that a devilish ingenuity could devise. Ugly and devilish as it is, it was probably an improvement on the face it concealed. You are shown the thumbscrew and rack. The thumbscrew would extort a confession from a dead man; and the rack--well, that is something inconceivably devilish. You are laid in a box; ropes on windlasses are tied to your ankles and wrists; then the windlasses are turned, inch by inch, till your joints are dislocated. After enduring the rack and answering questions the way they desired,--for a man in that apparatus would say anything for a moment's respite--you are hurried to the block for fear you may recant as soon as you get out of it. Then what was said in the rack was put upon record as a testimony on which to rack and behead other people. Those were the "good old days of merrie England." [Illustration: THE BYWARD TOWER. [From the West.]] [Sidenote: MORE MURDER.]