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Updated: June 19, 2025
"I'm ruined, too. We must make a fresh start." "Fresh start, hell!" The words rang queerly through the accompaniment of a bitter laugh. "Hamilton Burton took me and squeezed me dry. He put the thumbscrews on me and bled me of my Coal and Ore stock. He made me a traitor to Malone and today when Malone might have saved me I had no friends.
Sometimes they placed burning coals in their hands, or used an instrument of torture resembling that known in Scotland as the thumbscrews. Many of their attempts at conversion were accompanied by details too hideous to be recorded. Of those who would not be converted, the prisons were kept full. They were kept there without the usual allowance of straw, and almost without food.
Of "Scavenger's Daughters," Backs, Thumbscrews, iron boots, and wedges, and other horrible engines of pain, I have heard many dismal tales told; but all had long fallen into disuse before my time. But after Colonel Guido Faux, Back, Thumbscrews, boots, and wedges, and Scavenger's daughters fell into a decline, from which, thank God, they have never, in this fair realm of England, recovered.
Less than adequate in general: few of them in reality were richer than Burns; many of them were poorer: for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from the hard hand, and, in their need of guineas, to forget their duty of mercy, which Burns was never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them.
Religious persecution does not consist in thumbscrews or fires of Smithfield; the essence of religious persecution is this: that the man who happens to have material power in the State, either by wealth or by official position, should govern his fellow-citizens not according to their religion or philosophy, but according to his own.
To this may be added a large band of monks, with racks, thumbscrews, chains, whips, butchering knives, and other implements of torture, with which it was proposed to convert the English from the error of their ways, and to bring them to the true faith as expounded by the pope and his pupil Philip.
In front of them, seated on a chair with his arms pinioned, was Andrew Black. His face was pale and had a careworn look, but he held his head erect, and regarded his judges with a look of stern resolution that seemed to exasperate them considerably. On the table lay a pair of brass-mounted thumbscrews, and beside them the strange-looking instrument of torture called the boot.
The carriers of the bearings may be raised and lowered by turning suitable thumbscrews, whereby the distance between the roller and the back fall is increased or decreased. The whole is above covered with a dome, the so-called case, to prevent the throwing out of the mass under the operation of grinding.
During the remainder of the afternoon I was left to my own reflections, which were anything but agreeable; for I could not banish from my mind the threat about the thumbscrews, of the nature and use of which I had a vague but terrible conception. I was still meditating on my unhappy fate when, just after nightfall, one of the watch on deck called down the hatchway: "Hallo, there!
There are no thumbscrews now; they are rusting away; but every man in this town who is not willing that another shall do his own thinking and will try to prevent it, has in him the same hellish spirit that made and used that very instrument of torture, and the only reason he does not use it today is because he cannot. The reason that I speak here tonight is because they cannot help it.
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