RACK, an engine of torture, furnifhed with pulleys, cords, &c. for extorting confeffion from criminals.—The trial by rack is utterly unknown to the law of England: though once, when the dukes of Exeter and Suffolk, and other minifters of Henry VI. had laid a defign to introduce the civil law into this kingdom as the rule of government; for a beginning thereof they erected a rack for torture, which was called in derifion
VOL. XVII. Part II.
the duke of Exeter's daughter, and ftill remains in the Tower of London, where it was occafionally ufed as an engine of ftate, not of law, more than once in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. But when, upon the affaffination of Villiers duke of Buckingham, by Felton, it was propofed in the privy council to put the affaffin to the rack in order to difcover his accomplices; the judges, being confulted, declared unanimously, to their own honour and the honour of the English law, that no fuch proceeding was allowable by the laws of England. It feems astonishing that this ufage of adminiftering the torture fhould be faid to arife from a tenderness to the lives of men; and yet this is the reafon given for its introduction in the civil law, and its fubfequent adoption by the French and other foreign nations, viz. becaufe the laws cannot endure that any man fhould die upon the evidence of a falfe or even a fingle witnefs, and therefore contrived this method that innocence fhould manifefit itfelf by a ftoat denial, or guilt by a plain confeffion; thus rating a man's virtue by the hardinefs of his confiftion, and his guilt by the fenfibility of his nerves. The marquis Beccaria, in an exquisite piece of railing, has propofed this problem, with a gravity and precifion that are truly mathematical: "The force of the mufcles and the fenfibility of the nerves of an innocent perfon being given; it is required to find the degree of pain neceffary to make him confefs himfelf guilty of a given crime." See ACT of Faith, INQUISITION, and TORTURE.