RACK, an engine of torture, furnished with pulleys, cords, &c. for extorting confession 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 ministers of Henry VI. had laid a design 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 derision, Val. XVII. Part II.
the duke of Exeter's daughter, and still remains in the Tower of London, where it was occasionally used as an engine of state, not of law, more than once in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. But when, upon the assassination of Villiers duke of Buckingham, by Felton, it was proposed in the privy council to put the assassin to the rack in order to discover his accomplices; the judges, being consulted, declared unanimously, to their own honour and the honour of the English law, that no such proceeding was allowable by the laws of England. It seems astonishing that this usage of administering the torture should be said to arise from a tenderness to the lives of men; and yet this is the reason given for its introduction in the civil law, and its subsequent adoption by the French and other foreign nations, viz. because the laws cannot endure that any man should die upon the evidence of a false or even a single witness, and therefore contrived this method that innocence should manifest itself by a stout denial, or guilt by a plain confession; thus rating a man's virtue by the hardiness of his constitution, and his guilt by the sensibility of his nerves. The Marquis Beccaria, in an exquisite piece of railing, has proposed this problem, with a gravity and precision that are truly mathematical: "The force of the muscles and the sensibility of the nerves of an innocent person being given; it is required to find the degree of pain necessary to make him confess himself guilty of a given crime". See ACT of FAITH, INQUISITION, and TORTURE.