Page 224 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

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224 EARLY ENGLISH ADVENTURERS IN THE EAST

others of that which is false as God is true : for God is my
witness, I am as innocent as the child new borne.
At length the examinations were complete. The ver­
sion given of them is the English one, but there is no reason
to doubt its substantial accuracy. Though afterwards
Van Speult and his associates challenged the truth of the
allegations that the confessions were extorted by torture
they admitted that torture was used in a minor degree and
the circumstance, in modern eyes at least, will be held to
vitiate the whole proceedings more especially as even in the
Dutch records there is not a scintilla of direct evidence,
apart from the confessions, to bring guilt home to the
prisoners. It is true that Van Speult at a later period
spoke of documentary evidence in his possession connect­
ing Towerson with the conspiracy, but this as far as can
be ascertained was never produced. Nor is it likely that
it existed, for if certain|proofs had been available they would
assuredly have been forthcoming when the justice of the
procedure was violently challenged as it was at a subsequent
stage.
There is a possibility that the details of the torture
have been painted in a little too lurid colours. Men labour­
ing under a great sense of wrong as the survivors were
were not likely to exercise much restraint in relating per­
sonal experiences of a painful land. As far as the use of
torture was concerned it must, too, be remembered that
such was not an uncommon feature of judicial procedure
in that period. Only a few years before the scenes des­
cribed in the Amboina Chamber of Horrors, Guido Fawkes,
the principal conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, had been
placed upon the rack to extort that confession which the H
curious visitor to the Record Office in London inspects

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