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 version 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 connecting 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 labouring under a great sense of wrong as the survivors were were not hkely to exercise much restraint in relating personal experiences of a painful kind. 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 described 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 curious visitor to the Record Office in London inspects
