Skeffington’s Daughter

Skeffington’s Daughter is a portable torture device used in the novel’s account of Thomas More’s methods against suspected religious reformers. Its function is presented as both instrumental and coercive: it is intended to extract information about the circulation of prohibited books, while making the body bear the force of interrogation.

Design and Use

The device is described as a frame into which a prisoner is folded, with the knees drawn toward the chest. An iron hoop lies across the back and is tightened by a screw. More’s interrogations seek practical intelligence, such as the identity of a printer or the master of a ship that brought books into England. The frame’s stated purpose is to prolong the prisoner’s survival during questioning, since a death in the device would mean losing whatever information the prisoner possessed.

Association with More’s Campaign

The account places the device among the whip, manacles, and other means reportedly used against religious suspects. More is said to have stood by during torture at the Tower and to have held suspects in the stocks at his gatehouse in Chelsea, where he also pressed them for names and preached to them. These reports make Skeffington’s Daughter part of a system that joins interrogation to religious argument and the policing of printed texts.

The device’s appearance is set against Thomas Cromwell’s efforts to help people caught up in that campaign. When Lucy Petyt visits him, she recounts how Thomas More searched her home and her husband John’s premises for William Tyndale’s Testament. John Petyt is taken to the Tower despite the search producing no discovery; Cromwell offers Lucy help with the costs of bribing gaolers. The episode clarifies the stakes behind the search for names: possession and circulation of reforming scripture could lead to imprisonment and exposure to coercive interrogation.

Contrast with Public Punishment

Skeffington’s Daughter belongs to a wider landscape of state and religious violence in the novel, but its operation differs from an execution. It is a tool of interrogation, whose stated aim is to keep a prisoner alive long enough to speak. Elsewhere, the narrative shows the public burning of an elderly woman condemned for her religious beliefs, and later describes the law’s prescribed punishment for treason. Set beside those scenes, the frame represents violence turned toward extracting information, rather than a sentence whose declared outcome is death.

Narrative Significance

The device makes the pursuit of religious dissent concrete: printed scripture is traced through ports and households, and interrogation seeks the human network that carried it. Its mechanical construction also sharpens the contrast between the language of preaching and the physical means reportedly used to enforce belief. The account does not show the device being applied to a named prisoner; instead, its place in reports about More’s methods establishes the coercive threat surrounding the search for reformers and their books.