Richard Topcliffe
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Richard Topcliffe (1532-1604)
Notorious Elizabethan torturer and sadist. He was a landowner and Member of Parliament who entered the service of William Cecil and worked with Sir Francis Walsingham and the Privy Council.
Topcliffe was involved in the interrogation and torture of many Catholics and Jesuit priests, at a time when Catholics were actively and violently trying to overthrow the Protestant government of England. His victims included Ben Jonson and the Jesuits Robert Southwell, John Gerard, and Henry Garnet.
He gained a reputation as a cruel, relentless, and imaginative torturer who got results. He claimed that his own instruments and methods of torture were more effective than the official ones, and was authorized to create a torture chamber in his own private house in London.
He was involved in a strange legal wrangle with his assistant Thomas Fitzherbet. Fitzherbet had betrayed his own father and uncle as guilty of treason, agreeing to split their forfeited estates with Topcliffe if they were condemned. There was a dispute over whether a victim had died of natural causes or as a result of being tortured by Topcliffe, and Fitzherbert refused to pay. Topcliffe won the case and gained the estates, but a few years later the estates were returned to the Fitzherbet family by Queen Elizabeth I, and Topcliffe was presented with estates in Derbyshire instead.
Topcliffe lived to a ripe old age for the times and died quietly in his bed.