Drake's Chaplain by Bernard Capes — Read

Looking like a man who had fallen from a roof, a pulp of red and grey, with joints heaved out of all relation to anatomy, the prisoner of the Inquisition was haled before his most Catholic Majesty, who sat in a closet of the Escurial eating rich pastry from a salver, and licking his fingers between. A swarthy guard on either side held up the poor wretch, else he would have weltered to the stones, for he had no limbs capable of supporting him. Yet he swaggered in grotesque suggestion, and gave a twisted parody of a laugh. The pitiful, it seemed, where such existed, could endure the sight of his mutilation less than he himself the fact. He was one of those endowed with a constitutional insensibility to pain. That such human anomalies occur, witness the contemporary examples of Gérard, who murdered William the Silent, and Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry of Navarre.

Each endured, jesting and unflinching, the most exquisite tortures, the least of which, one cannot but think, would have killed any man of normal nerves.