he will not spare to extend any torture whatsoever". His favourite method (which he may have introduced) was to hang a prisoner by the hands in the gauntlets or manacles, a procedure which, though exquisitely painful, left no permanent injury if properly administered. Improperly administered, it caused permanent internal injury and even death. There is some evidence that he used psychological torture as well, keeping prisoners awake, for instance. Having seen his prisoners through to trial and condemnation, he would then attend the executions as a kind of master of the ceremonies, usually putting up a notice or titulus on the gallows indicating the sufferer's name and offence, and making sure that the full rigours of the sentence — hanging, drawing, and quartering while still alive for those convicted of treason — were carried out. Under the law after 1585, merely being a priest in England was treason. The British literary critic Frank Kermode notes in The Age of Shakespeare that "Topcliffe's copy of a history of the Jesuit mission survives, with his gloating marginalia: beside the name of a missionary the words ‘I racked him,’ beside the name of someone hanged a little stick figure dangling from a gallows.” Unfortunately, Kermode's reference cannot be verified, though Topcliffe, whose official police career began with the searching out of Catholic books, was fond of annotating the books he confiscated and kept. Topcliffe's victims included the Jesuits Robert Southwell, and Henry Walpole. Topcliffe features numerous times in John Gerard, S.J.'s autobiography of his days as a hunted priest in Elizabethan England. In it, he is described as, "old and hoary and a veteran in evil". In early 1592, he or one of his men, Nicholas Jones, raped or seduced a prisoner in the Gatehouse prison, Anne Bellamy, and persuaded her to arrange the capture of the Jesuit priest Robert Southwell at her family's house outside London. When Bellamy married Jones, Topcliffe tried to force her father to give the couple an estate. What became of them is unknown, but the Bellamy family was ruined. Anne Bellamy was the Queen's prisoner, and therefore entitled to her protection, yet no action was taken against Topcliffe over this affair, even though the Queen knew about the pregnancy, and knew that Topcliffe had spirited the woman away to his house in Lincolnshire. In August 1597, the Council commissioned Topcliffe to investigate the play by Ben Jonson