Religious persecution offered much sensational interest in nineteenth-century literary and visual culture. The physical and psychological torments of heroic martyrs – perplexed by conflicting loyalties to state and church, family and conscience – are a stock feature of popular Victorian fictions by both Catholic and Protestant authors. Even though critics derided such works ‘as a “literary nuisance’, the exciting blend of gory tortures, riotous mobs, and wily entrappers of the innocent faithful provided vicarious adventure and spiritual gratification simultaneously. This chapter argues that the complex Victorian rhetoric of Catholic torture, persecution and suffering is of particular importance for understanding nineteenth-century anxieties about the individual's relation to institutional authority, expressed in terms of the rights of the law over the body.