WHEEL, BREAKING ON THE, a form of torture (q.v.) or of execution formerly in use in France and Germany, where the victim was placed on a cart-wheel and his limbs stretched out along the spokes. The wheel was made to revolve slowly, and the man's bones broken with blows of an iron bar. Sometimes it was mercifully ordered that the executioner should strike the crim inal on chest or stomach, blows known as coups de grace, which at once ended the torture, and in France he was usually strangled after the second or third blow. A wheel was not always used. In
some countries it was upon a frame shaped like St. Andrew's cross that the sufferer was stretched. The punishment was abol ished in France at the Revolution. It was employed in Germany as late as 1827. A murderer was broken on the row or wheel at Edinburgh in 1604, and two of the assassins of the regent Len nox thus suffered death.