They say that the scenes of being pressed to death and hung, drawn and quartered were too violent and gory. One woman even said she was sick.

This seems odd to me, as I've read a fair bit around the period and its judicial punishments and in fact was complaining that the scenes in question were far too tame. The hanging, drawing and quartering in particular was far too quick. All over in seconds it was. The chap didn't even have his genitals chopped off and burned in front of him. The disembowelling was done very quickly and he was dead in no time. It was nowhere near drawn out and agonising enough. The executioner would have been in real trouble if he'd underperformed like that.

These people who complained really do need to be reminded that what they're moaning about is a very anodyne version of the true horrors people are capable of inflicting on one another. God help them if they ever have to witness representations of actual punishments of the time such as flaying alive (where boiling water was thrown over the victim to loosen up the skin before it was ripped off by tongs), breaking on the wheel (where the trussed-up victim simply had all their bones smashed with a metal bar), or the one where red hot pincers were used to rip muscle, sinews and tendons away from the still-living body for as much as an hour before death.

Human beings, eh? Lovely lot.