Past a certain point, they all suck. Being drawn and quartered sounds pretty bad, although that wood chipper/feet first thing sounds worse.

EDIT: Then there was Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, a feudal warlord of Wallachia, an ancient region of what is now Romania. Vlad, is, of course, Bram Stoker's inspiration for "Dracula", although Vlad Draculya differed markedly from the rather urbane, polished, Hollywood Bela Lugosi version.

In her wonderful book, "The Historian", Elizabeth Kostova" describes Vlad as "...the Wallachian prince, a fifteenth-century ruler, hated by the Ottoman Empire and his own people - both. Really among the nastiest of all medieval European tyrants. It's estimated that he slaughtered at least twenty thousand of his fellow Wallachians and Transylvanians over the years....Actually, there is evidence that Dracula's father gave Dracula over to the Turks when he was a boy as hostage in a political bargain, and that Dracula acquired some of his taste for cruelty from observing Ottoman torture methods."

Vlad (or his henchmen) burned whole families alive. He buried people naked up to their navels, and shot at them until they died. His nickname, Vlad the Impaler, comes from the grisly torture of impalement - shoving a sharpened wooden stake up through the body's genital or anal area with such force that it emerges from the victim's mouth or the top of his/her head.