One of the myths we should fight against claims that "patriarchy" has always treated women badly and worse than men. But that's a "feminist fact", not true, in other words. Here are a few citations from the A History of Torture in Britain.

In England, only men were tortured to discover information.

That, I've read elsewhere, was common in Europe - although Scotland was more equal and allowed torturing women, too.

Witches were a different thing, and they were mostly women in England. But

There were no witch hunts in England during the Tudor period of the kind seen in Germany. Witchcraft was certainly against the law, but the penalties were relatively mild.

Later, witches were occasionally tortured, but not to get information but to make them confess so that they could be saved from the eternal torture of hell. In addition, there were a few cases of "unofficial" torture.

One form of cruelty was burning:

After the end of the sixteenth century, only women were burned at the stake in this way, and then only for treason, never, in England, for witchcraft.

But this was not because men wanted to see women suffer, on the contrary:

The punishment of burning alive, used on women who had been found guilty of treason, was actually designed to be an act of mercy! ... they were invariably strangled before being burned.

There were some milder forms of punishments that were at times reserved only for women. These included pillorying and the ducking stool. So, it's not that women were spared form all kinds of humiliating and even painful punishments. But "patriarchy" didn't want to see them suffer in the terrible way men sometimes suffered.

It seems that in rest of the empire women didn't enjoy the same kind of protection as they did in England.