Jack Ketch in The Plotters Ballad (1678-9). Ketch is seen right of center holding a rope and an axe. Jack Ketch, otherwise known as John Ketch or Richard Jaquet, began his twenty-three year career as London’s leading executioner in 1663. He was not the only executioner dispatching the condemned at Tyburn, but he was the most infamous, earning a reputation for brutality remarkable even for a man in his profession. Even after his death in 1686, his name became slang for any executioner, the devil, and even death itself. Overtime, his reputation took on such epic proportions until that he became a sort of bogeyman. So who was he? Like many executioners, Ketch spent much of his early life on the wrong side of the law, and is known to have spent time in Marshalsea Prison. Little is definitively known about his origins. He is first mentioned in the Old Bailey proceedings in January 1676 in the case of a man who was executed for a murder taking place in Whitechapel, and who also killed
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