n British history, so strong has been the connection between the name Jack Ketch and the horrors of hanging that the name has become a generic term for the public hangman. He is included in virtually all dictionaries of villains and in fact people with an interest in crime history could be forgiven for thinking that he never existed at all. But we know quite a lot about him, in spite of some confusions in the sources. Jack Ketch in popular culture is so popular that his name even lives on in Punch and Judy shows. His name was used as an instrument of fear for children in the same way that parents would use Napoleon Bonaparte - ‘Boney will come and get you!’
The great Victorian historian, Lord Macaulay, said of Ketch that he was, ‘a wretch who had butchered many brave and noble victims, and whose name has, during a century and a half, been vulgarly given to all who have succeeded him in his odious office’.
The hangman’s other skill before the Regency period: using an axe. Popular Educator
A pirate hanged at Execution Dock. Malefactor’s Register, 1800
John Ketch lived in Spread Eagle Alley, north of Bow Street, Westminster and was buried at St James’s, Clerkenwell. According to a publication of 1679 he was imprisoned for debt at one time, but other statements on his life are questionable., such as the idea that he once went on strike to be given more payment for his essential but unsavoury work. It does appear that he was greedy for money; after a hanging in 1683 Ketch complained at what he thought was a measly fee of three guineas; there was an altercation and he was given more. As was the case with so many hangmen., he certainly knew the inside of a gaol and he was in Bridewell in 1686., sacked and replaced by a man called Pascha Rose. It was once thought that he was reinstated but that is not certain. His life generated many tall tales, including the one that he was really a certain Richard Jaquette, Lord of the Manor of Tyburn - a completely false story probably coming from the world of pantomime rather than social history.
The first references to him are in some publications in print around 1678-9. Whether or not he followed a man called Dunn is not clear, but Ketch was acting as hangman in the years 1678-86, and so he was in office when there was a time of great political upheaval and a number of trials for treason. Unfortunately, Ketch’s name is linked forever with the image of the executioner as a drunken, incompetent bungler. But he was definitely involved in hanging the people involved in the Popish Plot of 1678 and the Rye House Plot of 1683; his reputation for barbaric ineptitude comes largely from the mess he made of despatching the Duke of Monmouth to the next life in 1685.
The Popish Plot was hatched by two men, Titus Oates and Israel Tonge, when they came before magistrates in London in 1678 with a massive bundle of lies regarding a supposed Jesuit plot to murder the King, Charles II. The Duke of Monmouth, a Catholic, was therefore allegedly the reason for the plot - that he would restore the Catholic dynasty. Oates was an Anglican priest but he was always in some kind of trouble, and was undoubtedly a petty criminal. He realised that success and status (as well as money and preferment) would come his way if he worked on the plan of inventing a Catholic plot, and in 1677 he became a Catholic, ostensibly to infiltrate the ‘enemy’. There was a massive paranoid response to his lies and a genuine plot was feared by many in high office.
Oates pointed the finger at all kinds of men, and this led to thirty-five executions. But if we need to have an illustration of the man at work, we need to look at the case of Lord William Russell, beheaded at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1683. There were several witnesses there who wrote down their responses, including Sir Charles Lyttelton, who wrote that Ketch tried three times to use the axe, and then still had to saw the remnants of muscle and bone at the neck. Gilbert Burnet was there also, and he wrote that it took two strokes to cut the head.
The Old Bailey and the Sessions House. Malefactor’s Register, 1800
The most remarkable (and also questionable) source we have about Ketch is from a pamphlet called The Apology of John Ketch Esq. Of course, we have no accurate notion of who wrote this; it may well have been what we would now call a ‘ghost writer’ out to make a few groats by fabricating a biography of a notorious public figure. But it is expressed as a defence: ‘Since it is not fit that so public a person as the executioner . . . should lie under the scandal of untrue reports . . .’ The work explains the death of Russell and makes every effort to dismiss the myths and tales, such as the supposed statement by the condemned man:
‘You dog! Did I give you ten guineas to use me so inhumanly?’ If it is a genuine work, written by the man or at his dictates, then there was a great deal to protest about and to explain. Russell had been involved in the Rye House Plot which had been discovered in 1683: it was a plan to depose and possibly kill Charles and his brother James. They were to be taken at Rye House in Hertfordshire as they returned to London from Newmarket.
We are reminded that the hangman had other duties, when we read that Ketch was the man who whipped Titus Oates all the way to his cell at Newgate, and there is an old print that shows Ketch, well-dressed and smart, using two bundles of rods, like the Roman fascia, with Oates tied to the back of a cart. Oates was whipped further when he was moved again, but he was pardoned in 1689 after serving a few years of what was at first a life sentence for perjury. Ketch clearly felt that he had done well in his career and he had been wrongly maligned.
But it was the occasion of the death of the Duke of Monmouth that really put Jack Ketch into the infamous chronicles of history. After Monmouth’s rebellion and defeat at the battle of Sedgemoor in 1685, the trials of the captured rebels were first held at Winchester in August, and the famous ‘Bloody Assizes’ began. The brutal Judge Jeffreys presided and across the South-West, 300 of Monmouth’s supporters were hanged, drawn and quartered. Retribution was extreme and savage; hundreds more were transported to the Caribbean. Jeffreys said openly that any pleas of not guilty would lead to execution; pickled heads and quartered remains of corpses were on show across the land.
Monmouth himself was a client of the horrendous Ketch on Tower Hill on 15 July. It was so widely known that Ketch was incompetent in his bloody trade that the Duke followed the usual practice of giving the hangman money to ensure a quick death. But with Ketch that was not necessarily money well spent. The Duke reportedly said, giving Ketch six guineas, ‘Pray do your business well. Don’t serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him three or four times . . .’
Ketch was troubled and nervous. He failed to decapitate Monmouth after three strikes and then said ‘God damn me I can do no more . . . my heart fails me!’ But he was forced to complete the job, using a knife to sever the last sinews. It comes as no surprise to learn that Ketch was hated. The crowd expected entertainment at the scaffold, and part of that show was to see a clean, swift exit, hopefully after a heartfelt repentance by the felon.
As for the end of the Jack Ketch story, he died at the end of November 1687, shortly after Rose. If Ketch ever came back to serve again, it was for a very short time. One diarist of the time thought that he had done some work in his last months, writing, ‘The 28 May, five men of those lately condemned at the sessions were executed at Tyburn; one of them was poor Pascha Rose, the new hangman, so that now Ketch is restored to his place.’ He may well have served for just a few months; it appears that Ketch was buried on 29 November. Little did he know that his record of killings was so horrendous and the fear he instilled so great that his name would live on in British folklore and popular culture for centuries. Arguably he is the most notorious hangman of them all.