Until I started researching and writing Death’s Bright Angel, my knowledge of the Great Fire of London came from a combination of general knowledge, facts learned at school, TV programmes, Pepys’ diary, and a couple of books on the matter, read more than a decade ago. I suspect, if pushed, most people would admit similar. However, I’d also taught the subject quite often, usually to twelve year olds (Year 8, in British education parlance), frequently employing ancient BBC educational programmes with shockingly cheap special effects. It’s a subject that goes down well with schoolchildren – lots of drama and destruction, vivid first-hand accounts, even some humour (‘he buried a cheese?’), and best of all, nobody dies; well, hardly anybody. Unsurprisingly, the Great Fire is a mainstay of the National Curriculum in History for schools in England and Wales, and some ten children’s books about it have been published since 1995 alone. Within the same period, three full-length, fully referenced adult studies of the Fire have also gone into print.
I duly read or re-read all three of these books, and several earlier ones, as research for Death’s Bright Angel, and as I did so, felt a mounting disquiet. All described mid-seventeenth-century London, the actual course of the Fire, and its various aftermaths, competently enough – sometimes quite brilliantly. But when it came to the aspect in which I was most interested, the different theories circulating at the time to explain why the Fire began, and especially the confessions, trial, and execution, of the supposedly simple-minded French watchmaker Robert Hubert, alarm bells rang.
All recent books on the Fire explicitly derive large parts of their accounts – of the theories, of the Fire’s outbreak in Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane, – from a single earlier secondary source, The Great Fire of London by Walter George Bell. This was originally published in 1923 and republished several times since, and the principal primary source upon it relied, William Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, was published between 1809 and 1826, incorporating earlier material from editions dating back to 1719. All the modern books accept without question Bell’s judgement that ‘this fact (the accidental outbreak in the bakery) does not admit of doubt… the judgment that must result from a calm consideration of the evidence, [is] that the Fire in its origin was due to carelessness, and was not criminal’.
What of it? Surely all that Bell (a journalist and astronomer, incidentally, not a historian) did was follow the orthodoxy rapidly accepted by enlightened contemporaries like Samuel Pepys, the orthodoxy allegedly followed by the Lord Chief Justice who had actually sentenced Hubert and which, when partisan fervour and religious bigotry eventually died down, became accepted by most of the general public, too? The Great Fire began by accident; as I indicated in the note at the beginning of this book, Robert Hubert’s confession to having started it was written off almost immediately, as it has been ever since, as the rambling of a madman who did not even arrive in London until after the Fire began.
Even so, I wanted to see exactly how Bell reached the conclusions, upon which all recent books about the Fire depend. I also wanted to examine the source material about Robert Hubert in a more forensic way than has been attempted before, and to see if there were any sources that had been completely ignored in previous studies. This might seem a curiously intensive research strategy for a work of fiction, but I knew from the outset that the storyline for Death’s Bright Angel would only have sufficient drama if it posited arson, or strong suspicions of arson, as the cause of the Great Fire. To make the book as convincing as possible, I knew I had to investigate that possibility as rigorously as I could.
In other words: once a historian, always a historian.
In Chapter Eight of this book, Matthew Quinton is briefed by Aphra Behn and the Earl of Ravensden about the extraordinary number of rumours and threats circulating during the summer of 1666 – what might now be termed ‘terrorist chatter’. I took a liberty by bringing the doyenne of women playwrights back to London, when she actually spent the whole of that year in Antwerp, but as the plot of this book posits, she was certainly in Surinam, then an English colony, in 1663-4, when she was already acting as an agent for Charles II’s government, a role she was still playing in Spanish Flanders in 1666 under the code name of Astraea (the elusive Mr Behn having died sometime between those dates, after a very brief marriage).
I also invented the names and ‘back stories’ of the book’s ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, with the debatable exception of the final plot twist concerning Stephen Piedloe. Apart from those elements of dramatic licence, everything recounted to Matthew in that chapter was actual intelligence that came before the King’s government during that year, and the Rathbone Plot took place exactly as described. Rumours about potential rebel leaders called ‘Mene Tekel’ and ‘the Precious Man’ were legion, while it was widely believed that something dramatic, even cataclysmic, would take place on or around 3 September, the anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell and of two of his greatest victories, the battles of Dunbar and Worcester. Above all, many preachers, pundits and bar-room recidivists galore held forth on the supposed significance of the year 1666 itself: the date containing the number of the Beast.
As with all predictions (to date) of the world’s end, this was a potent blend of wishful thinking, paranoia and hysteria. But the fact that the Great Fire of London took place after so many predictions, so many prophecies (even, inevitably, one from Nostradamus), and so much prayer on the part of the disaffected, was simply too great a coincidence for many at the time, and for many years afterwards. Just as on 9/11 and other occasions, the official explanation was just too pat. There had to have been some greater conspiracy afoot. Unfortunately for those of this mindset, the Great Fire of London’s Osama Bin Laden (or Dick Cheney, depending on your viewpoint) seemed to be a mentally ill twenty-six-year-old French watchmaker named Robert Hubert.
In a nutshell, the commonly accepted story is this.
During and after the Fire, many Londoners maintained that not only was the blaze begun deliberately, but that they had actually witnessed people starting fires (or, as is often the way in such cases, they knew someone who claimed to have witnessed it). In the short term, such stories helped generate the wave of xenophobia leading to several attacks on and attempted lynchings of French and Dutch residents of London in particular. A Frenchman was nearly torn apart because he was found to be carrying several ‘fireballs’, which turned out to be tennis balls. A poor widow was attacked on suspicion of having fireballs in her apron, and closer inspection revealed them to be chickens. This is the real historical (and hysterical) context underpinning the fictional attack on Cornelia Quinton and Captain Ollivier in this book.
Many of these tales of arson were eventually recounted to the Parliamentary investigation into the disaster, and are considered in more detail below, but one in particular developed an unstoppable momentum. This was the odd saga of one Robert Hubert, a twenty-six-year-old French watchmaker, who left the City after the Fire (as did many foreigners, fleeing both the flames and the wrath of the Londoners). He was apparently heading to one of the east coast ports when he was apprehended in the Romford area and taken before Carey Harvie, a Justice of the Peace, at Havering-atte-Bower.
The tale Hubert told Harvie was extraordinary. He claimed to have been one of twenty-four men, led by a fellow Frenchman named Stephen Piedloe, who had set out to destroy London. (Subsequently, Hubert would claim they originally intended to do so in 1665, but abandoned that plan due to the plague.) Hubert even confessed to Harvie that he had thrown a fireball into a building – although he said this was near the palace of Whitehall, and that he only did so after the fire in the City itself was already raging.
Hubert was sent up to London, to the White Lion Gaol in Southwark. He appeared at the substitute Old Bailey in October, and now told a different story. Now there were just four arsonists, including himself and Piedloe. He, Hubert, had been recruited in Paris by someone ‘that he did not know, having never seen him before’. Hubert and Piedloe went to Stockholm, for reasons unknown, but took passage in a ship which brought them to London at the end of August. During the night of 1-2 September, Piedloe took him ashore, ending up before the bakery in Pudding Lane, where he told Hubert to put a fireball through a window. Hubert attached a ball to a long pole, lit it, and put it into the building, waiting to be certain that it was ablaze before making off. He claimed to be a Catholic, and to have carried out the attack for money. He had only received one gold coin from Piedloe, with a promise of five more when they got back to France. Despite all the contradictions in his evidence, Hubert clinched the case against himself by insisting on being taken by his gaoler, John Lowman, to identify the site of the bakery amidst the charred rubble of Pudding Lane, which he duly did, despite Lowman’s best efforts to confuse him and get him to retract.
Some contemporaries clearly found it all unlikely, not least because the Farriners – who had good cause to encourage belief in Hubert’s guilt – stated that there had never been a window where Hubert claimed to have inserted the fireball. Hubert’s evidence was full of contradictions, and he pleaded not guilty at the beginning of his trial, thus effectively retracting his confession before Harvie, before reaffirming the confession once again, and then retracting it again on the scaffold. Even the notoriously draconian Lord Chief Justice Kelyng, who presided over the trial, said of Hubert, ‘all his discourse was so disjointed that he did not believe him guilty’. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, claimed that ‘nobody present credited anything [Hubert] said’, concluding that he must have been ‘a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it this way’. Sir Edward Harley, one of the MPs who examined Hubert, reported that ‘he said some extravagant things that savoured of a disordered mind’. But, faced with a confession that the accused simply refused to retract, despite all the doubts over its veracity, the jury had no alternative but to convict. Robert Hubert was hanged at Tyburn on 17 October 1666; his body, intended for dissection by the Barber Surgeons Company, was reputedly torn apart by a furious mob (‘reputedly’ being inadequate evidence for a historian, but ideal for a novelist seeking an ending for his book). Fifteen years later, the Swedish captain of the Milkmaid, the ship that supposedly carried Hubert to London, provided written evidence that he could not have started the Great Fire. According to the captain, Hubert did not go ashore until Tuesday, 4 September, two days after the blaze broke out in Pudding Lane. London had hanged an innocent man, albeit one who’d been determined to convince everybody he was guilty.
For many, Hubert’s guilt was unquestionable. The Great Fire was a tragedy so colossal, taking place against a backdrop of so many signs and portents, that it could only have been started deliberately. Hubert was French, a citizen of an enemy country; the French were mostly Catholics; therefore Hubert was a Catholic, as he himself testified (although virtually everyone who knew him judged him to be a Protestant). By the perverse form of circular logic employed by seventeenth-century English Protestants, Catholics were assumed to be arsonists, and vice-versa. ‘Papists’, especially foreign Papists, were ‘the other’ of the age, the archetypal bogeyman, cast in the same role that Jews, witches, Communists and Muslims have played in other eras. In seventeenth-century England, though, this fearful mindset seemed to be supported by the lessons of history – the burnings of Protestant martyrs by ‘Bloody Mary’, the Gunpowder Plot, the stories of the treatment of English sailors at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and so forth. The Jesuits were even believed to run entire colleges where they trained fire-raisers. In the seventeenth century, Catholicism was synonymous with fire: QED.
Cobbett, Bell, and the authors who have relied on their accounts, all reject such simplistic thinking, and take the more rational – and more comfortable – line that Hubert was a simpleton, who, for whatever reason, confessed to a blaze that started accidentally. At the same time, these authors have sometimes turned equally unreliable hearsay and second-hand gossip into gospel. For example, the suggestion, repeated uncritically in some modern accounts, that Hubert was disabled, and thus physically incapable of lifting a fireball on a long pole, seems to have first appeared in issue 370 of The Observator, published in 1683, a source I’ll examine in detail later. According to its author,
I am told, that Hubert had a dead palsy on one side, one arm useless, and much ado to trail one leg after him; was not this a fit man to manage a long pole, clap a fireball to the end of it, and this fireball to be put into a window, where there was no window at all?… Here’s Hubert, a lame, creeping miserable wretch, a Protestant brought over in a ship, that was not designed to come hither, a known madman singled out for a conspiracy. Here’s Hubert setting the town a fire with a long pole, that must reach from St Katharine’s [Dock] to Pudding Lane; and in short, he’s as mad as Hubert, that does believe it, and a Jesuit that does not.
Even though the opening remark (‘I am told’) should have rung some alarm bells, this assertion was repeated in pamphlets throughout the eighteenth century, and eventually became accepted orthodoxy. In fact, the only basis for all this seems to be John Lowman’s statement that he placed Hubert on a horse ‘by reason of his lameness’. It was never suggested that this would have prevented him lifting a long pole to a window, and Lowman, who was seemingly determined to undermine Hubert’s confession if he could, would surely have mentioned such a severe disability.
There is a similar silence in other contemporary sources. The best chronicler of the age, Samuel Pepys, who invariably recorded such things in minute detail, relates a conversation he had on 24 February 1667 with Sir Robert Vyner, the King’s goldsmith, who had been the Sheriff of London at the time of the Fire. Vyner referred explicitly to the issue of the fireball being stuck through the window. He did not argue that Hubert could not have done this due to an infirmity, merely that the Farriners had said no such window existed. Instead, Vyner stated that he found the Frenchman ‘though a mopish besotted fellow, [he] did not speak like a madman’.
Vyner’s interestingly nuanced assessment was supplanted in later years by the orthodoxy that Hubert was simple-minded, and would confess to anything: what would now be called a serial confessor. For example, Observator 370, as well as trumpeting (and perhaps greatly exaggerating) Hubert’s supposed ‘disability’, also claimed that the watchmaker had previously confessed to a murder and was to be hanged for it, but the day before he was meant to go to the gallows, the real murderer was caught and Hubert set free. There appears to be no corroboration at all for this statement.
A similar story can be seen across the board in the literature about the Great Fire: secondhand ‘evidence’, or pure hearsay, has become accepted fact. Many authoritative-looking references citing pages in Cobbett’s State Trials (could any book wish for a more intimidatingly impressive title?) are actually citing the footnotes on those pages, which are not drawn from accounts of ‘state trials’ at all. Instead, those notes comprise lengthy quotations from other vaguely contemporary, but sometimes deeply flawed, partisan accounts pedalling rumours that circulated years after the Fire. Such sources include the Earl of Clarendon’s Life, essentially just second-hand recollections of some trial evidence, written in exile, from memory rather than documentary sources, six years after the Fire. The History of My Own Time, written by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, largely in the early eighteenth century, was a partial, error-strewn and unreliable narrative, with most statements about the Great Fire being explicitly secondhand and prone to namedropping (‘[Archbishop] Tillotson told me…’, ‘was told me by…the Countess of Clarendon’, and so forth). Several other of these misleadingly quoted works were written even later: Laurence Echard’s History of England (1718), Paul Rapin de Thoyras’ Histoire d’Angleterre (1723-5), John Oldmixon’s Critical History of England (1724-6), and James Ralph’s History of England (1744-6). Fortunately, it is possible to get past this edifice of myth-building, and to study some of the original sources relating to Robert Hubert, rather than much later printed versions. These sources paint a very different picture.
The original of Hubert’s first deposition, taken before Carey Harvie or Hervey, Justice of the Peace, at Havering-atte-Bower on 11 September 1666, survives in the Mildmay manuscripts at Somerset Record Office, Taunton, but this document seems not to have been studied – and has certainly not been quoted – by any previous writer on the Great Fire of London. The deposition contains a number of deletions and amendments, casting new light on the story.
According to it, Hubert left France about the middle of the previous Lent (‘5 or 6 months since’ was crossed through; the middle of Lent would have been about the end of the third week in March) with a French gentlemen named ‘Piedelow’, with whom he travelled to Sweden. They spent three or four months there before going to London, where ‘Piedelow’ gave him a fire ball, keeping two others for himself, ‘wishing him when the city was on fire [my italics] to cast the same ball into an house [sic] in Whitehall’. But ‘in Whitehall’, repeated slightly later in the document too, was an afterthought or correction; the original location written down, but then crossed through, was ‘in London’. Piedelow gave Hubert a shilling in advance, promising him ‘a greater reward when they came into France’. Hubert carried the fire ball ‘some time about him in his pocket’ before throwing it into a house; ‘in the window’ was added.
After the City was ablaze, Hubert claimed he went aboard a Swedish ship moored near St Katherine’s Dock, by the Hartshorn brewhouse, ‘where Piedelow was, and saith that he should be well rewarded when he came into France [the passage in italics was inserted subsequently]’. (It is interesting that Hubert was so precise about the location of the ship and so vague, in this deposition at least, about the location of the house he claimed to have set on fire.)
The next sentence is particularly important, and is printed here as it appears in the manuscript deposition: ‘the master’s name of that ship was Skipper Schipper, and that was also the name of the ship master of the ship was Skipper Schipper’. Clearly both Hubert and the clerk recording the deposition were confused, which probably explains the unlikely repetition. According to Hubert, though, the mysterious ship master gave him leave to go ashore and confer with Piedelow, ‘if he could find him and go about his business’. This phrase was inserted into the text and then effectively repeated a second time, but with one crucial difference crossed through, and thus absent from the printed versions. Hubert seems to have said originally that ‘the master and Piedelow’ told him to go about his business.
Hubert was sent to the White Lion Gaol in Southwark, and on 16 September, indicted before the Middlesex Assizes, charged as follows:
True Bill that, at St. Martin’s (-in-the-Fields), county Middlesex on the said day, Robert Hubert late of the said parish, labourer, set fire to a certain fire-ball compounded of gunpowder brimstone and other combustible matter, and with it fired and destroyed the dwelling-house of a certain man to the jurors unknown. Robert Hubert put himself ‘Not Guilty’ to this indictment, process on which ceased, because the said Robert was hung in London on another indictment.
This corresponds to the evidence in the Havering-atte-Bower deposition, namely that Hubert attacked a house ‘in Whitehall’; and it provides the intriguing lead that Hubert was a ‘local’, a resident (at least occasionally) of the parish of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields. All of this, though, must have been overtaken by events, because Hubert simply went back to prison. Meanwhile, two separate official investigations into the causes of the fire got under way. The first was ordered by the King, under the auspices of the Privy Council, and was chaired by the Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Kelyng. On 25 September, too, the House of Commons appointed its own committee of no fewer than seventy members, chaired by the young and fiercely independent-minded Sir Robert Brooke, MP for Aldeburgh, to enquire into the causes of the disaster, and this began sitting the next day. It heard many supposed ‘eyewitness’ accounts of Catholic and/or Dutch and/or French incendiarism, although the committee had not formally reported by the time Parliament was prorogued on 8 February 1667, and it was never reconvened.
Thus Robert Hubert’s was simply one of many depositions given to the committee. It was set down as follows (spellings, etc, modernised):
Robert Hubert of Rouen in Normandy, who acknowledged that he was one of those that Fired the House of Mr. Farriner a Baker in Pudding-Lane, from whence the Fire had its beginning, confessed, that he came out of France with one Stephen Piedloe about four months before the Fire, and went into Sweden with him, where he also stayed with him as his Companion four months, and then they came together into England in a Swedish Ship called the Skipper, where he stayed on board with the said Piedloe till that Saturday night, in which the Fire broke out. When Piedloe taking him out of the Ship, carried him into Pudding Lane, and he [Hubert] being earnest to know whither he [Piedloe] would carry him? he would not satisfy him till he had brought him to the place, and then he told him, that he had brought three [fire] Balls, and gave him one of them to throw into the house. And he would have been further satisfied in the design, as he said, before he would execute it: But Piedloe was so impatient that he would not hear him, and then he did the Fact, which was, That he put a fireball at the end of a long Pole, and lighting it with a piece of Match, he put it in at a Window, and stayed till he saw the House in a flame. He confessed that there were three and twenty accomplices, whereof Piedloe was the Chief.
There is no suggestion that the committee originally placed any more weight on Hubert’s testimony than on any other evidence it heard, much of which was fanciful, much pure hearsay. There was even an attempt to attribute dire significance to something an Irishman had supposedly said in a pub, a species of evidence not normally considered legally watertight. As one of the MPs serving on the committee noted, ‘all the allegations are very frivolous and people are generally satisfied that the fire was accidental’.
Perhaps inevitably, accusations had been levelled against Monsieur Belland of Marylebone, the King’s French firework-maker, who was supposedly hunted down by a mob and found hiding in Whitehall Palace. William Champneys, hatband maker of Horselydown, came across a constable in Shoe Lane who had arrested a Frenchman for throwing fireballs, and asked Champneys to assist him; the Frenchman was supposedly turned over to the Life Guards. Yet another Frenchman was seized in Southwark, supposedly carrying fireballs on his person, was turned over to the Guards, and again disappeared without trace; and a man allegedly caught in the act of firing a house in West Smithfield was seized at gunpoint by the Guards from the clutches of the mob. Still another fire-raising Frenchman was arrested by a constable who then propitiously encountered the Duke of York, who took the man off into his own custody, saying ‘I will secure him.’ Again,
On Monday the third of September, there was a Frenchman taken firing a House; and upon searching of him, fireballs were found about him. At which time four of the Life Guard rescued the Frenchman, and took him away from the People, after their usual manner in the whole time of the Fire. [emphasis in original source]
Nothing more was heard of these stories, several of which seem like attempts to suggest that the King’s Guards, the King’s brother, and by implication the King himself, were in league with Papist and foreign arsonists. This agenda was favoured by many inhabitants of London, and not a few members of the parliamentary committee of enquiry.
The brief ‘headings’ Sir Robert Brooke reported to Parliament on 22 January 1667, other evidence supposedly submitted to his committee, and the evidence given at Hubert’s trial, were combined into a pamphlet entitled A True and Faithful Account of the Several Informations, published in 1667. This found its way into later collections of ‘primary’ sources, including Cobbett’s State Trials, thus becoming the basis for much of Bell’s account, and more recent books about the Great Fire. Sources that did not end up in the True and Faithful Account, on the other hand, or in the equally accessible Calendar of State Papers – such as the original Havering-atte-Bower deposition and the record of Hubert’s appearance before the Middlesex sessions – have been ignored. In one sense, they make Hubert’s story even more confused and self-contradictory than it already appears to be. They also pose new and problematic questions.
Hubert’s appearance before the parliamentary committee was generally recognised to be pathetic: he was described shortly afterwards as ‘an inconsiderable fellow’, and it was said that ‘little credit has hitherto been given to his discourse’. Nevertheless, the alternative royal-sponsored enquiry into the fire found the case against him serious enough to press charges. Hubert was indicted on 8 October, and went for trial before the London City assizes. It is worth noting that three of the signatories to the letter of indictment were Thomas Farriner, the owner of the bakery in Pudding Lane, his son, and his daughter, for whom the Frenchman’s confession must have been a godsend. Without it, the entire population of London would have blamed the Farriners for the Great Fire.
However, the assumption that Farriner, or one of his family or employees, made a careless mistake on the night of 1-2 September 1666, and sought to offload the blame onto Hubert, is too easy. There were suggestions that some fuel had been placed next to, or even in, one of the bread ovens, to allow its more speedy lighting the next morning. Farriner, who had the contract for supplying the Navy with ship’s biscuit (which seems to be the sole reason for so many sources describing him as ‘the King’s baker’) could have been under pressure to fulfil a bulk order for a fleet six weeks away from port. At the same time, though, he would have been more aware than most of the dangers of fire, and must have followed exactly the same routine to guard against it every single night of the thirty-seven years since he’d begun his apprenticeship.
Moreover, as Matthew Quinton points out in Chapter Sixteen, if you wished to start a fire that was likely to cause significant damage in London during the dry summer of 1666, regardless of the direction of the wind, you would almost certainly start it somewhere near Pudding Lane, given the immediate proximity of countless warehouses, wharves, and workshops, filled with highly flammable material. And you would certainly start it on a Sunday, when fewer people would have been up and about to fight any fire.
Hubert’s confession inevitably focused attention entirely upon him, but this has led to a dismissal of all other accounts of the Fire’s origins. Quite apart from all the stories recorded by the Brooke committee, there was the testimony of Edward Taylor, a ten year old boy, who testified before Lord Lovelace on 9 September that he, his father and his Dutch uncle, John Taylor, had set off fireballs in Farriner’s bakery and elsewhere in London. There is also a previously unknown – or, at least, uncited – letter about the Great Fire in the National Library of Wales, written on 6 September, from an anonymous correspondent in London to one of the Wynn family of Gwydir, on the Caernarfonshire-Denbighshire border, suggesting that at least some contemporaries believed in a middle ground between the ‘conspiracy’ and ‘cock-up’ theories. This letter suggested that the fire did break out accidentally in Farriner’s bakery, but was then spread by the ‘malstring industry’ of the French and Dutch using fireballs, of which the writer claimed to have seen one or two. A similar tale appears in a letter from John Tremayne, a nineteen-year-old student at the Inner Temple, to his father Colonel Lewis Tremayne of Heligan in Cornwall. Although the surviving version was written on 22 September, it repeats the information given in a letter John had sent on the eighth, but which had apparently miscarried. John Tremayne provides a dramatic eyewitness account of proceedings:
we were all in arms in the beginning, it being certainly said that it was a plot, but I rather think it God’s judgment for our sins and devil ways; though I saw several French & Dutch taken with fire balls setting houses on fire, and some of them in woman’s clothes, yea there were some English taken likewise. One I saw taken in the Temple garden with fire balls, but would not confess what he kept them for; God be praised, the villains never gathered to any head, though several outcries were made to that purpose, and one in the night which forced us to leave all in the fields [and] take arms, but it was presently over. They fired also several places [such] as Southwark, Westminster behind the Abbey, St Martins in the Fields, etc. There were several taken and killed outright: one woman that had fire balls was drawn in pieces per the multitude, and any that had but the look of a Frenchman was taken and carried to prison, or cut and slashed per the people, they were so violently bent against the French.
These two previously unpublished sources corroborate Robert Hubert’s original deposition (as well as, potentially, some of the other tales of arson attacks too), which stated that the French watchmaker threw a fireball into a house somewhere in London after the fire had already begun. Both letters were written privately, before Hubert made his deposition, so none of these sources could have drawn on any of the others.
In one sense, though, Hubert made a perfect scapegoat, and not just for the Farriners. If the Great Fire was an accident, tenants would have to rebuild their burned properties at their own expense. If it was arson, carried out by a subject of a nation with which England was at war, the tenants would not be liable. From the point of view of most Londoners, then, the self-confessed guilt of Robert Hubert could not have been more fortuitous.
It was this decision over legal responsibility that encouraged tenants to rebuild their properties rapidly, on the same footings, and within much the same street pattern, thereby stifling at birth the ambitious plans developed by Sir Christopher Wren and others for a new, more rationally laid-out London, with wider streets and grand vistas. If someone was setting out to arrange such a thing, then, a Great Fire of London that could be pinned on a ‘lone gunman’ – or rather, a lone Frenchman – was truly the ‘insurance scam’ from Heaven. There may be sinister significance to the way Hubert’s testimony shifted from him attempting to fire a house ‘near Whitehall’ (in other words, outside the City of London), back to what he seems originally to have said at Havering-atte-Bower before his deposition was modified, namely that the house was ‘in London’ (that is, strictly speaking, within the City). His insistence on identifying the Pudding Lane bakery as his target, meanwhile, seemingly clinched the matter.
In 1666 and thereafter, it suited the royal and civic authorities to demonstrate that Hubert was a Protestant madman who, if he attacked anything at all, attacked a building outside the City. Conversely, it suited London property holders, and the fevered mood of public opinion, to demonstrate that he was a Catholic terrorist who threw a fireball into Farriner’s bakery, within the City. Whether the impressionable Hubert was ever ‘leaned on’ to ensure his testimony conformed to the latter story will never be known. What we do know is that the crime he was charged with, and apparently confessed to, changed between 16 September and 8 October 1666, from throwing a fireball into an unspecified house in the parish of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields (consistent with his original Havering-atte-Bower deposition), a charge to which he pleaded not guilty, into throwing one into Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane, to which he pleaded guilty. Quite how and why this came about remains a moot point.
Robert Hubert is always assumed to have been a watchmaker, despite the Middlesex Sessions indictment describing him as a ‘labourer’. But no one, to date, has analysed this assumption, or the generally held belief that Hubert’s father was a famous watchmaker of Rouen. In fact, significant information about the Hubert dynasty is accessible. In 2014, the clock museum at Saint Nicholas d’Aliermont, near Dieppe, mounted a substantial exhibition of the work of Normandy watch- and clockmakers of the seventeenth century, the catalogue of which, available online, includes much information about the Huberts.
The founding father was Noel Hubert, who died in 1654; he seems to have had eight sons, several of whom became noted watchmakers in their own right, as did several of their sons in turn. Robert Hubert ‘the arsonist’ has not been directly connected to this family tree, but this signifies nothing. For one thing, there were several other Huberts in Rouen, working in related crafts, and almost certainly brothers, cousins or nephews of Noel Hubert. In 1660, for example, Timothy and Salomon Hubert were master locksmiths in the city, and are known to have been related to Noel. Moreover, the known grandsons of Noel Hubert were all born between 1634 and 1654, which would place Robert’s likely birthdate of 1640 squarely in the right timeframe for that generation of the family. The increasingly vicious persecution of French Huguenots after 1660, mentioned in this book in the context of Captain Ollivier, ultimately led many members of the Hubert family to seek their fortunes elsewhere. By the 1680s, 1690s and 1700s, family members could be found in Geneva (an important connection, to which I’ll return), Amsterdam, and, indeed, London, where David Hubert, a great-grandson of Noel, was a prominent member of the Watchmakers Company by 1714.
One further, critical, piece of evidence should be emphasised: Robert Hubert was almost certainly not a Roman Catholic, although his various contradictory statements muddied the waters. Further confusion was introduced by a visit supposedly made to him in prison by Father Harvey, confessor to the much-mistrusted, Portuguese and devoutly Catholic Queen. Some accounts have Harvey converting Hubert to Rome; others have Hubert refusing to renounce his Protestant faith. Still others, always second-hand, maintain that on the scaffold Hubert recanted both his confession and his apocryphal conversion, thus dying a Protestant.
Despite being a publication that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, Observator 370 stated categorically that Hubert was a Huguenot, and that the French Protestant Church in Stockholm could testify to the truth of that. I contacted that church’s modern day incarnation, the Franska Reform Kyrkan, but it does not hold records from before the mid-eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the weight of evidence tends to confirm that Hubert was, indeed, Protestant, from a staunchly Protestant family. The 2014 exhibition catalogue from the museum in Saint Nicholas d’Aliermont indicates that the Hubert family was Catholic until the first quarter of the seventeenth century, but all members, without exception, then became Protestant, and in later decades, their response to the persecution of the Huguenots was absolutely typical of the French Protestant experience. It is highly unlikely, although not impossible, for Robert Hubert to have been a Catholic. Later in this account, too, previously unknown evidence will be presented about Hubert’s possible Huguenot connections in Stockholm.
The political and legal squabbles over what Robert Hubert was – Protestant madman, or Papist conspirator? – also shaped the emergence, fifteen years afterwards, of the next substantial evidence about the outbreak of the Fire, Hubert’s potential role in it, and the shadowy Stephen ‘Peidelow’, or Piedloe.
Amid all the contradictions and confusions in Hubert’s various statements, one element is consistent and unshakeable: his insistence on the existence, and central role in the outbreak of the Great Fire, of Stephen Piedloe. Moreover, unlike most other elements of Hubert’s story, there appears to be corroboration for at least part of this. A man named Graves, a French merchant of St Mary Axe, testified that he had known Hubert since he was four years old, and had visited the watchmaker in prison (where Hubert had supposedly confessed his guilt to him). Graves said he knew Piedloe, too, and described him as ‘a very debauched person, and apt to any wicked design’.
This, in turn, invites us to ponder Monsieur Graves. There is no trace of any individual by that name in the area around St Mary Axe, or in the City as a whole, in the 1666 Hearth Tax for London, but that is not necessarily suspicious. A Josephe Graves had been a vintner in St Helen’s Bishopsgate, immediately adjacent to St Mary Axe, during the 1640s, so could well have been the same man, especially as this would probably make him about the same age as Hubert’s father, whom he also claimed to know. Moreover, Hubert’s original deposition at Havering-atte-Bower stated that Piedloe ‘had a chamber in London’, a sentence subsequently crossed out and thus absent from all published accounts of the Fire. If that was so, then as members of the French expatriate community, Graves, Hubert and Piedloe could have known each other, perhaps even worshipped together at the Huguenot Church in Threadneedle Street. In any event, it seems probable that Hubert and Piedloe knew the geography of London well.
We cannot be certain about the origins of the name ‘Piedloe’, which is also spelled ‘Peidelow’ in some contemporary sources and ‘Peidlo’ in slightly later printings. However, Piedleu or Piedeleu is an old French surname, common in Normandy and Brittany, and conspiracy theorists may delight in the fact that it means ‘wolf’s foot’. A William and Simon Piedeleu seem to have been merchants of Amiens, trading with the city of London as early as 1367. Various Piedeleus were prominent in civil life in Rouen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; one held the noble title of Sieur d’Aunay, and to provide yet more grist to the mill for conspiracy theorists, several were prominent Freemasons. Marie Piedeleu was one of the first women in Rouen to obtain a divorce, after the French Revolution legalised the practice; and Piedeleus can still be found in Rouen (and even at Oxford University) today. So, again, it is possible that a Stephen ‘Piedloe’ could have known Robert Hubert, and probably his father too, through the Rouen connection, and could have moved in circles that made him known to the prominent London-based French merchant, Monsieur Graves.
Hubert’s evidence is so confused, and contemporaries’ confirmation of his simple-mindedness so substantial, that it is difficult to accept him as the instigator of the Great Fire. Hubert was in any case posthumously provided with an alibi by the captain of the ship who brought him to London, Lawrence Peterson, who wrote a letter on 17 December 1681 stating that Hubert could not have started the fire, as he was aboard his ship when it began.
There are several problems with Peterson’s evidence, quite apart from the obvious question of why it took him fifteen years to come forward. First, who was Laurence Peterson? Hubert never actually named him; in his original deposition, the name of the captain of the ship he went aboard was ‘Skipper’, or Schipper. Not one witness who came forward in 1666 named this man in connection with Robert Hubert. But there certainly was a Captain Laurence Peterson, in the right place at the right time, as evidence produced hereafter will confirm, so we can take it for granted that he wrote the letter attributed to him.
Peterson’s letter of 17 December 1681 stated that Hubert had been aboard his ship, near St Katherine’s, when the fire broke out, having not gone ashore at all previously. The Frenchman ‘did seem to rejoice and say, Fery well, fery well, which with the word Yes, yes, was all the English he could speak’, at which Peterson took offence and clapped him in the hold. According to the Swede, Hubert managed to escape through a scuttle and got ashore at ‘Mr Corsell’s’ quay, where the captain saw him being seized by the mob. This was the wharf adjoining Hartshorn’s brewhouse, the building mentioned in Hubert’s Havering-atte-Bower disposition. (Abraham Corsellis, who owned the business, was a wealthy brewer of Flemish origins, whose family became so respectable in English society that his grandson went to Eton and became an MP.)
The flaw in Peterson’s evidence here is that Hubert was not arrested in London on 4 September, but in Essex seven days later. It is possible, of course, that Peterson either lied about, or ‘misremembered’, the timing of Hubert’s going ashore and how, when and where he ended up captured. But he made no reference to Stephen Piedloe having been aboard his ship: a curious omission, given the precision of other recollections from fifteen years earlier. The remainder of Peterson’s evidence, too, stretches credibility. Peterson stated that he never heard of Hubert again until he went to his father in Rouen to claim back the three pounds ten shillings he was owed for the son’s passage in the ship. At this, the father said his son had been hanged for starting the Great Fire of London; ‘which much amazed this informant, he well knowing the contrary to be true’.
Why did Laurence Peterson wait fifteen years before providing a statement setting out his recollections of Robert Hubert and the Great Fire of London? The political context of the period might explain things. On 10 January 1681, the House of Commons resolved ‘that it is the opinion of this House, that the City of London was burnt in the Year One thousand Six hundred Sixty-and-six, by the Papists; designing thereby to introduce arbitrary Power and Popery into this Kingdom’. This was one of a series of resolutions passed by a House consumed by fears of the (entirely fabricated) ‘Popish Plot’, and which was determined to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from the succession through the efforts of the new, ferociously anti-Catholic ‘Whig party’. Charles II’s response was to prorogue, and shortly afterwards to dissolve, this Parliament. Another met at Oxford in March, but this, too, was swiftly dissolved, and a loyalist backlash began, with another new party, the pro-crown and anti-exclusion Tories, at its heart. It was in this frenzied atmosphere that the virulently anti-Catholic passage, quoted by Matthew Quinton in the prologue, was added to Wren’s Monument. For some time, there was real prospect of a new civil war: on 2 September, the fifteenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Fire, 20,000 Protestant apprentices of London presented an address to the Lord Mayor to mark ‘the burning of that famous city by Papists’.
Captain Peterson’s ‘testimony’, dated 17 December 1681, might have been orchestrated from within the court, or by someone loyal to the Stuart brothers, as a way of countering the still widespread idea that the Catholics began the Great Fire. Peterson’s statement seems to have been first published in issue 370 (5 July 1683) of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s newspaper, The Observator, a staunchly royalist propaganda vehicle (although this makes us wonder why the letter was apparently not disseminated for over eighteen months). As well as publishing the letter, L’Estrange attempted to explain the obvious discrepancy in Peterson’s dates by claiming that after being seized by the mob on 4 September, Hubert was taken before a Justice of the Peace in Mile End Green who found no cause for suspicion and released him. He was later arrested again at Romford, where the local mob demanded to know ‘”What? Are you one of the rogues that fired the City?” “Oui, oui,” says he.’ Quite apart from the Allo Allo like nature of the dialogue (which begs the questions of L’Estrange’s source for it, and why Hubert should say ‘oui, oui’ when, again according to L’Estrange, ‘“yes, yes” was all the English he could speak’), this still leaves seven days unaccounted for in Hubert’s movements. In the late seventeenth century, or even in the worst gridlock of the early twenty-first, it could not take seven days to get from Mile End to Romford.
It is also worth pointing out that Peterson’s statement was not, in fact, sworn on oath, as some have claimed. The Swede’s closing remark stated that he was ‘ready to make oath’ of what he had written, if necessary. In reality, there was not the remotest possibility of him being required to swear to that effect. Contrary to what some modern accounts state, there was no active enquiry into the Fire in December 1681, there was no Parliament, and Peterson was almost certainly not in England. He signed his letter as ‘master of Drottningholm’, and evidence generously supplied to me by the Swedish Maritime Museum shows that a Lorenz Peterson was, indeed, captain of a ship of that name in 1681, and remained so until she was wrecked in 1684.
In these circumstances, and given that Peterson’s account of Hubert’s departure from his ship was dubious, we might ask whether the Swedish captain ever actually wrote such a document at all – especially because, if the original but deleted words in Hubert’s Havering-atte-Bower deposition contain a shred of truth, then the captain and the mysterious Monsieur Piedloe might have been working together. But even if Peterson did write it, this still begs two critical questions: the one already stated, namely why did he write it when he did, and why did he not mention Stephen Piedloe?
Roger L’Estrange seems to have anticipated exactly such charges being laid against Peterson’s testimony, as he took great pains to establish the veracity of his source:
The Master (Peterson) was here again some two or three year after; and makes this voyage commonly once a year; he was here this very last spring. He has several times told this correspondent, how much it has troubled him, that he did not give Hubert a visit, when he was in prison; which would infallibly have sav’d his life. Now as to the information of this Peterson, I can prove it by several persons; and I dare appeal to my Honourable friend the Lord Leyemberg (Leijonbergh), the Swedish minister, for the credit of what I have delivered.
(In the subsequent issue, Observator 371, L’Estrange added the names of the Houblon brothers, prominent London merchants of French extraction, as further witnesses to the truth. The younger brother, John, later became the first Governor of the Bank of England.)
Then there’s a further question. If, as L’Estrange claims, Peterson knew Hubert was in prison, charged with starting the Great Fire, why was the skipper apparently so shocked when he went to Rouen and heard that Hubert had been hanged for exactly that offence (or so keen to stress that he hadn’t heard of Hubert after he’d left his ship)? I’ll return to the questions of Captain Peterson, and the timing of his letter, shortly. Before that, though, let’s examine why his letter should have appeared in print in the summer of 1683, not before, and in The Observator, not any other publication.
Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616-1704) was one of the founding fathers of modern journalism. However, he detested the notion of a free press, and would have found the notion of media neutrality incomprehensible. His latest biographer describes him as ‘violent in his battles and often brutal in enforcing his will on his enemies’, so perhaps modern press barons owe him a debt, too. In April 1681, shortly after the Oxford Parliament was dissolved, he began to publish The Observator, ‘the most powerful organ of Tory propaganda’, and it was in its pages that he launched an attack on the Whig domination of the City of London which had resulted in the anti-Catholic inscription being placed on the Monument. In doing so, L’Estrange revisited the evidence surrounding Hubert’s conviction in 1666, and in this context, Captain Peterson’s letter of December 1681 emerged.
Without exception, all material L’Estrange published on the subject went into print for one purpose alone: to promote the Tory and court argument, that Hubert had not been a Catholic and could not have started the Great Fire. The subtitle of Observator number 370 (5 July 1683) was ‘The whole story of Hubert’s setting fire to the city (and consequently that of Sir Patience Ward’s inscription upon the Monument) proved to be a mere sham’. (Ward was the Whig Lord Mayor of London who had ordered the inscription.) This was part of a series of issues in which L’Estrange, who had a long track record as an apologist for English Roman Catholics, attacked the entire narrative of ‘Popish plots’, and was published at a time when the Royalist/Tory reaction against that narrative, and the Whigs who promoted it, was in full swing. The ‘Rye House Plot’, an alleged Whig plot to assassinate Charles II, had been discovered only three weeks earlier, and Observator 370 and the following number, which continued L’Estrange’s ‘analysis’ of Hubert’s guilt, came out at exactly the moment Whig leaders, such as William, Lord Russell, and Captain Thomas Walcott, a veteran of the republic’s army, were being arrested and/or put on trial for their parts in the Rye House conspiracy. Therefore, the discrediting of everything Whig, including that party’s belief that Hubert was (a) a Catholic, and had (b) started the Great Fire, was in full swing in July 1683, a time when paranoia about plots – albeit of an anti-Catholic variety – was rampant once again.
In this respect, it suited L’Estrange and the Royalist/Tory ‘party line’ to rubbish the role, or even the very existence, of Stephen Piedloe, who was, naturally, as Andrew Marvell and others noted, a much more plausible conspirator and arsonist than Hubert. ‘There was no Piedelou in the ship [that brought Hubert to London]; and consequently all the Flam of Piedelou falls to the ground,’ L’Estrange wrote, citing Peterson’s evidence, but in the process brazenly disregarding something obvious. Even if there was no evidence of Piedloe having been on the ship – and Hubert stated categorically that he had been – there was ample evidence (notably the inconvenient testimony of Monsieur Graves) for the existence of such a person. Moreover, if Captain Peterson wrote his letter of December 1681 in response to a request to do so from someone in England, probably someone in an official position – and why else would he have written it? – why did he not write one sentence confirming that Stephen Piedloe had never been on his ship? There are many answers to that question, from the simplest (he forgot), to those which lead us inexorably to the ‘dark side’, such as the possibility that Piedloe and Peterson were working together, as Hubert implied, or that Peterson, the unknown person who had invited him to write his letter, and Roger L’Estrange, all had a vested interest in writing Piedloe out of the story.
Ultimately, Roger L’Estrange wasn’t interested in Stephen Piedloe at all, and certainly not in providing any evidence that he started the Great Fire. L’Estrange just wanted to convince the public that Robert Hubert, the man universally believed by Whigs to have started the Fire, could not have done so, thereby undermining the credibility of the Whig party and its belief in a long-standing succession of ‘Popish plots’.
L’Estrange was also driven by a personal agenda of wanting to exonerate Roman Catholics, and to demonstrate that they were loyal citizens. To prove this case, L’Estrange systematically went through the statements that Hubert made in 1666, and some of the stories about him that had surfaced subsequently. This led him to produce, in many cases for the first time, several new pieces of ‘evidence’ about Hubert and the Fire, but unsurprisingly, it is not easy to tell fact from rumour and downright fabrication. Many authors have rightly dismissed all those wild stories that surfaced before the Brooke Committee, the countless tales of Frenchmen with fireballs, and so forth. At the same time, strangely, these same authors have accepted uncritically pretty well everything an out-and-out partisan propagandist published seventeen years after the event.
L’Estrange employed the classic modus operandi of supporting his ‘facts’ by citing the number and unimpeachable integrity of the witnesses who could support him, without actually mentioning their names. An example is the story of Hubert’s supposed previous confession to murder, recounted earlier. L’Estrange provided no date for this, no location for the story, no names of any of the other parties involved. His sole claim to authenticity stated ‘this subject… is warranted to me, by a very good hand’.
But some of L’Estrange’s assertions have a ring of plausibility. For example, the Observator explains how Hubert managed to identify the charred remains of the bakery in Pudding Lane when Lowman took him there by pointing out that a crowd of curious onlookers had formed a circle around the ruin, making its significance blindingly obvious to Hubert. It would hardly have been difficult to identify the location attracting their interest, nor, in that part of London, to guess why they were there. (Matthew Quinton uses a variant of this explanation during the Epilogue.)
In a subsequent issue of the Observator, L’Estrange also claimed to have made enquiries at Rouen to confirm both Hubert’s religion and mental health. But the watchmaker’s father was dead, and his two brothers were living in Constantinople and Geneva, so it was taking longer than he hoped to obtain the information. This ‘evidence’ is plausible, especially as two watchmakers named Hubert, the brothers Étienne, born in 1648, and Paul, born in 1654 (so the right age to be younger brothers of Robert Hubert) were working in Geneva in the 1680s, and their father, another Robert (the third son of Noel Hubert), had died in 1680. But if L’Estrange did eventually receive further information about Robert Hubert, he never published it.
Quite simply, the imperative to do so stopped mattering, especially as L’Estrange was not interested in publishing facts for the record, but in scoring political points as viciously and as rapidly as possible. By the end of 1683, the Whigs were clearly defeated, the so-called ‘Tory reaction’ was in full swing, and in 1685, the accession of the Catholic King James II led to the erasing of the anti-Catholic inscription on the Monument. As far as The Observator was concerned, Robert Hubert had served his polemical purpose in 1683, and was now ancient history. To paraphrase the Earl of Oxford’s epitaph for Queen Anne, he was as dead as Julius Caesar.
According to the accounts published in The Observator, the ship in which Hubert was taking passage was actually sailing from Sweden to Rouen, where Hubert was meant to be reunited with his father. But it was intercepted at sea by Prince Rupert’s fleet and sent into the port of London. This, one of the many flaws in Robert Hubert’s testimony and conviction, was moderately inconvenient for anyone wishing to prove the Fire was caused by a deeply-laid, long-gestating conspiracy. In itself, the interception story is plausible enough – although Hubert’s original deposition, at Havering-atte-Bower, makes no mention of being arrested by the Royal Navy, and seems to imply that his intention (and, by implication, his ship’s) was always to go to London.
Following the Terschelling raid and Matthew’s fictional departure from it, the fleet continued to operate in the North Sea, with scouting warships regularly seizing suspected prizes and sending them to London; Prince Rupert’s nimble yacht the Fanfan was particularly successful in this respect. (Unfortunately, no log book survives for her; but that is true of every British warship at sea in 1666.) By the end of August, though, its principal objective was to prevent the conjunction of De Ruyter’s Dutch fleet and Beaufort’s French squadron. The British and Dutch fleets were in sight of each other on 31 August, but the incompetence of the British pilots and bad weather prevented more than a brief, small-scale action. The fleet put into Spithead to repair, and so was there when the Great Fire took place; the Duke of Albemarle was summoned back to London to help deal with the crisis, and never went to sea again. In mid-September, Rupert sailed again against the French fleet, which had come as far as Dieppe. During the subsequent operations, the French Second Rate Rubis was captured, an incident that I used as the basis for the capture of the Jeanne d’Arc by Matthew Quinton’s Royal Sceptre at the beginning of this book. (In reality, the capture of the Rubis had an air of farce about it: her captain mistook the ensigns of the British White Squadron for French flags, and thus blundered into the middle of Prince Rupert’s fleet.)
Throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars, it was common for neutral merchantmen to be seized and sent into English ports for examination. There were hundreds of cases of Dutch (and, from 1666, French) ships disguising themselves as neutrals, or of genuine neutrals carrying Dutch or French goods, and many Swedish vessels, along with ships of Lübeck, Hamburg, Spanish Flanders, and so forth, were arrested in British waters as a result. But if the Swedish ship had been sent up to London in this way, there ought to be a record in the voluminous archives of Charles II’s government, especially if the ship was bound for Rouen, in a kingdom with which England was at war, and thus might easily have been carrying, or been suspected of carrying, contraband goods.
Hubert’s testimony, both before the Havering-atte-Bower magistrate and at the Old Bailey, named one ship only, which he called the Skipper, claiming that its captain was also called Skipper. This is plainly nonsense, but could well have been the confused mishearing of a merchant captain’s usual title by a young man with learning difficulties, who was unused to the sea and who spoke very little English (and presumably no Swedish at all). But in his original deposition, Hubert never claimed that this was the ship which brought him to England. That ship was not named, and the Skipper was stated explicitly to be the ship that he went to only after the Fire had broken out. There is no mention of this ship or its eponymous captain in the testimony of John Lowman, keeper of the Surrey county gaol where Hubert was held, and who took the Frenchman to St Katherine’s dock on 2 October to point out where the Swedish ship had lain. Hubert indicated a berth off Abraham Corsellis’ Hartshorn brewhouse (thus providing the single piece of corroborating detail about the ship that appeared in the printed record in 1666, and which also appears, perhaps suspiciously, in the ‘Peterson letter’ of 1681), but Lowman ‘could neither find nor hear of any such vessel’.
This is, perhaps, unsurprising, if Hubert had got the name of the ship so badly wrong. However, L’Estrange’s suggestion that the ship in question was actually called the Milkmaid can be corroborated from unimpeachable sources. On 19 September 1666, the Privy Council met at Whitehall, a meeting attended by King Charles II, his brother the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and many of the other great figures of the day. Its second item of business was to hear a complaint from the Swedish ambassador, Lord Leijonbergh, about the illegal seizure of two Swedish ships, one of which was the Milkmaid, captained by a ‘Lorenze Peterson’. These had been seized at sea and sent up to London, contrary to the terms of the prevailing Anglo-Swedish treaty, and attempts had been made to ‘persuade’ the masters to sell their cargoes (iron, copper wire, copper kettles, and so forth) on the local market, rather than at their destinations. The ships were meant to be taking salt back to Sweden, ‘where there is great want thereof’, but ‘by their long detention their provisions are spent, the most part of their men run away and employed by the colliers’.
The Council referred the matter to the Lords Commissioners of Prizes, who were to examine the evidence and release the ships if the ambassador’s story proved correct. In fact, the Prize Commission was already on the case; a week before, on 12 September, it had referred the case of the Milkmaid to the judge of the Admiralty Court, Sir Leoline Jenkins. Curiously, though, the matter then goes silent. The Prize Commission minutes assiduously record the names and details of all ships discharged, having been proved not lawful prizes; but of the Milkmaid, there is no further word. This is very much a provisional judgement on my part, though. The High Court of Admiralty papers are voluminous, unwieldy, and very poorly catalogued and indexed (if at all), so it is possible that other references to Captain Peterson and his ship are lurking in some obscure folio within some forgotten box of dusty papers. Furthermore, the surviving port books for London for that year, incomplete in any case, are currently inaccessible due to mould damage.
But the Milkmaid’s trail can be picked up in the Swedish archives. Her owner was Claude Hägerstierna, a nobleman with extensive business interests. And as with everything else in the story of Robert Hubert and the Great Fire, the story is complicated. Claude’s original name was Roquette: he was a staunchly Huguenot Frenchman from Languedoc, who settled in Sweden, made a fortune, became a supplier to the royal court, and was ennobled in 1654, taking a Swedish name. His interests included iron, salt, and luxury goods for the court of Queen Christina, such as silk fabric, hats and gloves. Indeed, several accounts describe him as the Queen’s ‘tailor’, although he was much more important than that. Significantly, his principal trading connections included export trades to both Rouen and London. He made substantial loans to the Swedish crown, and, in a curious echo of my fictitious ‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, he also funded the work of General Erik Dahlbergh, Sweden’s leading military engineer, who would certainly have known how to blow up a wall or two.
Hägerstierna was so well connected that, when Christina began to plan her abdication, she secretly sent her fabulous art collection ahead of her aboard one of his ships. He was also a close friend of Magnus de la Gardie, Lord High Chancellor, arguably the most powerful man in Sweden from about 1660 to 1680 (and, coincidentally, a character featuring in the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight, as Matthew reminds us in the Epilogue). Hägerstierna owned several estates, including a substantial house in Stockholm’s fashionable Österlånggatan. However, his Calvinist religion conflicted with the Swedish kingdom’s official Lutheranism; consequently, services for like-minded French Huguenots in Stockholm had to be held secretly, sometimes in Hägerstierna’s house.
On his behalf, the Milkmaid appears to have undertaken two voyages in 1666, carrying iron and copper (thus tallying with the evidence in the English Privy Council records). Several loads dated between 27 March and 7 April 1666 are recorded in the Stockholm vågböcker at the Swedish National Archives, then none until 23 June, followed by several more until a final one on 10 July. Although the evidence cannot be conclusive (this source records when cargoes were bought, not when they were shipped), it suggests that the Milkmaid might have made a round trip, destination unknown, between early April and mid-June, then perhaps sailed again in mid-July – the voyage which ended in her interception by Prince Rupert’s fleet. If these suggested timings are correct, and given the usual length of a voyage from Stockholm, out through the Sound, and down the North Sea, it seems probable that the Milkmaid arrived in London perhaps as early as late July, certainly by about the middle of August at the latest, which again would fit with the reference to a ‘long detention’ in the Privy Council records.
The new evidence about the voyage of the Milkmaid casts considerable doubt on the version of the story told by Captain Peterson in 1681. If the ship really did arrive in London well before the end of August, when it is usually assumed that she docked there, then it is surely inconceivable that both Hubert and Piedloe remained aboard for such a long time, especially when both seem to have had residences within the city, and when there was seemingly no reason not to go ashore. True, England was at war with France, just as it was with the Netherlands. Even so, there were thousands of Frenchmen and Dutchmen in London, and in Britain as a whole, going about their business freely; the idea of interning citizens of enemy countries during wartime did not really take hold until Napoleon rounded up all British subjects in France in 1803, and then held them until his first abdication in 1814. As Matthew Quinton states, one of Charles II’s principal ministers, Lord Arlington, really was married to a Dutchwoman, as was one of his principal courtiers, the Earl of Ossory; and at the height of the war, during the year 1666, Dublin and Limerick really did have Dutch mayors. In that sense, my fictitious ‘Meinheer Vandervoort’, and the story that he spins, is perfectly plausible.
On 2 October 1666, the Southwark gaoler John Lowman found no Swedish ship lying off St Katherine’s dock during the time just before and during the Great Fire of London. Of course, he was looking for a ship called the Skipper; but even so, one assumes he would have checked all Swedish ships in the vicinity in order to prove or disprove Hubert’s story. Of course, as the Privy Council heard the case of the Milkmaid on 19 September, it is just possible that she had been released, and had sailed, before 2 October; but this would imply uncharacteristic speed and efficiency on the part of the Restoration government. Moreover, Hubert’s depositions make no mention of the ship in which he came to London being seized at sea, as the Milkmaid certainly was.
If all this is so, then it is possible Captain Peterson lied in 1681; and it also has to be possible that the skipper of a ship which was definitely in London at the time of the Great Fire, but which had not been meant to go there, was prevailed upon to provide a statement seeming to disprove Hubert’s guilt, at a time when doing so was very much an agenda King Charles II’s government wanted to pursue.
It also seems implausible that a random Swedish ship master would have met the likes of Roger L’Estrange, let alone opened his heart to him upon several occasions. It seems similarly unlikely that that ship master should have permitted an innocent man to be hanged in 1666; and that the veracity of the story should depend, not only upon the word of several anonymous ‘persons’, but also of the Swedish ambassador (a person surely unlikely to contradict the principal propagandist of the court he was accredited to), and the Houblon brothers, moderate Whigs keeping their heads down in the frenzied atmosphere of 1681-3, whose prosperity depended on not rocking too many boats.
‘Correlation does not imply causation’, as the saying goes, but the story of the Great Fire contains so many intriguing correlations that one cannot help but point them out. Let’s return to why Captain Lorenz Peterson said nothing about the Great Fire of London until 1681. There’s no evidence that he was still connected to Claude Hägerstierna by then, but the latter seems to have died in August of that year, just four months before Peterson wrote his testimony about Robert Hubert’s voyage aboard the Milkmaid. At his death, Hägerstierna was allegedly Sweden’s richest man. So was there some reason why Peterson could not speak out before his death? If Robert Hubert really was a Protestant, had he, too, been a part of Hägerstierna’s circle while he was in Stockholm? If so, was he, too, a part of the secretive Calvinist gatherings that constituted the so-called ‘French church in Stockholm’, which could supposedly vouch for the watch-maker’s religion (according to L’Estrange)? And if there is a truth in any of this, might it mean that Hägerstierna wanted a firm lid kept on any connection between himself and the Great Fire of London, no matter how tenuous, in case ‘guilt by association’ damaged his business interests?
Robert Hubert and Stephen Piedloe do seem to have come to London by ship – it was one of the few elements of his evidence to which Hubert adhered with absolute consistency – but thanks to all the new discoveries in primary sources, the ‘alibi’ supposedly provided for Hubert by Peterson, fifteen years after the event, no longer bears serious scrutiny. And, of course, there was never any alibi at all for Stephen Piedloe, the shadowy figure who got clean away: the man whom Robert Hubert consistently identified as the fire-starter of London, and whom Sir Roger L’Estrange was perhaps rather too keen to write out of the story.
Thomas Jackson, a nineteenth-century clergyman, once lampooned the nitpicking Biblical criticism of his day by using its methodology to prove that the Great Fire of London never actually happened at all. Unfortunately, the idiocies Jackson satirised are still with us, underpinning pretty much every conspiracy theory to be found in internet chatrooms and on social media. I don’t propose to add to them here, except in one sense alone.
The Great Fire of London happened. It is overwhelmingly probable that it was an accident, caused by the carelessness of Thomas Farriner or one of his assistants. But this orthodoxy has become established because virtually all writers on the Great Fire of London, from the seventeenth century to present day, have automatically (albeit often subconsciously) discounted alternative explanations, then cherry-picked the evidence from a number of second-hand and secondary sources, of debatable provenance. Above all, there has been an uncritical acceptance of the ‘evidence’ produced by Sir Roger L’Estrange in 1683 – evidence published for overt political ends, in a context of feverish partisan politics.
Cutting through all this, common sense, along with the verdict of level-headed contemporaries commenting on the matter during 1666 itself, still leads to the conclusion that the fire began accidentally.
But to this common sense orthodoxy, I’d suggest three crucial, perhaps controversial, caveats.
1. The belief that the Fire began accidentally has always been regarded as the ‘rational’ explanation, even since the days in early September 1666 when it was actually still raging. Unfortunately, this has meant that the ‘irrational’ alternative explanations – the accusations against the French, Dutch and Catholics, and Hubert’s bizarre behaviour – have not been analysed at all, or at best only in a superficial manner. Compare the treatment by historians of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, arguably the closest historical parallel. Because the Plot undoubtedly was instigated by domestic terrorists, the motives, connections, methods, and prospects of success of those involved have been analysed exhaustively. But the perception of the Great Fire as an accident has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with little attempt ever having been made seriously to examine alternative explanations, or to properly weigh other, perhaps rather inconvenient evidence that might support them.
Until now there has never been even a cursory attempt to research the backgrounds and connections of Robert Hubert, Stephen Piedloe, and Lawrence Peterson, or to test the known or supposed facts relating to those individuals. Moreover, since at least the time when the anti-Catholic inscription was removed from the Monument in the 1830s – or, perhaps, since the Dutch successfully invaded England in 1688 – even hinting at the possibility that English Roman Catholics, and/or the French, and/or the Dutch, might have been involved in the Great Fire of London, has been ‘politically incorrect’.
2. Taking this argument a stage further: even if the Fire did begin accidentally, this does not preclude the possibility that it was then exacerbated and accelerated by acts of arson, possibly by individuals disaffected toward the regime, possibly by a tiny minority of French or Dutch subjects living in London. It would be entirely conceivable that the latter could have wanted revenge for ‘Holmes’ Bonfire’; one letter written from London almost immediately after the Fire claimed that it was started ‘in revenge of what our forces had lately done at Brandaris upon the island Schelling’, while the Venetian ambassador, reporting the various rumours about the fire’s cause, noted that one of them was ‘due to many [Dutch] merchants rendered desperate by the burning of the ships at [the Vlie], which rendered them bankrupt, and so they wished to get consolation for their own misfortune by a universal ruin’.
In that sense, posterity might have taken Robert Hubert more seriously had he been Dutch, for in September 1666, Dutchmen undoubtedly had motives in spades for wanting London to burn. As it is, the supposed eyewitness accounts of deliberate acts of arson, be they allegedly committed by Dutchmen, Frenchmen, or English Catholics, have invariably been dismissed as fantasy or mass hysteria. Yet the sheer amount of such evidence, along with its partial corroboration by previously unknown, and rather more dispassionate, sources like the letters to the Wynns of Gwydir of 6 September 1666, and of John Tremayne to his father (and, indeed, Robert Hubert’s original Havering-atte-Bower deposition), suggest this possibility has been dismissed too readily.
3. Finally, if we accept that the timing of, and political context surrounding, Captain Peterson’s statement in 1681 (and its subsequent publication in 1683), puts its truth in doubt, then Robert Hubert’s supposed alibi must also be doubted. And if that alibi falls, then it is impossible to eliminate the possibilities that either the watchmaker of Rouen threw a fireball into a house in Whitehall when the fire in the City was already raging, as he originally claimed; or that Robert Hubert – or his companion Stephen Piedloe – really did set off a fireball in Farriner’s bakery in the early hours of 2 September 1666, thereby triggering the Great Fire of London.