Robert Hubert – for the Great Fire of London.

Robert Hubert – for the Great Fire of London.

On Sunday the 2nd of September 1666 the Great Fire of London started in a bakery in Pudding Lane owned by Thomas Farriner or Farynor.  It burned for three days before being finally extinguished on the Wednesday. 

 As sometimes happened people confessed to high profile crimes they did not commit and Robert Hubert, the 26 year old son of a watchmaker from Rouen in France did just that.  He was arrested in Essex, apparently trying to flee the country. Initially he claimed that he started the fire in Westminster but when it was pointed out to him that the fire never reached there, he changed his story and claimed that the fire bombed the baker’s shop in Pudding Lane.  

The baker, Thomas Farriner, said that the window through which the fire bomb had allegedly been thrown didn’t actually exist.  Hubert hadn’t arrived in London until the Tuesday, two days after the fire started. In fact he was aboard a Swedish ship called the Maid of Stockholm at the time of the outbreak of the fire, as was confirmed by the ship’s captain. 

There was no real evidence that the fire was anything other than an accident, although many people were ready to believe it was arson and that it was carried out by a foreign enemy.  

On the strength of his confession Hubert was hanged at Tyburn on the 27th of October 1666.  He provided a convenient scapegoat for the authorities and the baker.  Such was the level of public feeling that his body was torn apart by the crowd when it was taken down. It is amazing what some people will do to get themselves hanged!

Lord Clarendon wrote about Hubert as follows:

“Though the Chief Justice told the King, ‘that all his discourse was so disjointed that he did not believe him guilty;’ nor was there one man who prosecuted or accused him: yet upon his own confession … the jury found him guilty, and he was executed accordingly. 

And though no man could imagine any reason why a man should so desperately throw away his life, which he might have saved, though he had been guilty, since he was only accused upon his own confession; yet neither the judges, nor any present at the trial, did believe him guilty, but that he was a poor distracted wretch weary of his life, and chose to part with it this way. 

Certain it is, that upon the strictest examination that could be afterwards made by the King’s command, and then by the diligence of Parliament, that upon the jealousy and rumour made a Committee, who were very diligent and solicitous to make that discovery, there was never any probable evidence, (that poor creature’s only excepted) that there was any other cause of that woeful Fire, than the displeasure of God Almighty.”