Death's Bright Angel

by Death's Bright Angel (retail) (epub)

  Robert Hubert: ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am’

  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 Haverin
g-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.

  Robert Hubert: Patsy par excellence

  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, b
ut 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.