A False Confession, a Mysterious Man Named Peidloe and a Hanging? The Bizarre True Story of Robert Hubert and the Great Fire of London in 1666

A Watchmaker, a drifter, an injured man or a person with a cognitive disability--it didn’t matter.  No matter what Robert Hubert was--or may have been--in September of 1666 in the days just after the Great Fire of London had left most of England’s largest city a smoldering ruin, Robert Hubert was an immigrant; maybe a Catholic, a foreigner and what everyone at the time called a stranger.  Robert Hubert was a Frenchman who resided in England and for that reason he was considered a threat in September of 1666; a person who instantly became one of interest on account of his immigration status--a person who may have been responsible for the flaming holocaust that had just incinerated England’s seat of royal power--and who for that reason, was taken into custody by the King’s authorities in the days after the Great Fire of London.

Robert Hubert arrived in London at the age of twenty six in the spring of 1666 only weeks prior to the outbreak of the Great Fire.  History does tell us that upon entry to London he listed his occupation as watchmaker--an occupation that his father before him, and even his grandfather before that, had pursued with some renown in Rouen, France.  But, by most accounts despite his claims to affluence in his native France, while in England Robert Hubert was, for the most part, homeless.  He was considered a drifter; a man with an injured leg who worked menial tasks on London’s docks and who may have walked with a constant and noticeable limp, and despite the fact that it is difficult to tell after the passage of four hundred and seventy years, Robert Hubert may have a been a little slow.  In the end, Hubert would confess to one of the greatest accidents (or crimes) in history and end his days swinging from the end of a noose--but even at the time people wondered--was the whole thing just made up?

Nearly five hundred years ago while the embers of the Great London Fire of 1666 still glowed red Robert Hubert gave a false confession to starting the fire that destroyed more than half the city.  Upon his arrest he said that he was part of a foreign-born conspiracy against the English that originated in Holland, France and Sweden.  He claimed that he had been put up to the deed by shadowy underworld figures from Scandinavia and mainland Europe.  He described in minute detail the steps that he and his cohorts had taken to start the fire and then, within a few short weeks of his confession, his claims were found to be false.  He was discredited and his sanity was put into question.  He admitted to giving a false confession, out of fear when he was first arrested and even in 1666, almost all observers realized as it was happening, that Hubert’s story was, most probably,  completely made up.

Even despite this false confession, Robert Hubert was hanged for starting the Great Fire of London in 1666.

It happened in the middle of the night on a Sunday--September 2, 1666.  It burned for three days--and when it was over, almost the entire city of old London, inside the old Roman Wall, lay in ashes.  Though few people died, thanks in large part to people’s wariness of fires in the 17th century and their timely evacuations,  it would take nearly half a century to repair all the damage and rebuild the city.

The fire started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery--a timber framed two storey building on Pudding Lane--that like most buildings in London at the time was wedged between two others and fronted the narrow street nearly reaching out to touch its neighbors just across the Lane.

Thomas Farriner, like hundreds of others in the city, was a middling sort of baker but he did have some connections in government.  He had used these connections to acquire a commission to make ship biscuits for the Royal Navy.  Ship Biscuits were a form of military ration--a precursor to hardtack--bread that had the texture and consistency of granite but that lasted for years while at sea and that was still sort of edible if one didn’t mind breaking their teeth and picking out the maggots.  In addition to his commission for the Royal Navy, Thomas Farriner also made bread and pastries that he sold to the local citizens of London, so that Farriner was a rather well off baker who had money enough to employ several workers and indentured servants to help him run both his baking business and his household.

On the Saturday night before the Great Fire, September 1, 1666, Thomas Farriner closed up shop in his bakery sometime just after sunset between 8 and 9 pm, like he always did.  He tamped out the fires in his baking hearths and made sure that everything was ready for Sunday morning’s business before he headed up the stairs to the apartment above his bakery where he lived with his wife, the maid and a manservant.

Parliament records from 1666 from an inquiry concerning the cause of the Great Fire indicate that at around midnight Thomas Farriner’s wife Hanna awoke and headed downstairs to double check and make sure that everything was okay in the bakery and that all of the fires had been properly extinguished.  The records do not tell us why Hanna did this, though we are left to assume that this act of double-checking may have been quite common on the part of Farriner’s wife, an indication that perhaps she knew that her husband could sometimes be somewhat negligent when it came to closing up shop.  Anyway, Hanna did state that she noticed that nothing was amiss and that all the fires had been properly extinguished before she headed back up to bed.

However, only a few short hours later in the middle of the night during the wee hours of Sunday morning September 2, 1666 the Farriner’s were awakened by shouts of “Fire!  Fire! Fire” and by the sound of their manservant loudly banging on their bedroom door as acrid gray smoke rushed up the stairwell.  The Great Fire of London had begun.

After seventy- two hours of a raging inferno--swept along by dry weather and whipping winds, famed diarist Samuel Pepys wrote, “London was, but is no more.”  Pepys, and others, would write about the Great Fire of 1666 in apocalyptic prose.  They would speak of the sound of hellfire and of the smell of burning flesh.  Tens of thousands of listless refugees, homeless and near starving, would camp out in tents that became unsanitary, open air cesspools in fields on the outskirts of the charred city…but Londoners would rebuild.  Eventually, through hard work, brilliant design and the investment of royal money Britons would replace the medieval hodge-podge of old London with the beautiful brilliant metropolis that we all know today.

But before Londoners rebuilt and quite literally rose up from out of the ashes--they looked for someone to blame--for a scapegoat.  Londoners had to find someone, or something, to blame and to hold responsible in order to make any sense at all out of the calamity that had befallen them.  And there was no better scapegoat than foreigners.

When Robert Hubert the “watchmaker” from Rouen, France, was arrested and brought before Justice Cary Harvie to give an account of his activities during the Great Fire, he came forward with an astonishing story that left all of England in disbelief.

Hubert claimed that he was a member of an organized gang--what today we would call an international terror cell--of more than two dozen fire-bombers who had been hired and led by a man named Stephen Peidloe.  Hubert further stated that during the fire he had been rowed up the Thames by none other than Stephen Peidloe himself and directed to throw a firebomb at the King’s own palace at Whitehall.

After his shocking confession Hubert was brought up on charges of attempted murder of the King and members of the Royal Family.  He was indicted and imprisoned in Southwark with a trial date at the Old Bailey set for early October.

Shockingly enough, though, when he came to trial in October Robert Hubert changed his story yet again.  This time it was even more shocking!

When asked to give an account of how he had first arrived in London Hubert stated that, “He had first arrived in London during the plague in the summer of 1665.”

He said that he had come over from mainland Europe as a member of a gang that summer, but this time Hubert claimed that there were only four members--and not two dozen--in the group that came across the English Channel.  Once again he said that the group was led by the shadowy and mysterious figure known as Stephen Peidloe--though he swore up and down that he couldn’t recall the exact names of the other members.  Hubert said that the group had originally planned to set fire to the city of London in the summer of 1665, but for whatever reason--perhaps because of the sudden and devastating onset of a bubonic plague epidemic in the city that year--the group never went through with their plans in 1665.

But Hubert and the mysterious shadowy figure known as Stephen Peidloe weren’t done.  According to his testimony--after returning back to France in the summer of 1665--Hubert and Peidloe (along with a third unnamed accomplice) bided their time until returning to London aboard a small boat via Stockholm, Sweden, on September 1, 1666--the day before the start of the Great Fire of London at Thomas Farriner’s bakery.

That night, September 1, 1666, Hubert testified that he was led by Peidloe, to Puddling Lane and the site of the Farriner bakery.  He said that Peidloe gave him an incendiary comprised of, “six ounces of gunpowder, four ounces of saltpetre, linseed oil, sulphur and resin wrapped in a cotton cloth to be placed on the end of a long stick.” (Tinniswood 164).  Peidloe, according to Hubert’s testimony, wanted Hubert to light the parcel and then throw the flaming incendiary through the window of Farriner’s bakery.

Hubert claimed that at this point he protested the sheer randomness of the act and that he got into an argument with Peidloe.  Hubert testified that he questioned Peidloe’s logic and said, “Why here?  Why this place?  What is the point?”  Apparently, Hubert had been under the impression that the would-be firebombers would set a palace or a government building alight first and not some innocuous bakery on Pudding Lane.

In response to Hubert’s protests Peidloe became angered and impatient.  He simply told Hubert, “Go on.  Get on with it.”  And then, according to his own testimony, Robert Hubert, “Put the ball at the end of a long stick, lighting it with a match, and pushed it through a window.”  He testified that he stayed until he saw the house aflame, and then that he and the mysterious Stephen Peidloe, ran off in opposite directions never to see one another again.  Thus began the Great Fire of London of 1666--at least according to the testimony of Robert Hubert---drifter, immigrant and watchmaker from the city of Rouen, France.

Of course, right from the moment he said it, no one in London believed a single word of Robert Hubert’s testimony.  For one thing he contradicted himself every time he spoke and many witnesses claimed that they had known Robert Hubert for quite some time and that there was no way that his story regarding a conspiracy between himself and the shadowy “Stephen Peidloe” to firebomb London could possibly be true.  

Hubert’s acquaintances in London testified to the fact that he was a Huguenot--a French Protestant and that they had regularly attended services with him--even as, all the while, Hubert maintained that he was a devout Catholic and wholly loyal to the Church in Rome.

While Robert Hubert was locked away in Gaol in Southwark awaiting his fate a French merchant, then residing in London, who had known Hubert well their entire life back in Rouen came to visit him.  He called Hubert’s bluff and said that he knew that Hubert’s confession was complete nonsense.  But Hubert remained steadfast in his assertions.  He replied in jail to his old acquaintance, “Yes Sir I am guilty of it and have been brought to it by the instigation of Monsieur Peidloe, but not out of any malice to the English nation but out of a desire for a reward which was promised me upon my return to France.”

Robert Hubert stuck steadfastly to his story.  But there were no witnesses and no one could find, nor had anyone ever even heard of, a mysterious Frenchman named Stephen Peidloe.

In a letter to King Charles II, Lord Chief Justice Kelyng, the Earl of Clarendon who heard the case at the Old Bailey wrote, “Nobody present credited anything that he said…all his discourse was so disjointed that we did not believe him guilty.”

Still, although no one believed that he was guilty, the English public was clamoring for someone, or something, to blame for the Great Fire.  Robert Hubert had come forward and claimed responsibility.  In a purely literal sense the man’s motives were not the King’s concern, and if he was guilty of the crimes to which he confessed, well then, he had to be held responsible….didn’t he?

Not wishing to execute a delusional, and perhaps, completely innocent man a Parliamentary Inquiry into the fire requested that the Keeper of the White Lion Gaol, where Hubert was imprisoned, escort him through the charred rubble of London to locate the scene of his crime.

And sure enough to everyone’s amazement---despite the fact that the once glorious city lay in ruins--Robert Hubert took his jailer right to what had been Pudding Lane and correctly identified the heap of  ashes that had been the site of Thomas Farriner’s bakery.  In fact, when Hubert pointed out the spot where he had set the fire, the landscape was so devastated and unrecognizable that his jailer had to stop a passerby and ask if this, indeed, had been the site of Farriner’s bakery.

Though his story always changed; though no one was able to ever locate a man by the name of Stephen Peidloe and despite the fact that there were no witnesses to corroborate anything he confessed to, Robert Hubert was hanged til dead in London at Tyburn on October 27,, 1666.  His execution went forward despite the fact that neither the arresting authorities, parliament or even King Charles II himself believed that Robert Hubert was guilty of setting the Great Fire of London.  It was hoped that holding Hubert responsible and executing him in public would assuage the public’s anger and rage over the Great Fire.

Robert Hubert may not have even known what he was confessing to, or he may not have cared, but he was an immigrant, a Catholic who walked with a limp, a man who most likely lived on the streets and someone who was just a little bit different---he was the perfect scapegoat for the Great Fire of London of 1666.

As local surgeons attempted to take Robert Hubert’s body down from the gallows for autopsy and proper burial a ravenous crowd of bloodthirsty Londoners tore his flesh to shreds and fed his entrails to the vultures…

For more information on The Great Fire of London and on the strange case of Robert Hubert see:

Tinniswood, Adrian.  By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great 

Fire of London.  Published by Riverhead Books NY. 2004