Shortly after midnight on Sunday, September 2, 1666, a fireplace broke out at a bakery in Pudding Lane. Within the days that adopted, the hearth proceeded to destroy round 80% of the previous Metropolis of London.
Robert Hubert (c. 1640-1666), the son of a Rouen watchmaker, later confessed to beginning the hearth. He was indicted on the Middlesex classes on September 16, 1666, and jailed within the White Lion jail in Southwark. Simply over a month later, he could be executed for a criminal offense that he didn’t commit.
Alongside his alleged confederate, Stephen Peidloe, Hubert claimed to have created a crude hearth grenade by inserting gunpowder, brimstone and different flammable materials onto the top of a pole and pushing it via the open window of the bakery on Pudding Lane. The one supporting proof for Hubert’s confession lay in his capacity to go to the location of the bakery and to explain its look.
His declare that he pushed a fireball via a window was completely falsified, as even the proprietor of the bakery maintained that it had no home windows. Later, the testimony of the captain of the ship on which Hubert sailed from Sweden would additional show his innocence, by confirming that Hubert had not arrived in England till two days after the hearth began.
But within the Evelyn papers held on the British Library, we see that up to date author, diarist and horticulturalist John Evelyn probably nonetheless held Hubert answerable for the conflagration. Evelyn made copious annotations of his letters in later life, and on the reverse of a letter written to him by one Estienne Hubert, written in 1650, Evelyn famous: “I thinke this was the Father of the villain [that] was hanged for setting hearth on London 1666.”
Evelyn was not alone in his perception that Hubert had intentionally and maliciously began the hearth. As a foreigner, Hubert turned a simple goal for these looking for to clarify away the various misfortunes that befell the town within the mid-Seventeenth century. Even though each he and his household have been recognized to be Protestant, Hubert may be seen depicted on the frontispiece to Pyrotechnica Loyalana, Ignatian Fireplace-Works (1667), an nameless work recommended that the Fireplace had been intentionally began by Catholic arsonists, appearing on the directions of the Pope.
Within the etching above, Hubert exchanges a hand grenade with a Jesuit priest labelled “Pa.H”. It has been recommended that this will discuss with Harcourt, a notable Jesuit priest who would later be arrested and dedicated to Newgate Jail on the cost of complicity within the fictitious Titus Oates plot to kill the king. A gallows is depicted behind the pair, indicative of Hubert’s destiny.
Though Hubert’s confession was fraught with contradictions and the authorities largely accepted that the hearth was an accident, Hubert had confessed to the crime and was subsequently hanged at Tyburn on October 27, 1666. Hubert’s motives for confessing stay as mysterious at the moment as they have been to the authorities current at his trial, though there may be some proof to counsel that the younger man was affected by psychological sickness.
A number of witnesses remarked on Hubert’s mind-set throughout his trial, and it was Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s opinion that he was a “poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and selected to half with it this fashion”.
This text first appeared on the British Library’s Untold Lives weblog.
