Robert Hubert did not start the Great Fire of London. He confessed, was convicted, and was hanged at Tyburn on 27 October 1666, but the confession changed, had little corroboration, and was contradicted by later evidence placing his arrival in England after the fire began. The surviving record does not include the testimony heard at his trial.
Did Robert Hubert start the Great Fire of London?
No. Hubert’s confession was not reliable proof that he set the fire. The captain of his ship later said Hubert did not land in England until two days after the blaze began, on 2 September 1666. If that reported chronology is correct, Hubert could not have started it. The British Library recounts this evidence alongside problems in Hubert’s account, including his claim that he put a fire device through a bakery window when the bakery had no such window.
The fire began at Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane. Suspicion fell on Hubert, a Frenchman, amid a climate of wartime hostility and conspiracy fears. The London Museum’s account of the Great Fire describes how accusations against foreigners and Catholics spread as the city burned.
What did Hubert confess, and what happened to him?
Hubert eventually said that he had deliberately started the fire, describing an alleged device and claiming to have thrown it through the bakery window. His story shifted during his imprisonment and trial. Apart from his own confession, the reported supporting point was that he identified the bakery’s location among the ruins; the physical detail about the window did not fit the building.
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Hubert was formally accused, tried, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn on 27 October 1666. His indictment, dated 10 October 1666, survives in the London Metropolitan Archives collection. It is a formal accusation, not a record of all the evidence or testimony presented in court.
What evidence survives from Hubert’s trial?
The testimony heard at the trial does not survive. The extant indictment names witnesses and sets out the charge, but it cannot establish what each witness said or how the court weighed the evidence. Kate Loveman, a historian at the University of Leicester, emphasizes this distinction in her archival reconstruction of who discovered the fire.
That reconstruction discusses a letter written by Edward Harley on 20 October 1666, which reported that “between one and two His man was waked with ye choak of ye Smoke”. It is Harley’s report of what he had heard about the fire’s discovery—not direct testimony preserved from Hubert’s trial. Loveman’s account suggests Thomas Dagger, a servant in the bakery household, may have woken to smoke and raised the alarm; this is a later reconstruction from fragmentary records.
The ship-captain evidence is important but must also be placed in context: it was reported after Hubert’s execution. The British Library’s account of Hubert and the Great Fire describes the captain’s statement and the inconsistencies in Hubert’s confession.
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Hubert’s accusation took hold when London was already gripped by fear that the fire was deliberate. England was at war with France and the Netherlands, and anti-Catholic suspicion made stories of foreign or Catholic arson politically potent. These beliefs explain the atmosphere in which Hubert’s confession circulated; they do not validate it.
A plaque erected at Pudding Lane in 1681 blamed “barbarous papists” and named Hubert as their agent. Its language records the persistence of a conspiracy narrative, not proof of a Catholic plot. The London Museum’s record of the plaque preserves its wording and context. A parliamentary inquiry later concluded that the fire had been accidental.
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, later wrote in his memoirs that “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”. This is Clarendon’s retrospective report, not a verbatim court transcript. Hubert’s precise mental state and motive cannot be established from the surviving evidence, and the London Museum’s suggestion that he may have had mental health problems should not be treated as a confirmed diagnosis.
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How should the historical accounts be read?
- The indictment: a contemporary legal document establishing the formal charge, but not a full trial transcript. See the record of Hubert’s indictment, dated 10 October 1666.
- The 1667 pamphlet: A True and Faithful Account gathers purported information about the fire, but the London Museum notes that it relied largely on eavesdropped conversations, casual remarks, and alleged sightings. It is evidence of contemporary claims and anti-Catholic prejudice, not a neutral transcript. The museum’s catalogue record identifies the pamphlet and its date.
- Clarendon’s memoir: a later account that conveys an interpretation of Hubert’s trial and state of mind, rather than a court record.
- Modern archival reconstruction: useful for testing the chronology and piecing together fragmentary reports, but conclusions about the bakery household are reconstructions, not surviving trial testimony.
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