The Hunt for a Culprit

On Monday, 10 September 1666, the bread continued. At Moorfields the ovens turned out thousands of loaves for the displaced, yet through the ruins moved another sustenance: suspicion, feeding a hunger official charity could not touch. The London Gazette, appearing that Monday with its familiar heading of the king’s arms, carried the state’s voice into this landscape of ash and rumor. Its editors printed what the Privy Council had approved: that the fire was an accident, that God had permitted the flames, that the king had labored to stem them. The paper spoke of divine will and royal exertion. It said nothing of plots.

But the paper was read in coffeehouses where men gathered with their faces still smudged from the fire, and in the tents and sheds where families huddled with their salvaged goods, and in the streets where the smell of burning hung in the September air. In those places, other accounts traveled faster than print. Word passed that the fire had been set. Men claimed to have seen foreigners with fireballs. A Catholic conspiracy, it was said, had waited for the wind to turn. The Gazette reached its readers already surrounded by these whispers, its official calm pitched against a turbulence it could not name.

Samuel Pepys, returning to his office at the Navy Board on Seething Lane, found the city heaving with this double consciousness. On Tuesday 11 September he wrote what he heard and saw. The people, he noted, were mighty apt to run into reports of others that had their hands in it. He recorded the specific texture of their fear: not abstract dread but directed accusation, aimed at those who were already suspect. The foreigners. The Catholics. The men whose allegiances lay elsewhere than England’s Protestant order.

Pepys moved through streets where these suspicions had begun to harden into threats, where a French accent or a known recusancy could draw a crowd. He was a man who trusted documentary evidence, who built his career on the verification of ships and supplies and accounts. Yet even he felt the pressure of the rumors, noted their power, recorded their circulation without quite endorsing or rejecting them.

John Evelyn, writing from his house at Sayes Court in Deptford, observed the same phenomenon from a greater distance but with no less clarity. The general cry, he called it: the collective voice that rose when no individual cause could be found. The fire had consumed too much, had moved too fast, had spared too little to be explained by ordinary accident. The human mind, confronted with catastrophe on this scale, reached for intention. Someone must have wanted this. Someone must have planned it. The alternative—that timber and thatch and September wind could combine to destroy a city without malice—offered no target for the grief and rage that needed somewhere to land.

Official denial and popular accusation moved on parallel tracks through mid-September 1666, each confirming the other by its very contradiction. The state needed order. The people needed explanation. Between these necessities, the figure of the foreign arsonist took shape, a specter that served both masters imperfectly. The Privy Council could deplore the rumors while secretly welcoming their displacement of blame from civic negligence. The crowd could focus its violence on visible targets while postponing the harder question of how a wooden city had been allowed to stand so long. The hunt for a culprit was already underway before any suspect had been named. It answered a structural need, not a response to evidence.

The first arrests came quickly. Men with foreign names, men with Catholic associations, men whose movements during the fire could not be immediately accounted for: these were taken up by constables and questioned by magistrates. The London Gazette reported them without editorial comment, its bare lists of names and charges doing the work of acknowledgment while the official narrative held to accident. On 13 September the paper noted that several persons suspected to have been actors in this dreadful mischief had been apprehended. The phrasing was careful. Not “arsonists.” Not “plotters.” But suspected and actors and mischief—words that gestured toward intention without committing to it.

The suspects were held in various prisons, examined by various authorities. Some were released for want of evidence. Some were detained longer, their names circulating in broadsides and ballads that multiplied the rumors the Gazette contained. The machinery of law ground slowly, and the crowd’s appetite for swift justice went unsatisfied. For a week, perhaps ten days, the search for a culprit remained diffuse, a scatter of accusations without a center.

Then Robert Hubert appeared.

He was a French watchmaker, twenty-seven years old, who walked into the justice system of a hostile country with a story that met its needs too perfectly. The circumstances of his first approach remain unclear: whether he sought out authorities or was brought to them, whether he came forward voluntarily or was denounced by someone who knew him. What is known is that he soon confessed to starting the fire himself, to traveling to London with that purpose, to throwing a fireball through the window of a bakery in Pudding Lane.

The confession was immediately improbable. The fire’s origin had been established by direct witness. In the early hours of Sunday, 2 September 1666, Thomas Farriner woke to smoke billowing under his bedroom door. His bakery below had caught fire. Farriner and his daughter escaped through an upstairs window to the neighboring house. A maidservant, too frightened to attempt the climb, remained behind and perished. The household had been locked from within. The fire had begun in the bakery’s oven or among its stored fuel, not from any missile thrown from outside. Hubert could not have entered the house. He could not have thrown anything through its windows. The physical circumstances of the fire’s start made his confession impossible.

And there was more. Hubert’s initial confession, according to those who recorded it, had placed the fire’s origin in Westminster. Only when he learned that the fire had never reached Westminster—that the flames had moved east and north from Pudding Lane, leaving the western suburbs untouched—did he relocate his crime to the bakery. He was adapting his story to fit known facts, not reporting what he had done. The adaptation was clumsy, visible to anyone who cared to look.

Yet the authorities looked, and looked away. Hubert was held, examined, sent to Newgate to await trial. His foreignness was his credential. His Catholicism, or the Catholicism attributed to him, was his motive. The watchmaker’s trade, with its need for precision and its association with Continental craft, made him intelligible as an agent of calculated destruction. He was what the rumors had predicted. The gap between prediction and reality, between the confession’s impossibility and its utility, did not prevent its acceptance. It determined it.

The trial came with speed that suggested official anxiety as much as judicial efficiency. The autumn assizes at the Old Bailey were not due until October, but Hubert’s case was heard earlier, perhaps by special commission. The documentation is fragmentary. What survives suggests a proceeding more concerned with closure than with truth. Hubert repeated his confession in court. He added details: that he had been part of a gang, that the plot had been hatched in France, that he had been paid for his work. These elaborations made his story more elaborate without making it more credible. They multiplied accomplices who could not be found, payments that could not be traced, conversations that could not be verified.

Some in the courtroom had doubts. The judges, or one of them, expressed misgivings about Hubert’s fitness to plead. His manner was strange, his account inconsistent, his grasp of ordinary facts uncertain. He may have been simple, or disturbed, or simply desperate for the attention that his confession brought him. The law of the time made provision for such cases: a prisoner who could not understand the proceedings, who raved or fell mute or demonstrated manifest incapacity, might be spared trial until restored to reason. Hubert was not spared. The misgivings were noted and overruled. The trial continued.

The jury convicted him. The sentence was death, to be carried out at Tyburn on 29 October 1666.

Pepys recorded the execution without comment on Hubert’s guilt or innocence. He noted the crowd, the ritual, the body’s disposal. The diarist’s silence on the central question—whether an innocent man had died for a crime he could not have committed—suggests either discretion or unease. Evelyn, more explicit, wrote of the poor wretch who had confessed what he could not have done, and of the general satisfaction that followed his death. The satisfaction was the point. Hubert’s execution closed a narrative that had threatened to remain open, to feed on itself, to generate more arrests, more accusations, more violence against the foreign and the Catholic populations of London. His death was a full stop inserted into a sentence that had run too long.

But the full stop was also a question mark, though few chose to read it as such. Hubert’s body was hardly cold before the contradictions in his story began to surface more openly. He had claimed to be in London on the night of 1 September, positioning himself to start the fire in the early hours of the 2nd. Investigation showed that he had been aboard a ship in the North Sea at that time, traveling from Sweden to England. The ship’s master could testify to his presence. The dates of its voyage could be verified against port records. Hubert had not been in London when the fire began. He could not have started it. He had confessed to a physical impossibility, and the state had killed him for it.

The revelation came too late to save him. It came early enough to taint the satisfaction his death had provided. The London Gazette, which had reported his arrest with such economy, found nothing to say about his exoneration. The official narrative of accident and divine permission, so carefully maintained through September, could hardly accommodate this proof that the official narrative of plot and foreign malice had been false. The two narratives had been allowed to coexist, each serving different purposes, each contradicting the other. Hubert’s posthumous innocence exposed the cost of this accommodation: a man’s life spent to preserve a political convenience.

The city that received this news was already moving into another phase of its aftermath. The bread distribution continued. The surveys of ruin began. The Fire Court would soon convene to adjudicate the disputes of property and debt that the destruction had created. These were the serious business of reconstruction, the measurable work of a city trying to reconstitute itself. Against this emerging order, the hunt for a culprit appeared as what it had been: not an investigation but a diversion, a channeling of energy away from questions that had no easy answers.

Why had the fire spread so far? Timber construction met dry summer conditions. The east wind drove flames through narrow lanes. Yards were piled with combustibles. The water supply proved inadequate. The Lord Mayor had hesitated to order demolitions. Aldermen disputed his authority. Military firebreaks came too late. These were systemic failures, distributed across institutions and individuals, resistant to the narrative form of villain and victim.

Why had Robert Hubert died? A traumatized city needed someone to blame, and he had offered himself. The state’s machinery for determining truth had proven weaker than its machinery for producing executions. The gap between what people needed to believe and what the evidence supported could be bridged by a single desperate confession, accepted without sufficient scrutiny and retracted too late.

The watchmaker’s death left its traces in the city’s memory, though they were soon overlaid by other concerns. The inscription on the Monument, when it was completed a decade later, would include the accusation that Popish frenzy had wrought the horrors of the fire. The inscription would be added in 1681, when political circumstances again made Catholic conspiracy a usable explanation. It would be removed in 1830, when such explanations had lost their power. The stone bore the marks of these changes, the chisel work visible to those who looked closely. The building itself, designed by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, stood 61½ meters tall between Pudding Lane and Fish Street Hill, a permanent commemoration of an event that official memory kept trying to misremember.

The machinery of accusation that seized upon Hubert did not operate in a vacuum. It drew upon a reservoir of suspicion that predated the fire and would outlast his execution. The 1660s had been a decade of acute anxiety about Catholic intentions, fueled by the recent Anglo-Dutch War and the visible presence of French agents at the restored court of Charles II. The Clarendon Code, with its punitive measures against religious nonconformity, had sharpened the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic, Englishman and foreigner, without eliminating the fear that those boundaries could be penetrated. The fire arrived in this atmosphere of vigilance, and the vigilance turned immediately to interpretation. Every stranger in the city became a potential instrument of continental malice; every unexplained movement during the chaos of the fire became evidence of design.

The specific content of the rumors that circulated in mid-September reveals the structure of this interpretive hunger. Men claimed to have seen foreigners distributing combustible materials in the streets before the fire began—a claim that collapsed under the most elementary scrutiny, since no one had anticipated the fire and the foreigners in question would have had to possess precognitive knowledge of its timing. Other accounts described fireballs thrown into houses, a technology of arson that existed more readily in the imagination than in the arsenals of any European power. These narratives borrowed from the conventions of conspiracy literature that had flourished since the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes had become the template for the Catholic agent of destruction. The fire demanded a Fawkes, and the crowd’s imagination supplied him in advance of any evidence.

The London Gazette’s careful neutrality in reporting Hubert’s arrest—“several persons suspected to have been actors in this dreadful mischief”—represented a deliberate editorial choice that reflected the Privy Council’s divided purposes. The paper’s printer, Henry Muddiman, operated under direct government license and knew the boundaries of permissible statement. To deny the possibility of plot entirely would be to ignore the popular temper that the Council wished to manage. To endorse the rumors would be to surrender control of the narrative to the streets. The Gazette’s solution was to report facts of arrest without facts of guilt, to acknowledge the machinery of suspicion while withholding its validation. This was a balancing act performed under the pressure of events, and it left the paper’s readers to supply the connections that the text refused to make.

The coffeehouses where the Gazette was read and debated had themselves become sites of political anxiety in the 1660s. Charles II’s government viewed these informal assemblies with suspicion, seeing in them the potential for organized opposition that the Protectorate had taught it to fear. The fire concentrated this anxiety.

Men gathered to exchange information and found themselves exchanging rumor; they sought to understand their losses and found narratives that explained too much. The very sociability that made the coffeehouse a distinctive institution of Restoration London—its mixing of ranks, its cultivation of conversation, its dependence on the circulation of print—made it an efficient vector for the suspicions that official discourse could not directly articulate.

Pepys, who frequented these establishments and recorded their conversations, understood their double character as forums of information and misinformation. His diary entries from mid-September show him navigating between the desire to know and the recognition that knowledge, in this atmosphere, was contaminated by need.

The international context of Hubert’s confession added another dimension to its reception. France and England were not formally at war in September 1666, but their relationship was shaped by the recent conflict with the Dutch Republic, in which French and English interests had briefly aligned before diverging.

A French watchmaker was intelligible as an enemy agent precisely because the categories of national identity remained fluid enough to accommodate him. He was not a soldier or a diplomat; his trade gave him cover for movement and observation; his technical skill suggested the precision that arson, as imagined by the crowd, would require. The confession that named him as the sole agent of destruction also, in its elaborations, gestured toward the international conspiracy that would have made sense of his presence.

The gang he claimed to have joined, the French paymasters he described, the coordinated plan he outlined: these satisfied the expectation that individual malice must be the surface manifestation of collective design.

Hubert had no monument. His grave, if he had one, was unmarked. The record of his trial, if it was ever fully recorded, has not survived in complete form. We know him through the diaries of men who did not know him, through the brief mentions in official papers, through the contradictions that his story generated and that his death could not resolve. He was a French watchmaker who came to London in the autumn of 1666 and left it on a gallows, having confessed to a crime that the physical evidence excluded and that the subsequent investigation disproved.

The execution of Robert Hubert provided a hollow closure, leaving the state with the unanswered question of how to officially investigate and explain the catastrophe. The mechanisms that had produced his death—the reliance on confession over evidence, the pressure to satisfy popular demand, the willingness to accept a foreign suspect as definitionally culpable—were not mechanisms that could produce reliable knowledge. They were mechanisms for managing political anxiety, and they had managed it at the cost of justice. The king’s government, which had deplored the rumors while secretly benefiting from their direction, now faced the harder task of constructing an inquiry that could command credibility without merely confirming what power preferred to believe. The ruins of London awaited their survey. The ruins of the official story awaited their own reconstruction.