Robert Hubert

Robert Hubert (c. 1640 – 27 October 1666) was a watchmaker from Rouen, France, who was executed following his false confession of starting the Great Fire of London.

Between 2 and 5 September 1666, a major fire broke out in Pudding Lane in the City of London, and proceeded to destroy around 80 percent of the old city.

Hubert's confession, at first, was of starting a fire in Westminster. However, this story proved unsatisfactory, and his confession changed upon learning that the fire never reached Westminster. Having learned that the fire started in Pudding Lane, in the house of the baker Thomas Farriner (or Farynor), he then claimed to have thrown a crude fire grenade through the open window of the Farriner bakery. He claimed to have acted with accomplices, who stopped the water cocks to sabotage the effort to put out the fire. Hubert's confessed motive was, apparently, that he was a French spy, and an agent of the Pope.

Hubert's confessions never seemed convincing. His retroactive change of story to fit the facts, though, was not the only reason. Hubert had not even been in London at the time that the fire broke out — he had not even arrived in England until two days after the fire started. That he was not in the country at the time of the outbreak of fire is not in doubt, as testified, years later, by a captain of the Swedish ship the Maid of Stockholm, that he personally had landed Hubert ashore two days after the outbreak of the fire. Having never seen the Farriner bakery, Hubert also did not know that it had no windows. What is more, he was judged so severely crippled that it would have been impossible for him to throw the claimed grenade.

Hubert's confession is often attributed to a mental simplicity, an inability to understand what it was he was doing; a kind of "Confessing Sam" tendency. One source claims, though, that the confession was coerced "probably by an extreme form of torture".

As The London Gazette suggests, some put the disaster down to chance:

[...] notwithstanding which suspicion, the manner of the burning all along in a Train, and so blowen forwards in all its way by strong Wings, make us conclude the whole was an effect of an unhappy chance, or to speak better, the heavy hand of God upon us for our sins [...]

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