Death's Bright Angel

by Death's Bright Angel (retail) (epub)

  The mob was already flooding away from the scaffold, pressing so tightly around us that it was impossible for our coach to move. Hubert’s body had been cut down, and was being bundled into a cart; it was common knowledge that the corpse was to go to the College of Surgeons, there to be dissected. The carter started his donkeys, a file of troopers from the Trained Bands fell in on each side, and the cart began to come down Tyburn Hill, directly towards us.

  The cart was very nearly alongside our coach when it began. To this day, I am not certain whether it was an accident or not. Whether a meanly dressed bald man from among the crowd simply stumbled due to the press of people, and stretched out his hand to grab the site of the cart for support. Or whether he had intent in his mind from the very start. In either event, the troopers did nothing to stop him. The fellow pulled himself up, looked into the cart, then struck out and punched the corpse of Robert Hubert.

  A woman shrieked. Not a shriek of horror, but one of delight. She flung herself forward, pulled herself into the cart, and began to tear off Hubert’s shirt. A short man climbed up beside her, then another, then a boy of ten or so, who snatched the Frenchman’s left hand and tried to rip off his thumb. The troopers did nothing. More and more climbed aboard; more and more hands snatched at the watchmaker’s corpse.

  Within seconds, fingers were tearing at Hubert’s flesh, pulling it apart, ripping it from the bone. A woman scoured out an eyeball. A man produced a large knife and began to hack off the head. But as he did so, the Frenchman’s ghastly, torn face turned toward me. To this very day, I can still see the expression that Robert Hubert must have had on his face when he died, and I will swear upon oath that it was a smile.

  The Great Fire of London

  The Curious Case of the Fire-Raising Watchmaker, the Elusive Sea Captain, and the Queen of Sweden’s Tailor

  A Historical Investigation

  Until I started researching and writing Death’s Bright Angel, my knowledge of the Great Fire of London came from a combination of general knowledge, facts learned at school, TV programmes, Pepys’ diary, and a couple of books on the matter, read more than a decade ago. I suspect, if pushed, most people would admit similar. However, I’d also taught the subject quite often, usually to twelve year olds (Year 8, in British education parlance), frequently employing ancient BBC educational programmes with shockingly cheap special effects. It’s a subject that goes down well with schoolchildren – lots of drama and destruction, vivid first-hand accounts, even some humour (‘he buried a cheese?’), and best of all, nobody dies; well, hardly anybody. Unsurprisingly, the Great Fire is a mainstay of the National Curriculum in History for schools in England and Wales, and some ten children’s books about it have been published since 1995 alone. Within the same period, three full-length, fully referenced adult studies of the Fire have also gone into print.

  I duly read or re-read all three of these books, and several earlier ones, as research for Death’s Bright Angel, and as I did so, felt a mounting disquiet. All described mid-seventeenth-century London, the actual course of the Fire, and its various aftermaths, competently enough – sometimes quite brilliantly. But when it came to the aspect in which I was most interested, the different theories circulating at the time to explain why the Fire began, and especially the confessions, trial, and execution, of the supposedly simple-minded French watchmaker Robert Hubert, alarm bells rang.

  All recent books on the Fire explicitly derive large parts of their accounts – of the theories, of the Fire’s outbreak in Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane, – from a single earlier secondary source, The Great Fire of London by Walter George Bell. This was originally published in 1923 and republished several times since, and the principal primary source upon it relied, William Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, was published between 1809 and 1826, incorporating earlier material from editions dating back to 1719. All the modern books accept without question Bell’s judgement that ‘this fact (the accidental outbreak in the bakery) does not admit of doubt… the judgment that must result from a calm consideration of the evidence, [is] that the Fire in its origin was due to carelessness, and was not criminal’.

  What of it? Surely all that Bell (a journalist and astronomer, incidentally, not a historian) did was follow the orthodoxy rapidly accepted by enlightened contemporaries like Samuel Pepys, the orthodoxy allegedly followed by the Lord Chief Justice who had actually sentenced Hubert and which, when partisan fervour and religious bigotry eventually died down, became accepted by most of the general public, too? The Great Fire began by accident; as I indicated in the note at the beginning of this book, Robert Hubert’s confession to having started it was written off almost immediately, as it has been ever since, as the rambling of a madman who did not even arrive in London until after the Fire began.

  Even so, I wanted to see exactly how Bell reached the conclusions, upon which all recent books about the Fire depend. I also wanted to examine the source material about Robert Hubert in a more forensic way than has been attempted before, and to see if there were any sources that had been completely ignored in previous studies. This might seem a curiously intensive research strategy for a work of fiction, but I knew from the outset that the storyline for Death’s Bright Angel would only have sufficient drama if it posited arson, or strong suspicions of arson, as the cause of the Great Fire. To make the book as convincing as possible, I knew I had to investigate that possibility as rigorously as I could.

  In other words: once a historian, always a historian.

  1666: A Year of Prophecy

  In Chapter Eight of this book, Matthew Quinton is briefed by Aphra Behn and the Earl of Ravensden about the extraordinary number of rumours and threats circulating during the summer of 1666 – what might now be termed ‘terrorist chatter’. I took a liberty by bringing the doyenne of women playwrights back to London, when she actually spent the whole of that year in Antwerp, but as the plot of this book posits, she was certainly in Surinam, then an English colony, in 1663-4, when she was already acting as an agent for Charles II’s government, a role she was still playing in Spanish Flanders in 1666 under the code name of Astraea (the elusive Mr Behn having died sometime between those dates, after a very brief marriage).

  I also invented the names and ‘back stories’ of the book’s ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, with the debatable exception of the final plot twist concerning Stephen Piedloe. Apart from those elements of dramatic licence, everything recounted to Matthew in that chapter was actual intelligence that came before the King’s government during that year, and the Rathbone Plot took place exactly as described. Rumours about potential rebel leaders called ‘Mene Tekel’ and ‘the Precious Man’ were legion, while it was widely believed that something dramatic, even cataclysmic, would take place on or around 3 September, the anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell and of two of his greatest victories, the battles of Dunbar and Worcester. Above all, many preachers, pundits and bar-room recidivists galore held forth on the supposed significance of the year 1666 itself: the date containing the number of the Beast.

  As with all predictions (to date) of the world’s end, this was a potent blend of wishful thinking, paranoia and hysteria. But the fact that the Great Fire of London took place after so many predictions, so many prophecies (even, inevitably, one from Nostradamus), and so much prayer on the part of the disaffected, was simply too great a coincidence for many at the time, and for many years afterwards. Just as on 9/11 and other occasions, the official explanation was just too pat. There had to have been some greater conspiracy afoot. Unfortunately for those of this mindset, the Great Fire of London’s Osama Bin Laden (or Dick Cheney, depending on your viewpoint) seemed to be a mentally ill twenty-six-year-old French watchmaker named Robert Hubert.

  Robert Hubert: the Unusual Suspect

  In a nutshell, the commonly accepted story is this.

  During and after the Fire, many Londoners maintained that not only was the blaze begun deliberately, but that they h
ad actually witnessed people starting fires (or, as is often the way in such cases, they knew someone who claimed to have witnessed it). In the short term, such stories helped generate the wave of xenophobia leading to several attacks on and attempted lynchings of French and Dutch residents of London in particular. A Frenchman was nearly torn apart because he was found to be carrying several ‘fireballs’, which turned out to be tennis balls. A poor widow was attacked on suspicion of having fireballs in her apron, and closer inspection revealed them to be chickens. This is the real historical (and hysterical) context underpinning the fictional attack on Cornelia Quinton and Captain Ollivier in this book.

  Many of these tales of arson were eventually recounted to the Parliamentary investigation into the disaster, and are considered in more detail below, but one in particular developed an unstoppable momentum. This was the odd saga of one Robert Hubert, a twenty-six-year-old French watchmaker, who left the City after the Fire (as did many foreigners, fleeing both the flames and the wrath of the Londoners). He was apparently heading to one of the east coast ports when he was apprehended in the Romford area and taken before Carey Harvie, a Justice of the Peace, at Havering-atte-Bower.

  The tale Hubert told Harvie was extraordinary. He claimed to have been one of twenty-four men, led by a fellow Frenchman named Stephen Piedloe, who had set out to destroy London. (Subsequently, Hubert would claim they originally intended to do so in 1665, but abandoned that plan due to the plague.) Hubert even confessed to Harvie that he had thrown a fireball into a building – although he said this was near the palace of Whitehall, and that he only did so after the fire in the City itself was already raging.

  Hubert was sent up to London, to the White Lion Gaol in Southwark. He appeared at the substitute Old Bailey in October, and now told a different story. Now there were just four arsonists, including himself and Piedloe. He, Hubert, had been recruited in Paris by someone ‘that he did not know, having never seen him before’. Hubert and Piedloe went to Stockholm, for reasons unknown, but took passage in a ship which brought them to London at the end of August. During the night of 1-2 September, Piedloe took him ashore, ending up before the bakery in Pudding Lane, where he told Hubert to put a fireball through a window. Hubert attached a ball to a long pole, lit it, and put it into the building, waiting to be certain that it was ablaze before making off. He claimed to be a Catholic, and to have carried out the attack for money. He had only received one gold coin from Piedloe, with a promise of five more when they got back to France. Despite all the contradictions in his evidence, Hubert clinched the case against himself by insisting on being taken by his gaoler, John Lowman, to identify the site of the bakery amidst the charred rubble of Pudding Lane, which he duly did, despite Lowman’s best efforts to confuse him and get him to retract.

  Some contemporaries clearly found it all unlikely, not least because the Farriners – who had good cause to encourage belief in Hubert’s guilt – stated that there had never been a window where Hubert claimed to have inserted the fireball. Hubert’s evidence was full of contradictions, and he pleaded not guilty at the beginning of his trial, thus effectively retracting his confession before Harvie, before reaffirming the confession once again, and then retracting it again on the scaffold. Even the notoriously draconian Lord Chief Justice Kelyng, who presided over the trial, said of Hubert, ‘all his discourse was so disjointed that he did not believe him guilty’. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, claimed that ‘nobody present credited anything [Hubert] said’, concluding that he must have been ‘a poor distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it this way’. Sir Edward Harley, one of the MPs who examined Hubert, reported that ‘he said some extravagant things that savoured of a disordered mind’. But, faced with a confession that the accused simply refused to retract, despite all the doubts over its veracity, the jury had no alternative but to convict. Robert Hubert was hanged at Tyburn on 17 October 1666; his body, intended for dissection by the Barber Surgeons Company, was reputedly torn apart by a furious mob (‘reputedly’ being inadequate evidence for a historian, but ideal for a novelist seeking an ending for his book). Fifteen years later, the Swedish captain of the Milkmaid, the ship that supposedly carried Hubert to London, provided written evidence that he could not have started the Great Fire. According to the captain, Hubert did not go ashore until Tuesday, 4 September, two days after the blaze broke out in Pudding Lane. London had hanged an innocent man, albeit one who’d been determined to convince everybody he was guilty.

  Robert Hubert: Everybody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

  For many, Hubert’s guilt was unquestionable. The Great Fire was a tragedy so colossal, taking place against a backdrop of so many signs and portents, that it could only have been started deliberately. Hubert was French, a citizen of an enemy country; the French were mostly Catholics; therefore Hubert was a Catholic, as he himself testified (although virtually everyone who knew him judged him to be a Protestant). By the perverse form of circular logic employed by seventeenth-century English Protestants, Catholics were assumed to be arsonists, and vice-versa. ‘Papists’, especially foreign Papists, were ‘the other’ of the age, the archetypal bogeyman, cast in the same role that Jews, witches, Communists and Muslims have played in other eras. In seventeenth-century England, though, this fearful mindset seemed to be supported by the lessons of history – the burnings of Protestant martyrs by ‘Bloody Mary’, the Gunpowder Plot, the stories of the treatment of English sailors at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and so forth. The Jesuits were even believed to run entire colleges where they trained fire-raisers. In the seventeenth century, Catholicism was synonymous with fire: QED.

  Cobbett, Bell, and the authors who have relied on their accounts, all reject such simplistic thinking, and take the more rational – and more comfortable – line that Hubert was a simpleton, who, for whatever reason, confessed to a blaze that started accidentally. At the same time, these authors have sometimes turned equally unreliable hearsay and second-hand gossip into gospel. For example, the suggestion, repeated uncritically in some modern accounts, that Hubert was disabled, and thus physically incapable of lifting a fireball on a long pole, seems to have first appeared in issue 370 of The Observator, published in 1683, a source I’ll examine in detail later. According to its author,

  I am told, that Hubert had a dead palsy on one side, one arm useless, and much ado to trail one leg after him; was not this a fit man to manage a long pole, clap a fireball to the end of it, and this fireball to be put into a window, where there was no window at all?… Here’s Hubert, a lame, creeping miserable wretch, a Protestant brought over in a ship, that was not designed to come hither, a known madman singled out for a conspiracy. Here’s Hubert setting the town a fire with a long pole, that must reach from St Katharine’s [Dock] to Pudding Lane; and in short, he’s as mad as Hubert, that does believe it, and a Jesuit that does not.

  Even though the opening remark (‘I am told’) should have rung some alarm bells, this assertion was repeated in pamphlets throughout the eighteenth century, and eventually became accepted orthodoxy. In fact, the only basis for all this seems to be John Lowman’s statement that he placed Hubert on a horse ‘by reason of his lameness’. It was never suggested that this would have prevented him lifting a long pole to a window, and Lowman, who was seemingly determined to undermine Hubert’s confession if he could, would surely have mentioned such a severe disability.

  There is a similar silence in other contemporary sources. The best chronicler of the age, Samuel Pepys, who invariably recorded such things in minute detail, relates a conversation he had on 24 February 1667 with Sir Robert Vyner, the King’s goldsmith, who had been the Sheriff of London at the time of the Fire. Vyner referred explicitly to the issue of the fireball being stuck through the window. He did not argue that Hubert could not have done this due to an infirmity, merely that the Farriners had said no such window existed. Instead, Vyner stated that he found the Frenchman ‘though a mopish besotted fellow
, [he] did not speak like a madman’.

  Vyner’s interestingly nuanced assessment was supplanted in later years by the orthodoxy that Hubert was simple-minded, and would confess to anything: what would now be called a serial confessor. For example, Observator 370, as well as trumpeting (and perhaps greatly exaggerating) Hubert’s supposed ‘disability’, also claimed that the watchmaker had previously confessed to a murder and was to be hanged for it, but the day before he was meant to go to the gallows, the real murderer was caught and Hubert set free. There appears to be no corroboration at all for this statement.

  A similar story can be seen across the board in the literature about the Great Fire: secondhand ‘evidence’, or pure hearsay, has become accepted fact. Many authoritative-looking references citing pages in Cobbett’s State Trials (could any book wish for a more intimidatingly impressive title?) are actually citing the footnotes on those pages, which are not drawn from accounts of ‘state trials’ at all. Instead, those notes comprise lengthy quotations from other vaguely contemporary, but sometimes deeply flawed, partisan accounts pedalling rumours that circulated years after the Fire. Such sources include the Earl of Clarendon’s Life, essentially just second-hand recollections of some trial evidence, written in exile, from memory rather than documentary sources, six years after the Fire. The History of My Own Time, written by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, largely in the early eighteenth century, was a partial, error-strewn and unreliable narrative, with most statements about the Great Fire being explicitly secondhand and prone to namedropping (‘[Archbishop] Tillotson told me…’, ‘was told me by…the Countess of Clarendon’, and so forth). Several other of these misleadingly quoted works were written even later: Laurence Echard’s History of England (1718), Paul Rapin de Thoyras’ Histoire d’Angleterre (1723-5), John Oldmixon’s Critical History of England (1724-6), and James Ralph’s History of England (1744-6). Fortunately, it is possible to get past this edifice of myth-building, and to study some of the original sources relating to Robert Hubert, rather than much later printed versions. These sources paint a very different picture.