Death's Bright Angel

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

  Despite being a publication that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, Observator 370 stated categorically that Hubert was a Huguenot, and that the French Protestant Church in Stockholm could testify to the truth of that. I contacted that church’s modern day incarnation, the Franska Reform Kyrkan, but it does not hold records from before the mid-eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the weight of evidence tends to confirm that Hubert was, indeed, Protestant, from a staunchly Protestant family. The 2014 exhibition catalogue from the museum in Saint Nicholas d’Aliermont indicates that the Hubert family was Catholic until the first quarter of the seventeenth century, but all members, without exception, then became Protestant, and in later decades, their response to the persecution of the Huguenots was absolutely typical of the French Protestant experience. It is highly unlikely, although not impossible, for Robert Hubert to have been a Catholic. Later in this account, too, previously unknown evidence will be presented about Hubert’s possible Huguenot connections in Stockholm.

  The political and legal squabbles over what Robert Hubert was – Protestant madman, or Papist conspirator? – also shaped the emergence, fifteen years afterwards, of the next substantial evidence about the outbreak of the Fire, Hubert’s potential role in it, and the shadowy Stephen ‘Peidelow’, or Piedloe.

  The Mysterious Stephen Piedloe

  Amid all the contradictions and confusions in Hubert’s various statements, one element is consistent and unshakeable: his insistence on the existence, and central role in the outbreak of the Great Fire, of Stephen Piedloe. Moreover, unlike most other elements of Hubert’s story, there appears to be corroboration for at least part of this. A man named Graves, a French merchant of St Mary Axe, testified that he had known Hubert since he was four years old, and had visited the watchmaker in prison (where Hubert had supposedly confessed his guilt to him). Graves said he knew Piedloe, too, and described him as ‘a very debauched person, and apt to any wicked design’.

  This, in turn, invites us to ponder Monsieur Graves. There is no trace of any individual by that name in the area around St Mary Axe, or in the City as a whole, in the 1666 Hearth Tax for London, but that is not necessarily suspicious. A Josephe Graves had been a vintner in St Helen’s Bishopsgate, immediately adjacent to St Mary Axe, during the 1640s, so could well have been the same man, especially as this would probably make him about the same age as Hubert’s father, whom he also claimed to know. Moreover, Hubert’s original deposition at Havering-atte-Bower stated that Piedloe ‘had a chamber in London’, a sentence subsequently crossed out and thus absent from all published accounts of the Fire. If that was so, then as members of the French expatriate community, Graves, Hubert and Piedloe could have known each other, perhaps even worshipped together at the Huguenot Church in Threadneedle Street. In any event, it seems probable that Hubert and Piedloe knew the geography of London well.

  We cannot be certain about the origins of the name ‘Piedloe’, which is also spelled ‘Peidelow’ in some contemporary sources and ‘Peidlo’ in slightly later printings. However, Piedleu or Piedeleu is an old French surname, common in Normandy and Brittany, and conspiracy theorists may delight in the fact that it means ‘wolf’s foot’. A William and Simon Piedeleu seem to have been merchants of Amiens, trading with the city of London as early as 1367. Various Piedeleus were prominent in civil life in Rouen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; one held the noble title of Sieur d’Aunay, and to provide yet more grist to the mill for conspiracy theorists, several were prominent Freemasons. Marie Piedeleu was one of the first women in Rouen to obtain a divorce, after the French Revolution legalised the practice; and Piedeleus can still be found in Rouen (and even at Oxford University) today. So, again, it is possible that a Stephen ‘Piedloe’ could have known Robert Hubert, and probably his father too, through the Rouen connection, and could have moved in circles that made him known to the prominent London-based French merchant, Monsieur Graves.

  The Equally Mysterious Captain Peterson

  Hubert’s evidence is so confused, and contemporaries’ confirmation of his simple-mindedness so substantial, that it is difficult to accept him as the instigator of the Great Fire. Hubert was in any case posthumously provided with an alibi by the captain of the ship who brought him to London, Lawrence Peterson, who wrote a letter on 17 December 1681 stating that Hubert could not have started the fire, as he was aboard his ship when it began.

  There are several problems with Peterson’s evidence, quite apart from the obvious question of why it took him fifteen years to come forward. First, who was Laurence Peterson? Hubert never actually named him; in his original deposition, the name of the captain of the ship he went aboard was ‘Skipper’, or Schipper. Not one witness who came forward in 1666 named this man in connection with Robert Hubert. But there certainly was a Captain Laurence Peterson, in the right place at the right time, as evidence produced hereafter will confirm, so we can take it for granted that he wrote the letter attributed to him.

  Peterson’s letter of 17 December 1681 stated that Hubert had been aboard his ship, near St Katherine’s, when the fire broke out, having not gone ashore at all previously. The Frenchman ‘did seem to rejoice and say, Fery well, fery well, which with the word Yes, yes, was all the English he could speak’, at which Peterson took offence and clapped him in the hold. According to the Swede, Hubert managed to escape through a scuttle and got ashore at ‘Mr Corsell’s’ quay, where the captain saw him being seized by the mob. This was the wharf adjoining Hartshorn’s brewhouse, the building mentioned in Hubert’s Havering-atte-Bower disposition. (Abraham Corsellis, who owned the business, was a wealthy brewer of Flemish origins, whose family became so respectable in English society that his grandson went to Eton and became an MP.)

  The flaw in Peterson’s evidence here is that Hubert was not arrested in London on 4 September, but in Essex seven days later. It is possible, of course, that Peterson either lied about, or ‘misremembered’, the timing of Hubert’s going ashore and how, when and where he ended up captured. But he made no reference to Stephen Piedloe having been aboard his ship: a curious omission, given the precision of other recollections from fifteen years earlier. The remainder of Peterson’s evidence, too, stretches credibility. Peterson stated that he never heard of Hubert again until he went to his father in Rouen to claim back the three pounds ten shillings he was owed for the son’s passage in the ship. At this, the father said his son had been hanged for starting the Great Fire of London; ‘which much amazed this informant, he well knowing the contrary to be true’.

  Why did Laurence Peterson wait fifteen years before providing a statement setting out his recollections of Robert Hubert and the Great Fire of London? The political context of the period might explain things. On 10 January 1681, the House of Commons resolved ‘that it is the opinion of this House, that the City of London was burnt in the Year One thousand Six hundred Sixty-and-six, by the Papists; designing thereby to introduce arbitrary Power and Popery into this Kingdom’. This was one of a series of resolutions passed by a House consumed by fears of the (entirely fabricated) ‘Popish Plot’, and which was determined to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from the succession through the efforts of the new, ferociously anti-Catholic ‘Whig party’. Charles II’s response was to prorogue, and shortly afterwards to dissolve, this Parliament. Another met at Oxford in March, but this, too, was swiftly dissolved, and a loyalist backlash began, with another new party, the pro-crown and anti-exclusion Tories, at its heart. It was in this frenzied atmosphere that the virulently anti-Catholic passage, quoted by Matthew Quinton in the prologue, was added to Wren’s Monument. For some time, there was real prospect of a new civil war: on 2 September, the fifteenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Fire, 20,000 Protestant apprentices of London presented an address to the Lord Mayor to mark ‘the burning of that famous city by Papists’.

  Captain Peterson’s ‘testimony’, dated 17 December 1681, might have been orchestrated from within the court, or by someone loyal t
o the Stuart brothers, as a way of countering the still widespread idea that the Catholics began the Great Fire. Peterson’s statement seems to have been first published in issue 370 (5 July 1683) of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s newspaper, The Observator, a staunchly royalist propaganda vehicle (although this makes us wonder why the letter was apparently not disseminated for over eighteen months). As well as publishing the letter, L’Estrange attempted to explain the obvious discrepancy in Peterson’s dates by claiming that after being seized by the mob on 4 September, Hubert was taken before a Justice of the Peace in Mile End Green who found no cause for suspicion and released him. He was later arrested again at Romford, where the local mob demanded to know ‘”What? Are you one of the rogues that fired the City?” “Oui, oui,” says he.’ Quite apart from the Allo Allo like nature of the dialogue (which begs the questions of L’Estrange’s source for it, and why Hubert should say ‘oui, oui’ when, again according to L’Estrange, ‘“yes, yes” was all the English he could speak’), this still leaves seven days unaccounted for in Hubert’s movements. In the late seventeenth century, or even in the worst gridlock of the early twenty-first, it could not take seven days to get from Mile End to Romford.

  It is also worth pointing out that Peterson’s statement was not, in fact, sworn on oath, as some have claimed. The Swede’s closing remark stated that he was ‘ready to make oath’ of what he had written, if necessary. In reality, there was not the remotest possibility of him being required to swear to that effect. Contrary to what some modern accounts state, there was no active enquiry into the Fire in December 1681, there was no Parliament, and Peterson was almost certainly not in England. He signed his letter as ‘master of Drottningholm’, and evidence generously supplied to me by the Swedish Maritime Museum shows that a Lorenz Peterson was, indeed, captain of a ship of that name in 1681, and remained so until she was wrecked in 1684.

  In these circumstances, and given that Peterson’s account of Hubert’s departure from his ship was dubious, we might ask whether the Swedish captain ever actually wrote such a document at all – especially because, if the original but deleted words in Hubert’s Havering-atte-Bower deposition contain a shred of truth, then the captain and the mysterious Monsieur Piedloe might have been working together. But even if Peterson did write it, this still begs two critical questions: the one already stated, namely why did he write it when he did, and why did he not mention Stephen Piedloe?

  Roger L’Estrange seems to have anticipated exactly such charges being laid against Peterson’s testimony, as he took great pains to establish the veracity of his source:

  The Master (Peterson) was here again some two or three year after; and makes this voyage commonly once a year; he was here this very last spring. He has several times told this correspondent, how much it has troubled him, that he did not give Hubert a visit, when he was in prison; which would infallibly have sav’d his life. Now as to the information of this Peterson, I can prove it by several persons; and I dare appeal to my Honourable friend the Lord Leyemberg (Leijonbergh), the Swedish minister, for the credit of what I have delivered.

  (In the subsequent issue, Observator 371, L’Estrange added the names of the Houblon brothers, prominent London merchants of French extraction, as further witnesses to the truth. The younger brother, John, later became the first Governor of the Bank of England.)

  Then there’s a further question. If, as L’Estrange claims, Peterson knew Hubert was in prison, charged with starting the Great Fire, why was the skipper apparently so shocked when he went to Rouen and heard that Hubert had been hanged for exactly that offence (or so keen to stress that he hadn’t heard of Hubert after he’d left his ship)? I’ll return to the questions of Captain Peterson, and the timing of his letter, shortly. Before that, though, let’s examine why his letter should have appeared in print in the summer of 1683, not before, and in The Observator, not any other publication.

  Sir Roger L’Estrange, the Birth of Red Top Journalism, and the Invention of History

  Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616-1704) was one of the founding fathers of modern journalism. However, he detested the notion of a free press, and would have found the notion of media neutrality incomprehensible. His latest biographer describes him as ‘violent in his battles and often brutal in enforcing his will on his enemies’, so perhaps modern press barons owe him a debt, too. In April 1681, shortly after the Oxford Parliament was dissolved, he began to publish The Observator, ‘the most powerful organ of Tory propaganda’, and it was in its pages that he launched an attack on the Whig domination of the City of London which had resulted in the anti-Catholic inscription being placed on the Monument. In doing so, L’Estrange revisited the evidence surrounding Hubert’s conviction in 1666, and in this context, Captain Peterson’s letter of December 1681 emerged.

  Without exception, all material L’Estrange published on the subject went into print for one purpose alone: to promote the Tory and court argument, that Hubert had not been a Catholic and could not have started the Great Fire. The subtitle of Observator number 370 (5 July 1683) was ‘The whole story of Hubert’s setting fire to the city (and consequently that of Sir Patience Ward’s inscription upon the Monument) proved to be a mere sham’. (Ward was the Whig Lord Mayor of London who had ordered the inscription.) This was part of a series of issues in which L’Estrange, who had a long track record as an apologist for English Roman Catholics, attacked the entire narrative of ‘Popish plots’, and was published at a time when the Royalist/Tory reaction against that narrative, and the Whigs who promoted it, was in full swing. The ‘Rye House Plot’, an alleged Whig plot to assassinate Charles II, had been discovered only three weeks earlier, and Observator 370 and the following number, which continued L’Estrange’s ‘analysis’ of Hubert’s guilt, came out at exactly the moment Whig leaders, such as William, Lord Russell, and Captain Thomas Walcott, a veteran of the republic’s army, were being arrested and/or put on trial for their parts in the Rye House conspiracy. Therefore, the discrediting of everything Whig, including that party’s belief that Hubert was (a) a Catholic, and had (b) started the Great Fire, was in full swing in July 1683, a time when paranoia about plots – albeit of an anti-Catholic variety – was rampant once again.

  In this respect, it suited L’Estrange and the Royalist/Tory ‘party line’ to rubbish the role, or even the very existence, of Stephen Piedloe, who was, naturally, as Andrew Marvell and others noted, a much more plausible conspirator and arsonist than Hubert. ‘There was no Piedelou in the ship [that brought Hubert to London]; and consequently all the Flam of Piedelou falls to the ground,’ L’Estrange wrote, citing Peterson’s evidence, but in the process brazenly disregarding something obvious. Even if there was no evidence of Piedloe having been on the ship – and Hubert stated categorically that he had been – there was ample evidence (notably the inconvenient testimony of Monsieur Graves) for the existence of such a person. Moreover, if Captain Peterson wrote his letter of December 1681 in response to a request to do so from someone in England, probably someone in an official position – and why else would he have written it? – why did he not write one sentence confirming that Stephen Piedloe had never been on his ship? There are many answers to that question, from the simplest (he forgot), to those which lead us inexorably to the ‘dark side’, such as the possibility that Piedloe and Peterson were working together, as Hubert implied, or that Peterson, the unknown person who had invited him to write his letter, and Roger L’Estrange, all had a vested interest in writing Piedloe out of the story.

  Ultimately, Roger L’Estrange wasn’t interested in Stephen Piedloe at all, and certainly not in providing any evidence that he started the Great Fire. L’Estrange just wanted to convince the public that Robert Hubert, the man universally believed by Whigs to have started the Fire, could not have done so, thereby undermining the credibility of the Whig party and its belief in a long-standing succession of ‘Popish plots’.

  L’Estrange was also driven by a personal agenda of wanting to exonerat
e Roman Catholics, and to demonstrate that they were loyal citizens. To prove this case, L’Estrange systematically went through the statements that Hubert made in 1666, and some of the stories about him that had surfaced subsequently. This led him to produce, in many cases for the first time, several new pieces of ‘evidence’ about Hubert and the Fire, but unsurprisingly, it is not easy to tell fact from rumour and downright fabrication. Many authors have rightly dismissed all those wild stories that surfaced before the Brooke Committee, the countless tales of Frenchmen with fireballs, and so forth. At the same time, strangely, these same authors have accepted uncritically pretty well everything an out-and-out partisan propagandist published seventeen years after the event.

  L’Estrange employed the classic modus operandi of supporting his ‘facts’ by citing the number and unimpeachable integrity of the witnesses who could support him, without actually mentioning their names. An example is the story of Hubert’s supposed previous confession to murder, recounted earlier. L’Estrange provided no date for this, no location for the story, no names of any of the other parties involved. His sole claim to authenticity stated ‘this subject… is warranted to me, by a very good hand’.

  But some of L’Estrange’s assertions have a ring of plausibility. For example, the Observator explains how Hubert managed to identify the charred remains of the bakery in Pudding Lane when Lowman took him there by pointing out that a crowd of curious onlookers had formed a circle around the ruin, making its significance blindingly obvious to Hubert. It would hardly have been difficult to identify the location attracting their interest, nor, in that part of London, to guess why they were there. (Matthew Quinton uses a variant of this explanation during the Epilogue.)