In a subsequent issue of the Observator, L’Estrange also claimed to have made enquiries at Rouen to confirm both Hubert’s religion and mental health. But the watchmaker’s father was dead, and his two brothers were living in Constantinople and Geneva, so it was taking longer than he hoped to obtain the information. This ‘evidence’ is plausible, especially as two watchmakers named Hubert, the brothers Étienne, born in 1648, and Paul, born in 1654 (so the right age to be younger brothers of Robert Hubert) were working in Geneva in the 1680s, and their father, another Robert (the third son of Noel Hubert), had died in 1680. But if L’Estrange did eventually receive further information about Robert Hubert, he never published it.
Quite simply, the imperative to do so stopped mattering, especially as L’Estrange was not interested in publishing facts for the record, but in scoring political points as viciously and as rapidly as possible. By the end of 1683, the Whigs were clearly defeated, the so-called ‘Tory reaction’ was in full swing, and in 1685, the accession of the Catholic King James II led to the erasing of the anti-Catholic inscription on the Monument. As far as The Observator was concerned, Robert Hubert had served his polemical purpose in 1683, and was now ancient history. To paraphrase the Earl of Oxford’s epitaph for Queen Anne, he was as dead as Julius Caesar.
The Naval History of the Great Fire of London
According to the accounts published in The Observator, the ship in which Hubert was taking passage was actually sailing from Sweden to Rouen, where Hubert was meant to be reunited with his father. But it was intercepted at sea by Prince Rupert’s fleet and sent into the port of London. This, one of the many flaws in Robert Hubert’s testimony and conviction, was moderately inconvenient for anyone wishing to prove the Fire was caused by a deeply-laid, long-gestating conspiracy. In itself, the interception story is plausible enough – although Hubert’s original deposition, at Havering-atte-Bower, makes no mention of being arrested by the Royal Navy, and seems to imply that his intention (and, by implication, his ship’s) was always to go to London.
Following the Terschelling raid and Matthew’s fictional departure from it, the fleet continued to operate in the North Sea, with scouting warships regularly seizing suspected prizes and sending them to London; Prince Rupert’s nimble yacht the Fanfan was particularly successful in this respect. (Unfortunately, no log book survives for her; but that is true of every British warship at sea in 1666.) By the end of August, though, its principal objective was to prevent the conjunction of De Ruyter’s Dutch fleet and Beaufort’s French squadron. The British and Dutch fleets were in sight of each other on 31 August, but the incompetence of the British pilots and bad weather prevented more than a brief, small-scale action. The fleet put into Spithead to repair, and so was there when the Great Fire took place; the Duke of Albemarle was summoned back to London to help deal with the crisis, and never went to sea again. In mid-September, Rupert sailed again against the French fleet, which had come as far as Dieppe. During the subsequent operations, the French Second Rate Rubis was captured, an incident that I used as the basis for the capture of the Jeanne d’Arc by Matthew Quinton’s Royal Sceptre at the beginning of this book. (In reality, the capture of the Rubis had an air of farce about it: her captain mistook the ensigns of the British White Squadron for French flags, and thus blundered into the middle of Prince Rupert’s fleet.)
Throughout the Anglo-Dutch wars, it was common for neutral merchantmen to be seized and sent into English ports for examination. There were hundreds of cases of Dutch (and, from 1666, French) ships disguising themselves as neutrals, or of genuine neutrals carrying Dutch or French goods, and many Swedish vessels, along with ships of Lübeck, Hamburg, Spanish Flanders, and so forth, were arrested in British waters as a result. But if the Swedish ship had been sent up to London in this way, there ought to be a record in the voluminous archives of Charles II’s government, especially if the ship was bound for Rouen, in a kingdom with which England was at war, and thus might easily have been carrying, or been suspected of carrying, contraband goods.
Hubert’s testimony, both before the Havering-atte-Bower magistrate and at the Old Bailey, named one ship only, which he called the Skipper, claiming that its captain was also called Skipper. This is plainly nonsense, but could well have been the confused mishearing of a merchant captain’s usual title by a young man with learning difficulties, who was unused to the sea and who spoke very little English (and presumably no Swedish at all). But in his original deposition, Hubert never claimed that this was the ship which brought him to England. That ship was not named, and the Skipper was stated explicitly to be the ship that he went to only after the Fire had broken out. There is no mention of this ship or its eponymous captain in the testimony of John Lowman, keeper of the Surrey county gaol where Hubert was held, and who took the Frenchman to St Katherine’s dock on 2 October to point out where the Swedish ship had lain. Hubert indicated a berth off Abraham Corsellis’ Hartshorn brewhouse (thus providing the single piece of corroborating detail about the ship that appeared in the printed record in 1666, and which also appears, perhaps suspiciously, in the ‘Peterson letter’ of 1681), but Lowman ‘could neither find nor hear of any such vessel’.
This is, perhaps, unsurprising, if Hubert had got the name of the ship so badly wrong. However, L’Estrange’s suggestion that the ship in question was actually called the Milkmaid can be corroborated from unimpeachable sources. On 19 September 1666, the Privy Council met at Whitehall, a meeting attended by King Charles II, his brother the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and many of the other great figures of the day. Its second item of business was to hear a complaint from the Swedish ambassador, Lord Leijonbergh, about the illegal seizure of two Swedish ships, one of which was the Milkmaid, captained by a ‘Lorenze Peterson’. These had been seized at sea and sent up to London, contrary to the terms of the prevailing Anglo-Swedish treaty, and attempts had been made to ‘persuade’ the masters to sell their cargoes (iron, copper wire, copper kettles, and so forth) on the local market, rather than at their destinations. The ships were meant to be taking salt back to Sweden, ‘where there is great want thereof’, but ‘by their long detention their provisions are spent, the most part of their men run away and employed by the colliers’.
The Council referred the matter to the Lords Commissioners of Prizes, who were to examine the evidence and release the ships if the ambassador’s story proved correct. In fact, the Prize Commission was already on the case; a week before, on 12 September, it had referred the case of the Milkmaid to the judge of the Admiralty Court, Sir Leoline Jenkins. Curiously, though, the matter then goes silent. The Prize Commission minutes assiduously record the names and details of all ships discharged, having been proved not lawful prizes; but of the Milkmaid, there is no further word. This is very much a provisional judgement on my part, though. The High Court of Admiralty papers are voluminous, unwieldy, and very poorly catalogued and indexed (if at all), so it is possible that other references to Captain Peterson and his ship are lurking in some obscure folio within some forgotten box of dusty papers. Furthermore, the surviving port books for London for that year, incomplete in any case, are currently inaccessible due to mould damage.
But the Milkmaid’s trail can be picked up in the Swedish archives. Her owner was Claude Hägerstierna, a nobleman with extensive business interests. And as with everything else in the story of Robert Hubert and the Great Fire, the story is complicated. Claude’s original name was Roquette: he was a staunchly Huguenot Frenchman from Languedoc, who settled in Sweden, made a fortune, became a supplier to the royal court, and was ennobled in 1654, taking a Swedish name. His interests included iron, salt, and luxury goods for the court of Queen Christina, such as silk fabric, hats and gloves. Indeed, several accounts describe him as the Queen’s ‘tailor’, although he was much more important than that. Significantly, his principal trading connections included export trades to both Rouen and London. He made substantial loans to the Swedish crown, and, in a curious echo
of my fictitious ‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, he also funded the work of General Erik Dahlbergh, Sweden’s leading military engineer, who would certainly have known how to blow up a wall or two.
Hägerstierna was so well connected that, when Christina began to plan her abdication, she secretly sent her fabulous art collection ahead of her aboard one of his ships. He was also a close friend of Magnus de la Gardie, Lord High Chancellor, arguably the most powerful man in Sweden from about 1660 to 1680 (and, coincidentally, a character featuring in the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight, as Matthew reminds us in the Epilogue). Hägerstierna owned several estates, including a substantial house in Stockholm’s fashionable Österlånggatan. However, his Calvinist religion conflicted with the Swedish kingdom’s official Lutheranism; consequently, services for like-minded French Huguenots in Stockholm had to be held secretly, sometimes in Hägerstierna’s house.
On his behalf, the Milkmaid appears to have undertaken two voyages in 1666, carrying iron and copper (thus tallying with the evidence in the English Privy Council records). Several loads dated between 27 March and 7 April 1666 are recorded in the Stockholm vågböcker at the Swedish National Archives, then none until 23 June, followed by several more until a final one on 10 July. Although the evidence cannot be conclusive (this source records when cargoes were bought, not when they were shipped), it suggests that the Milkmaid might have made a round trip, destination unknown, between early April and mid-June, then perhaps sailed again in mid-July – the voyage which ended in her interception by Prince Rupert’s fleet. If these suggested timings are correct, and given the usual length of a voyage from Stockholm, out through the Sound, and down the North Sea, it seems probable that the Milkmaid arrived in London perhaps as early as late July, certainly by about the middle of August at the latest, which again would fit with the reference to a ‘long detention’ in the Privy Council records.
Denouement
The new evidence about the voyage of the Milkmaid casts considerable doubt on the version of the story told by Captain Peterson in 1681. If the ship really did arrive in London well before the end of August, when it is usually assumed that she docked there, then it is surely inconceivable that both Hubert and Piedloe remained aboard for such a long time, especially when both seem to have had residences within the city, and when there was seemingly no reason not to go ashore. True, England was at war with France, just as it was with the Netherlands. Even so, there were thousands of Frenchmen and Dutchmen in London, and in Britain as a whole, going about their business freely; the idea of interning citizens of enemy countries during wartime did not really take hold until Napoleon rounded up all British subjects in France in 1803, and then held them until his first abdication in 1814. As Matthew Quinton states, one of Charles II’s principal ministers, Lord Arlington, really was married to a Dutchwoman, as was one of his principal courtiers, the Earl of Ossory; and at the height of the war, during the year 1666, Dublin and Limerick really did have Dutch mayors. In that sense, my fictitious ‘Meinheer Vandervoort’, and the story that he spins, is perfectly plausible.
On 2 October 1666, the Southwark gaoler John Lowman found no Swedish ship lying off St Katherine’s dock during the time just before and during the Great Fire of London. Of course, he was looking for a ship called the Skipper; but even so, one assumes he would have checked all Swedish ships in the vicinity in order to prove or disprove Hubert’s story. Of course, as the Privy Council heard the case of the Milkmaid on 19 September, it is just possible that she had been released, and had sailed, before 2 October; but this would imply uncharacteristic speed and efficiency on the part of the Restoration government. Moreover, Hubert’s depositions make no mention of the ship in which he came to London being seized at sea, as the Milkmaid certainly was.
If all this is so, then it is possible Captain Peterson lied in 1681; and it also has to be possible that the skipper of a ship which was definitely in London at the time of the Great Fire, but which had not been meant to go there, was prevailed upon to provide a statement seeming to disprove Hubert’s guilt, at a time when doing so was very much an agenda King Charles II’s government wanted to pursue.
It also seems implausible that a random Swedish ship master would have met the likes of Roger L’Estrange, let alone opened his heart to him upon several occasions. It seems similarly unlikely that that ship master should have permitted an innocent man to be hanged in 1666; and that the veracity of the story should depend, not only upon the word of several anonymous ‘persons’, but also of the Swedish ambassador (a person surely unlikely to contradict the principal propagandist of the court he was accredited to), and the Houblon brothers, moderate Whigs keeping their heads down in the frenzied atmosphere of 1681-3, whose prosperity depended on not rocking too many boats.
‘Correlation does not imply causation’, as the saying goes, but the story of the Great Fire contains so many intriguing correlations that one cannot help but point them out. Let’s return to why Captain Lorenz Peterson said nothing about the Great Fire of London until 1681. There’s no evidence that he was still connected to Claude Hägerstierna by then, but the latter seems to have died in August of that year, just four months before Peterson wrote his testimony about Robert Hubert’s voyage aboard the Milkmaid. At his death, Hägerstierna was allegedly Sweden’s richest man. So was there some reason why Peterson could not speak out before his death? If Robert Hubert really was a Protestant, had he, too, been a part of Hägerstierna’s circle while he was in Stockholm? If so, was he, too, a part of the secretive Calvinist gatherings that constituted the so-called ‘French church in Stockholm’, which could supposedly vouch for the watch-maker’s religion (according to L’Estrange)? And if there is a truth in any of this, might it mean that Hägerstierna wanted a firm lid kept on any connection between himself and the Great Fire of London, no matter how tenuous, in case ‘guilt by association’ damaged his business interests?
Robert Hubert and Stephen Piedloe do seem to have come to London by ship – it was one of the few elements of his evidence to which Hubert adhered with absolute consistency – but thanks to all the new discoveries in primary sources, the ‘alibi’ supposedly provided for Hubert by Peterson, fifteen years after the event, no longer bears serious scrutiny. And, of course, there was never any alibi at all for Stephen Piedloe, the shadowy figure who got clean away: the man whom Robert Hubert consistently identified as the fire-starter of London, and whom Sir Roger L’Estrange was perhaps rather too keen to write out of the story.
* * *
Thomas Jackson, a nineteenth-century clergyman, once lampooned the nitpicking Biblical criticism of his day by using its methodology to prove that the Great Fire of London never actually happened at all. Unfortunately, the idiocies Jackson satirised are still with us, underpinning pretty much every conspiracy theory to be found in internet chatrooms and on social media. I don’t propose to add to them here, except in one sense alone.
The Great Fire of London happened. It is overwhelmingly probable that it was an accident, caused by the carelessness of Thomas Farriner or one of his assistants. But this orthodoxy has become established because virtually all writers on the Great Fire of London, from the seventeenth century to present day, have automatically (albeit often subconsciously) discounted alternative explanations, then cherry-picked the evidence from a number of second-hand and secondary sources, of debatable provenance. Above all, there has been an uncritical acceptance of the ‘evidence’ produced by Sir Roger L’Estrange in 1683 – evidence published for overt political ends, in a context of feverish partisan politics.
Cutting through all this, common sense, along with the verdict of level-headed contemporaries commenting on the matter during 1666 itself, still leads to the conclusion that the fire began accidentally.
But to this common sense orthodoxy, I’d suggest three crucial, perhaps controversial, caveats.
1. The belief that the Fire began accidentally has always been regarded as the ‘rational’ explanation, eve
n since the days in early September 1666 when it was actually still raging. Unfortunately, this has meant that the ‘irrational’ alternative explanations – the accusations against the French, Dutch and Catholics, and Hubert’s bizarre behaviour – have not been analysed at all, or at best only in a superficial manner. Compare the treatment by historians of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, arguably the closest historical parallel. Because the Plot undoubtedly was instigated by domestic terrorists, the motives, connections, methods, and prospects of success of those involved have been analysed exhaustively. But the perception of the Great Fire as an accident has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with little attempt ever having been made seriously to examine alternative explanations, or to properly weigh other, perhaps rather inconvenient evidence that might support them.
Until now there has never been even a cursory attempt to research the backgrounds and connections of Robert Hubert, Stephen Piedloe, and Lawrence Peterson, or to test the known or supposed facts relating to those individuals. Moreover, since at least the time when the anti-Catholic inscription was removed from the Monument in the 1830s – or, perhaps, since the Dutch successfully invaded England in 1688 – even hinting at the possibility that English Roman Catholics, and/or the French, and/or the Dutch, might have been involved in the Great Fire of London, has been ‘politically incorrect’.
2. Taking this argument a stage further: even if the Fire did begin accidentally, this does not preclude the possibility that it was then exacerbated and accelerated by acts of arson, possibly by individuals disaffected toward the regime, possibly by a tiny minority of French or Dutch subjects living in London. It would be entirely conceivable that the latter could have wanted revenge for ‘Holmes’ Bonfire’; one letter written from London almost immediately after the Fire claimed that it was started ‘in revenge of what our forces had lately done at Brandaris upon the island Schelling’, while the Venetian ambassador, reporting the various rumours about the fire’s cause, noted that one of them was ‘due to many [Dutch] merchants rendered desperate by the burning of the ships at [the Vlie], which rendered them bankrupt, and so they wished to get consolation for their own misfortune by a universal ruin’.
Death's Bright Angel Page 26