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Friends,
It is Sunday, 2 September 1666, and Thomas Faryner (sometimes written as Faynor, Farynor, or Farriner) wakes up to the smoke rolling under his bedroom door.
Not a good sign. Faryner is a well-known baker in London, with a shop on Pudding Lane, boasting years of experience. It wasn’t like him to make a careless mistake. He had made sure to rake the spent coals in his ovens before he went to bed.
Didn’t he?
Obviously, not because his house is on fire.
Thomas jumps into action, grabs his daughter, Hanna, and escapes out of an upstairs window. His son, Thomas, follows. Screaming for his maid to come with them, the family was devastated when she refused. The height scares her more than the flames.
She will become the first victim of the Great Fire of London.
Back Story
Imagine with me a city of 500,000 people in cramped streets and homes made of timber, pitch, and tar. Countless stables filled with hay and straw. Businesses with cellars and warehouses storing turpentine, lamp oil, and coal.
Now, add a summer-long drought and a water shortage, and we have a recipe for disaster.
It only takes five days for 85% of London’s citizens to become homeless. 13,000 homes are destroyed. Over eighty churches, including the iconic St Paul’s Cathedral, lay in ashes. There are only six recorded deaths, but historians argue this is because the fire burned so hotly that there were no bodies to recover.
So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops. This is very true; so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another. When we could endure no more upon the water; we to a little ale-house on the Bankside, over against the Three Cranes, and there staid till it was dark almost, and saw the fire grow; and, as it grew darker, appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the City, in a most horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire.- Diary of Samuel Pepys (English writer and Tory politican)
To read the full excerpt from Samuel Pepys (eyewitness), click here.
The End Is Just The Beginning.
I could stop the story here or mention how the city rebuilt itself. But I would just be repeating what all the professionals have written—a city destroyed, rising from the shambles like a phoenix, and building a bigger and better capital.
It is a true ashes-to-riches story, so to speak.
But, in true historical fashion, there is a story often overlooked. Who was to blame?
Now, it is common knowledge that Faryner started the fire that burned London to the ground. All evidence points to him. Historians agree that he is the culprit. There is even a plaque that claims it to be true.
Ironically, he wasn’t the one charged and found guilty of the crime. That honor would belong to Robert Hubert. Never heard of him? Don’t worry, most people haven’t. At least not us here in the U.S.
Which makes the story even more interesting to me.
The Plot Thickens.
In respect of the dead, I want to tell you another story about a man who was executed for a crime he never committed. It is a moment when the horror of human nature and the drive for self-preservation reveal their ugly sides.
Thomas Faryner started the fire. In his defense, at the time, maybe he didn’t realize. Maybe he did rake out the spent coals in the oven. Perhaps he really did think everything was shipshape. But the money is in the details. One can assume that when Faryner and his family escaped, as they turned to see their home engulfed and the flames jumping to their neighbor’s, a little piece of them must have realized they were in trouble.
We hope that when Faryner heard that innocent bystanders were attacked for being the cause of the fire just because they were foreign and, therefore, ‘terrorists,’ he felt some shame.
When the news came that hundreds of people who took refuge in St. Paul’s Cathedral were forced to run for their lives as the flames became an inferno that engulfed the church, maybe his heart broke.
Instead, a simple-minded Frenchman, Robert Hubert, confessed to the crime on 16 September 1666 and was imprisoned in the White Lion Prison in Southwark.
Faryner even signed an affidavit swearing that after midnight, he had:
“gone through every room and found no fire, but in one chimney, where the room was paved with bricks, which fire I diligently raked up in embers […] no window or door might let wind disturb them and that it was absolutely set on fire on purpose[…].”
Wait. What?
So, how do we know Hubert wasn’t guilty?
Easy. Hubert’s confession was thin—he could point to where the bakery had stood and describe what it looked like, nothing more. His tale of thrusting a fireball through a window collapsed when the bakery’s owner testified that his establishment had no windows at all.
The final nail in the coffin of his false confession came when the Swedish ship’s captain swore under oath that Hubert’s vessel had not even reached English shores until two days after flames had already engulfed the city.
So, why did everyone accept his confession as the truth? Because he was French. England was embroiled in the Second Anglo-Dutch War at the time, and nearly all foreigners —Dutch, French, Spanish, and even Irish—were considered suspects.
Bonus points if they were also Catholic.
Aftermath
On 27 October 1666, Hubert was hanged at the Tyburn Tree in London. As his body was handed to the Company of Barber-Surgeons, the crowd got hold of him and tore him apart in a fit of rage.*
There was nothing left for the surgeons when they were done.
It was hoped that all the talk of conspiracies and plots against the monarch would die down with Hubert’s death. And lo and behold, they did. So much so that in 1667, the fire was officially attributed to ‘the hand of God, a great wind and a very dry season…’
So, ultimately, not even Faryner was ‘technically’ responsible. It was deemed an accident—a horrible one that cost the city millions to rebuild and left thousands desolate. But an accident, nevertheless.
*Despite its name, the Tyburn Tree bore no leaves nor fruit—only bodies. This triangular gallows, with its three wooden beams forming a macabre canopy, could suspend twenty-four condemned souls simultaneously above the bloodthirsty masses below. Such efficiency in death made it a grim marvel of medieval engineering.
Why Did He Confess?
You might still be wondering why Hubert confessed. Well, it is believed that he suffered from mental illness. Several eyewitnesses took the stand to testify about Hubert’s state of mind.
Lord Chancellor Clarendon stated his opinion was that Hubert was “only accused upon his own confession; yet neither the judges nor any present at the trial did believe him guilty, but that he was a poor, distracted wretch, weary of his life, and chose to part with it in this way.”
To read the indictment of Robert Hybert (translation from the Museum of London), click here.
Final Thoughts
I was aware of the Great Fire of London. Anyone who has studied the 1665-1666 plague is likely familiar with it. The Great Fire was once believed to be the reason the plague was eradicated. That has since been proved false, but it once went hand in hand.
What I never heard about was the man who was falsely accused of setting the fire. All evidence, and I mean every piece of it, proved that Hubert was NOT in the area when the fire started. Everyone acknowledged that Hubert was mentally unstable. Hubert couldn’t even describe where he started the fire.
And yet they still sent him to his death.
We see this even in today’s society. When a devastating event rocks a country, the first person fingered as the ‘guilty party’ is usually the one who will pay the price.
What hurts my heart more are the players in this moment of history. At any point, the judge, the jury, the lawyers, hell, Thomas Faryner, and his family could have set the record straight. But no one did. They stood in the shadows and allowed man to be dehumanized to save their standing in society.
A sad day in England’s history. And one I hope we can all learn from.
Until next time, Keep Reading and Stay Caffeinated.
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Sources:
Robert Hubert • History in Numbers
Robert Hubert and the Great Fire of London
Who discovered the Great Fire? – Reimagining the Restoration
Good grief, will humanity ever get it right?