Great Fire of London the confession of a simple-minded French watchmaker named Robert Hubert, who claimed that he was an agent of the Pope and had started the Great Fire in Westminster. He later changed his story to say that he had started the fire at the bakery in Pudding Lane. Hubert was convicted, despite some misgivings about his fitness to plead, and hanged at Tyburn on 28 September 1666. After his death, it became apparent that he had been on board a ship in the North Sea, and had not arrived in London until two days after the fire started. These allegations that
Robert Hubert severe inquisition [...] Catholics were also chief suspects, and accusations were so formal as to be added to the Monument in 1668, which stayed (with brief interruptions) until 1830: [...] the most dreadful Burning of this City; begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction. Hubert had convenient attributes. He was convicted and sentenced to death at the Old Bailey. Despite the contradictoriness of both Hubert's account and of public opinion, the Farriner family, in whose bakery the fire had started, was naturally under pressure — they needed to show that their ovens had been