Robert Hubert was a watchmaker from Rouen, France, who was executed following his false confession of starting the Great Fire of London.
Hostile depiction of Hubert from the Pyrotechnica Loyalana, showing him receiving a fire-bomb from a Jesuit labelled "Pa.H." (perhaps for William Harcourt, one of the Jesuits hanged after being accused of engaging in the Popish Plot) with the Tyburn gallows behind them.
The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through central London from Sunday 2 September to Thursday 6 September 1666, gutting the medieval City of London inside the old Roman city wall, while also extending past the wall to the west. The death toll is generally thought to have been relatively small, although some historians have challenged this belief.
The Great Fire of London, depicted by an unknown painter (1675), as it would have appeared from a boat in the vicinity of Tower Wharf on the evening of Tuesday, 4 September 1666. To the left is London Bridge; to the right, the Tower of London. Old St Paul's Cathedral is in the distance, surrounded by the tallest flames.
A panorama of the City of London in 1616 by Claes Visscher. The tenement housing on London Bridge (far right) was a notorious death-trap in case of fire; much would be destroyed in a fire in 1633.
King Charles II
"It made me weep to see it." Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) painted by John Hayls in 1666, the year of the Great Fire
