The Black Archive

On 27 October 1666, Robert Hubert was hanged at Tyburn for deliberately starting the Great Fire of London — on the strength of his own confession. This episode sets out what the surviving record actually supports about that confession, his conviction, and the case for and against him, and where the evidence runs out entirely.

Claims in this episode are rated on two scales, used together but recorded separately: how well each is supported (proven, probable, possible, unsupported, or contradicted by the sources examined), and what kind of source it comes from — Tier 1 for primary records created as part of the legal or administrative process itself, Tier 2 for contemporary narratives written by people at or near the time of events, and Tier 3 for later constructions, including political commemoration, retrospective memoir, and modern scholarship. Where a source has been checked only as a catalogue description or an abstract rather than the full document, that is stated below rather than folded into the tier.

Source register

* LMA CLA/047/LJ/01/0177 — the formal indictment against Hubert. Tier 1. Alleges a thrown fireball, not entry via a window; lists names at close without labelling their role. Translated transcript examined directly; original manuscript not yet checked. Transcript, fireoflondon.org.uk

* A True and Faithful Account of the Several Informations (1667) — printed account of the parliamentary inquiry; preserves Lowman’s certificate. Tier 2. Examined directly. Oxford Text Archive

* Samuel Pepys, diary entry, 24 February 1666/7. Tier 2. Examined directly. pepysdiary.com

* Clarendon, memoir material describing Hubert. Tier 3. Reported and attributed; exact wording not checked against a scholarly edition.

* Laurence Peterson statement, dated 1681. Tier 3. Not examined directly; known only through the 1713 printed source below.

* A Protestant Monument… to the Immortal Glory of the Whiggs and the Dutch (1713). Tier 3. Catalogue description examined; full text not examined. Not established as the earliest or only surviving printed appearance of the Peterson statement. London Museum catalogue

* Pudding Lane plaque (1681). Tier 3. Catalogue description examined. London Museum catalogue

* Kate Loveman, “Who Discovered the Great Fire?” (2023). Tier 3. Examined directly. University of Leicester

* Frances E. Dolan, “Ashes and ‘the Archive’” (2001). Tier 3. Examined directly. UPenn PDF

* Alan Marshall, “The Great Fire, 1666, and the Conspiracy Mentalité in Restoration England” (2016). Tier 3. Repository metadata and author’s conference summary checked; full text not examined. Bath Spa repository

* Andrea McKenzie, “Fire, Fake News and the Standing Army” (2023). Tier 3. Accessible full-text extracts and metadata checked. ResearchGate

* Peter Hinds, “’After-Birth-Inscriptions’” (2010), in The Horrid Popish Plot, pp. 361–396. Tier 3. Abstract and publication metadata checked; full chapter not accessed. DOI

* Hubert’s examinations, BL Add MS 27962, ff. 480v–482r. Tier 1 if located. Not accessed.

A King’s Bench record accused Joanna Ferrour of leading rebels at the Savoy, Clerkenwell and the Tower of London in 1381. A Middlesex jury acquitted her on two charges. The Tower allegation was left unresolved. This episode follows the surviving record, the divided verdict, and the uncertainty remained.

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In 1675, a royal warrant ordered a monument for what it carefully called the “supposed bodyes” of two missing princes. Three years later, the finished tomb named a killer, a method, and a verdict as settled fact. No court had ever tried the case.

This episode goes back to the actual evidence: Edward V and Richard of York’s disappearance in 1483, the accusations that followed, Thomas More’s confession claim and why no record of it survives, the two later claimants who complicate everything, and the bones in Westminster Abbey that have never been forensically identified.

Every claim in this episode is sourced and tiered proven, probable, possible, or unsupported following The Black Archive’s standard evidence protocol. The full written case audit, with complete citations and links to primary sources, is available now at:

Essex, late May 1381. The third poll tax in four years had fallen dramatically short of expectations. When royal officials confronted people from Fobbing, Corringham, Stanford and other Essex communities at Brentwood, an attempt to enforce the Crown’s authority became open resistance.

This episode separates the surviving record from the story later built around it. It examines the two confrontations at Brentwood, the roles of John Bampton, John Gildesburgh and Robert Belknap, and the rapid mobilisation that followed across Essex and Kent.

It also investigates three details that drifted as the episode passed into modern history: why John Bampton became “Thomas”; how collective resistance became the story of a single arrested spokesman; and whether the three clerks killed during the later escalation belonged to Bampton or Belknap.

THE VERDICT

Supported: people from several Essex communities confronted a body of royal officials at Brentwood. A separate and more violent confrontation involving Robert Belknap followed several days later.

Probable: Brentwood was the immediate flashpoint for the wider rising across Essex.

Unconfirmed: the precise legal capacity in which the officials acted and the exact chronology and location of every subsequent act of violence.

Unsupported: the confident identification of Thomas Baker as a specific man ordered arrested.

Contradicted: the name “Thomas Bampton” and any reconstruction presenting Bampton as the only royal official targeted at Brentwood.

Episode Six follows the rising into Kent—and then towards London.

IMAGE CREDIT

The Peasants’ Revolt, from Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, southern Netherlands, c.1460–1480. British Library, Royal MS 18 E I, f.165v. CC0. This is a later artistic representation of the wider revolt, not a depiction of Brentwood.

The Black Archive separates the record, the story and the distortion.

On 30 January 1649, Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, was beheaded on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall. The execution followed a nine-day trial convened under an ordinance passed by the Rump Parliament, creating a High Court of Justice with the stated authority to try a reigning king for treason. No such court, and no such charge against a sitting monarch, had existed in English law before it.

The Record

The Act of 4 January 1649 established the High Court of Justice, naming 135 commissioners, without the assent of the House of Lords or the king. The trial opened on 20 January 1649 in Westminster Hall. John Bradshaw presided as Lord President; John Cook, as Solicitor General, led the prosecution.

The printed 1649 proceedings record Charles’s response to the charge: “I would be satisfied by what power I am called hither. Now I would understand by what Authority, I mean lawful, I am brought hither.” He did not enter a plea, and did not recognise the court for the whole of the trial. The same printed account records that “there were present that day, sixty and eight Members of the Court” — well under half of the 135 named.

On 27 January 1649, the court declared Charles guilty of attempting “to uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people,” and sentenced him to death by beheading. The death warrant, dated 29 January 1649, carries the signatures and seals of the commissioners who agreed to it; John Bradshaw’s name heads the list.

Charles was executed the following day. He wore two shirts, by his own account so that shivering in the cold would not be mistaken by the crowd for fear. His last recorded words, audible only to those on the scaffold, were: “I shall go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be.” The executioner and his assistant wore false wigs, beards, and masks; their identities were deliberately concealed and were never confirmed in the surviving record.

The Story

Ten days after the execution, a book titled Eikon Basilike appeared, presented as the king’s own spiritual memoir — an account of his sufferings, paired with prayers forgiving his executioners. It ran to 36 editions within the year, carried an allegorical frontispiece showing Charles as a Christian martyr, and did more to shape public memory of the execution than the trial record itself. Parliament commissioned John Milton to answer it in print, as Eikonoklastes. The rebuttal did not dislodge the image the book had already fixed in the public mind.

The Distortion

Modern scholarship attributes the primary authorship of Eikon Basilike to John Gauden, a clergyman who claimed credit for it after the Restoration, rather than to Charles himself, though it may draw on some genuine material from the king. A constructed first-person confession stood in for the court record in shaping how the execution was remembered.

The identity of the executioner became a matter of ongoing speculation rather than settled fact. Richard Brandon, London’s common executioner, is most often named, though he reportedly denied the act before his own death in June 1649, and one contemporary French source claimed, without support, that Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell had wielded the axe themselves.

The clearest case of record giving way to later self-interest belongs to Richard Ingoldsby, one of the commissioners whose name is on the death warrant. In 1660, with the monarchy restored and the regicides facing trial, Ingoldsby told Parliament that Cromwell had forced his hand onto the paper and written his signature for him, laughing as he did it. Cromwell, dead since 1658, could not answer the charge. Charles II accepted the account. Ingoldsby was pardoned, knighted, and allowed to keep the lands he had acquired under the Protectorate — the only regicide to come out of the Restoration with everything intact.

A single eyewitness account, recorded by Philip Henry decades after the fact, describes the crowd letting out a groan at the fall of the axe. No other surviving contemporary record mentions it, yet it appears in most retellings as an established detail of the scene.

Conclusion

What the record proves: a sitting king was tried by a court created for the purpose, refused to recognise its authority, was convicted of treason against the people he had ruled, and was executed on 30 January 1649. What remains unresolved: the identity of the man who swung the axe, and whether the crowd’s response was as one witness alone described it. Between the two sits Richard Ingoldsby — a signature on a death warrant, and a story told eleven years later that turned that signature into an alibi.

King Arthur — What the Sources Actually Say

The earliest surviving account of post-Roman Britain is a sermon. It was written around 540 AD by a cleric named Gildas. It describes the Saxon invasions, the British resistance, and the battle of Badon Hill. It names the leader who turned the tide.

That name is not Arthur.

This episode traces the documentary record from Gildas in 540 to Geoffrey of Monmouth in 1138 to the French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Every major element of the Arthurian legend has a first appearance date. This episode establishes what those dates are, what sources introduced each element, and what the earliest record actually contains.

The question is not whether Arthur existed. The record cannot answer that. The question is how a silence in a sixth-century sermon became the most elaborated legend in the English-speaking world.

Primary sources examined in this episode:

Gildas, De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, c.540 AD

Historia Brittonum (attr. Nennius), c.830 AD

Annales Cambriae, c.960 AD

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, 1138

Wace, Roman de Brut, 1155

Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, c.1177

Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, c.1180s

Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, 1485

The full written case file with source citations is available to paid subscribers — link below.

More cases at The Black Archive — link in profile.

Primary sources referenced in this episode include KB 8/9 (the Baga de Secretis indictment), the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, the dispatches of Eustace Chapuys, the correspondence of Thomas Cromwell, and the letters of Sir William Kingston.

The episode examines the contradiction between the Kent indictment’s placement of Anne Boleyn at East Greenwich on 13 May 1535 and Anne’s surviving letter dated Westminster on the same day.

The question addressed is not whether Anne Boleyn was guilty.

The question is what kind of legal document contains a demonstrably false date.

On the morning of Wednesday the 26th of April, 1871, a police constable walking a lane in south-east London found a seventeen-year-old girl on her hands and knees in the dark.

She was alive.

She would not be alive for much longer.

Her name was Jane Maria Clouson. She was a domestic servant from Deptford. She was motherless. She had been in service with a stationer’s family in Greenwich for nearly two years and had left that household a fortnight before she was attacked. She was approximately two months pregnant.

She died at Guy’s Hospital four days later without making any statement that could be used in the proceedings that followed.

A young man named Edmund Walter Pook — the twenty-year-old son of the stationer in whose household Jane had worked — was charged with her wilful murder. He was tried at the Central Criminal Court before the Lord Chief Justice over four days in July 1871. The judge ruled that all statements Jane had allegedly made before her death were inadmissible hearsay. The jury deliberated for twenty minutes.

They acquitted him.

The crowd outside the court reacted with anger. Within days, Greenwich saw riotous demonstrations. A pamphlet appeared attacking the verdict and the judge’s ruling. Libel proceedings were brought. Civil damages of forty shillings were awarded. Two false confessions arrived in 1873 and 1888 and were both dismissed.

A monument was erected in Brockley Cemetery by public subscription. Its inscription calls Jane’s death a murder.

No one was ever convicted of killing her.

This episode examines four things.

What the physical record of the discovery contains.

What the evidence assembled across the inquest, the police-court hearings, and the four-day Old Bailey trial actually proved — and what it failed to prove.

What happened after the verdict: the pamphlet, the libel proceedings, the demonstrations, and the monument.

And what the record leaves permanently unresolved.

A note on methodology.

The Black Archive separates what is recorded from what is inferred from what was later said.

Every claim in this episode is traceable to a source. Primary sources — court records, medical testimony, official registers — are treated as fact. Contemporary press and pamphlet material is treated as interpretation. Later retellings are treated as constructed narrative.

Where the sources contradict one another, both versions are stated. Where the record runs out, that is said directly.

This is not storytelling. It is a documented record of events and how those events were later altered.

Primary source: Old Bailey Proceedings, trial of Edmund Walter Pook, July 1871.

Contemporary source: Newton Crosland, The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed, published by F. Farrah, 1871.

Press record: The Times, 2 May, 13–21 July 1871. Illustrated London News, 22 July 1871. Illustrated Police News, 27 May 1871.

Memorial record: Inscription, Brockley Cemetery, erected by public subscription, 1871. Transcription via Wikimedia Commons.

The full written case file, source tier analysis, and paid archive notes for the Jane Clouson case are available to subscribers of The Black Archive.

More cases at The Black Archive — link in profile.

The killing of Julia Martha Thomas. Richmond, 1879. Kate Webster murdered her employer, dismembered and boiled the body, and spent twenty-seven days impersonating her. The victim's skull was missing for 131 years.

This episode reconstructs the case from the Old Bailey trial record, the 1879 inquest, Webster's multiple confessions, and the 2011 forensic inquest that formally closed the Barnes Mystery.

Primary source: Old Bailey Proceedings, trial of Catherine Webster, 30 June 1879.

The Black Archive is a documentary series examining crimes from British history, reconstructed from contemporary sources and inquest records. Each episode presents a structured account of events alongside the evidential gaps that remain unresolved.