<P> The fire was fed not merely by wood, fabrics, and thatch, Hanson points out, but also by the oil, pitch, coal, tallow, fats, sugar, alcohol, turpentine, and gunpowder stored in the riverside district . It melted the imported steel lying along the wharves (melting point between 1,250 and 1,480 ° C (2,300 and 2,700 ° F)) and the great iron chains and locks on the City gates (melting point between 1,100 and 1,650 ° C (2,000 and 3000 ° F)). Nor would anonymous bone fragments have been of much interest to the hungry people sifting through the tens of thousands of tons of rubble and debris after the fire, looking for valuables, or to the workmen clearing away the rubble later during the rebuilding . </P> <P> Hanson appeals to common sense and "the experience of every other major urban fire down the centuries", emphasising that the fire attacked the rotting tenements of the poor with furious speed, surely trapping at the very least "the old, the very young, the halt and the lame" and burying the dust and ashes of their bones under the rubble of cellars, producing a death toll not of four or eight, but of "several hundred and quite possibly several thousand ." </P> <P> The material destruction has been computed at 13,500 houses, 87 parish churches, 44 Company Halls, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, St Paul's Cathedral, the Bridewell Palace and other City prisons, the General Letter Office, and the three western city gates--Ludgate, Newgate, and Aldersgate . The monetary value of the loss, first estimated at £ 100,000,000 in the currency of the time, was later reduced to an uncertain £ 10,000,000 (equivalent to £ 1.55 billion in 2016). Evelyn believed that he saw as many as "200,000 people of all ranks and stations dispersed, and lying along their heaps of what they could save" in the fields towards Islington and Highgate . </P> <P> An example of the urge to identify scapegoats for the fire is the acceptance of 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 Catholics had started the fire were exploited as powerful political propaganda by opponents of pro-Catholic Charles II's court, mostly during the Popish Plot and the exclusion crisis later in his reign . </P>

Did the tower of london burn in 1666
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