<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 (over £ 1 billion in 2005 pounds). 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> <P> Abroad in the Netherlands, the Great Fire of London was seen as a divine retribution for Holmes's Bonfire, the burning by the English of a Dutch town during the Second Anglo - Dutch War . </P>

When was the great fire of london and where did it start