Drake Waterhouse was a puritan religious leader who maintained strict controls on the activities of his children. He had been mutilated by order of the King for distributing anti-church pamphlets. He participated in the sacking of Anglican churchs during the English Civil war and took his young son Daniel to see Charles I beheaded. While a devout puritan, he paid handsomely to get his son into strongly Anglican Cambridge University, hoping that he (Daniel) would make influential friends and useful contacts to help the family business, in the belief that Daniel would study to be a clergyman. He predicted that the apocalypse would occur in 1666, based on the number of the beast. He died in the Great Fire that year when the King of England blew up his house to create a firebreak.