Reformation
When King Henry VIII enacted his Reformation - breaking from Europe and looting church property - he terminated the nearby St Leonard’s Priory in 1533 which had been founded on the banks of the River Lea at the time of the Norman Conquest. It was valued at £108 and Sir Ralph Sadler, one of Henry’s privy councillors, acquired it as his private dwelling.
Services could be spoken in English for the first time and the English Bible was placed in every church. Statues of saints and religious paintings were removed, incense was no longer permitted and many ceremonies and rituals were outlawed. Yet although Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister and agent of the Reformation was resident in Stepney, the people of Bow were conflicted by the reforms.
In 1548, fishmonger Henry Amcotte became the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London and when his wife Grace died in 1551, a memorial was put up in Bow which is the oldest in the church.
Portrait of Mary Tudor
In 1540, William Jerome Vicar of Stepney was burnt at the stake for his beliefs, including describing Members of Parliament as ‘butterflies, fools and knaves.’ Local firebrand Edward Underhill - who described himself as ‘all of the Spirit’ - staged a protest against idolatry in Bow Chapel in 1547. During mass, he ran up to the altar, grabbed the pyx - the silver box in which the communion wafers were kept - and threw it and the wafers to the ground. As a consequence, he was nearly lynched by some of the women of the congregation for his sacrilegious behaviour. The next year, John Champneys from Bow wrote an anti-clerical tract, declaring ‘The clergy themselves know not what regeneration of the spirit of Christ is, but what the Devil and the subtlety of man’s wit by outward learning knoweth.’ John was burnt at the stake for this offence in 1549.
The entry for Bow in the King’s Commission on Chantry Chapels of 1548 lists three hundred and sixty communicants and revenue of £13 a year from the rent of lands and tenements. Subsequently, these lands were confiscated by the crown and ‘all the old Latine books were carried to the chancellor of the Bishop of Westminster.’
When Mary Tudor came to the throne in 1553, she entered the capital with Princess Elizabeth at her side, making a joyful and triumphant ride through Bow to declare the restoration of the Catholic faith. Mary’s violent antipathy to Protestants quickly led to further persecution.
In January 1555, Elizabeth Warren and thirty-five others were arrested in a house in Bow Churchyard. Diarist Henry Machyn reported ‘they had the Englys service and prayer and a lectorne.’ Elizabeth was burnt at the stake in August of that year and, in 1820, a churchwarden claimed to have uncovered the base of it to the east of the church. More atrocities followed in a similar vein, Machyn also recorded two men - one blind and the other lame - executed in May and thirteen Protestant martyrs on 27th June 1556 attended by an estimated crowd of 20,000 to view the spectacle.
Engraving of Stratford Martyrs
Known to history as the ‘Stratford Martyrs,’ these eleven men and two women died for their faith in Bow, with the execution believed to have taken place where Fairfield Road is today. According to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the ‘men were tied to three stakes and two women loose in the middle without any stake, and so they were all burnt in one fire.’
Those executed were Henry Adlington, a sawyer of Grinstead, Laurence Pernam, a smith of Hoddesdon, Henry Wye, a brewer of Stanford-le-Hope, William Halliwel, a smith of Waltham Holy Cross, Thomas Bowyer, a weaver of Great Dunmow, George Searles, a tailor of White Notley, Edmund Hurst, a labourer of Colchester, Lyon Cawch, a Flemish merchant of the City of London, Ralph Jackson, a servant of Chipping Ongar, John Derifall, a labourer of Rettendon, John Routh, a labourer of Wix, Elizabeth Pepper of Colchester who was pregnant, and Agnes George of West Bergholt.
A tribunal held by Bishop Bonner and the chancellor, Thomas Darbyshire, found the accused guilty of heresy and condemned them to death. When they were brought from London, the party was divided into two and held ‘in several chambers’ where the sheriff unsuccessfully attempted to persuade each group to recant, telling them falsely that the others had done so. A memorial erected in Stratford Broadway in 1879 commemorates the moral courage of the martyrs.
Sixteenth century wooden chancel ceiling
Will Kemp dances through Bow on his ‘Nine Days Wonder’
From 1590 onward, the marriage register at Bow includes the occupations of grooms, revealing the social composition of the local congregation at the end of the sixteenth century - nine labourers, eight cobblers, seven bakers, five gentlemen, three butchers, carpenters and oatmeal men, two brewers, millers, watermen, coopers and basket makers, plus one drayman, yeoman, plasterer, goldsmith, gun maker, blacksmith, husbandman, hackney man, shoemaker, silk worker, grocer, cutler, soap boiler, joiner, tailor, schoolmaster, hat dresser and doctor.
In February of that year, the celebrated Shakespearian actor and clown, Will Kemp, danced through Bow on his journey from Aldgate to Norwich, known as his ‘Nine Days Wonder.’ He wrote, ‘Many a thousand brought me to Bow, where I rested a while from dancing, but had small rest with those that would have urged me to drinking… Farewell Bowe haue over the bridge, where I heard say Conscience was once drowned.’