Civil War

Rector John Forster presided from 1611 until 1620. A gentleman of independent means, he married Anne Skorier, a native of Bow, whose family were local landowners. Their only child was a daughter, Priscilla, born in 1622 three years before before John died of the plague which killed 35,000 Londoners at that time. His legacy was in encouraging generous donations from other prosperous men who made their homes in Bow, including John Jolles, Master of the Drapers’ Company and Lord Mayor of London, who established the Drapers’ Almshouses which stand to this day.

In her eighty years, Priscilla became a significant force herself as a benefactor in the parish and her rococo monument still dominates the nave. At fifty-three years old in 1675, Priscilla married the recently-widowed brewer Thomas Coborn who died within months of their union, leaving his new bride and widow to run his business and bring up his daughter Alice. Fifteen years later, Alice died on what would have been her wedding day and is eulogised in the words of her bereaved fiancé upon the family memorial, ‘a prudence of mind and richness of intellect, a grace of carriage, beauty of form beyond the common, complete in every virtue, to an incredible degree she was just and kindly towards all and beloved by all, the delight of her friends, the one hope of her family.’ 

Although Priscilla’s life remains an enigma, we may speculate that her independence of mind indicated by her late marriage and the sense of loss engendered by the tragic events of her long life are reflected in her generous bequests, directing her fortune to the common good, including founding Coborn School and a home for seamen’s widows, supporting St Bartholomew’s Hospital and fitting a moulded plaster ceiling over the entire roof of the nave. Her years spanned the English Civil War and the Great Plague, and she died in 1702.

In June 1648, six hundred Royalist soldiers led by the Earl of Norwich occupied the village of Bow for a week. After a failed uprising in Kent, they crossed the Thames to the Isle of Dogs. There were skirmishes and the locally trained militia locked themselves in the chapel to defend it but later agreed to go home peacefully. Once a Parliamentary force came out of London in pursuit, the Earl of Norwich retreated over the bridge, escaping towards Colchester.

The register of nearby Bromley by Bow Church has this report which gives an indication of the spirit of these times - ‘Thomas White, baptised in England and being sent young beyond the seas and there perverted by the papists and entered into ye fraternitie of Augustine friars, was upon his earnest desire admitted into ye Protestant assembly at ye church of Bromley by Bow, after that he had made public confession with detestation of popish errors and a serious profession that he would live and die in ye Protestant Religion.’

When the Great Plague arrived in 1665, the register recorded 6,583 deaths in Stepney and guards were posted on Bow Bridge to halt the spread of infection. When plague broke out in Colchester the next year, a monthly quarantine of people and goods was held at Bow.

On July 8th 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary, ‘In the evening with my wife by coach to Bow and Stratford, it being so dusty weather there was little pleasure in it!’ Despite his apparent indifference this was one of many such trips that he made from his home in Seething Lane to Bow, perhaps encouraged by the presence of Deborah Willet, his wife’s maid who went to school in Bow and with whom he had an illicit relationship. Yet perhaps he was less discreet in his liaisons than he liked to believe since - two years later on May 7th 1669 - he wrote, ‘Coming through Bow, there being some young gentlewomen at a door and I seeming not to know who they were, my wife’s jealousy told me presently that I knew well enough… which made me swear very angrily that it was false, so I continued a good while out of humour.’