The Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula

The Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula is perhaps best known as the resting place of the bodies of Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, the two saints John Fisher and Thomas More, and other executed on what is now known as Tower Green just outside the chapel, or on Tower Hill. However, it should not be thought of only as a mausoleum, for here the sacraments have been administered and prayers offered regularly for nearly nine centuries. It was, and remains, a place of worship for the community within the Tower, just as the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist in the White Tower was the chapel for the sovereign and the court when the Tower was used as a royal palace. Today there are about 150 residents within the Tower walls but in the past there have been many more, at times over 1,000.

One of the most intriguing things about the Chapel Royal is its name. Only five or six other churches in England and Wales are similarly dedicated, and even among these there are two in whose title St. Peter ad Vincula does not stand alone, but is linked with other saints. Ad vincula means in chains and commemorates St. Peter’s imprisonment in Jerusalem. We may think how right it is that a chapel in a prison fortress should be so called, but the name becomes less appropriate when we recall that Peter miraculously escaped from his Jerusalem prison! Furthermore, the chapel was dedicated some time before the Tower was regularly used as a state prison and at first it lay just west of the Tower. Therefore, when we are asked why this very rare dedication was given, we can offer no clear-cut answer, but it is likely that the Chapel was consecrated on 1 August, the feast of St. Peter ad Vincula, when the supposed chains of St. Peter are annually displayed at the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome.


Assembling of Matins at Easter Sunday

We do not know the precise date when the first chapel was built, but it was certainly in existence before the last part of the twelfth century. Most scholars attribute to the reign of Henry I, and we shall not be far out if we say that it was built about the year 1110. In the earliest records it is usually described as ‘the Church’ or ‘the Parish Church’, and this is quite understandable because, as mentioned, the first building stood outside the walls of the Tower. During the reign of Henry III, who strengthened the Tower defenses with an outer wall, the Church of St. Peter was taken within its boundaries.


Modern banner, depicting
four saints whose statues
were in Henry III’s chapel

Henry III was probably the greatest of all patrons of Medieval ecclesiastical architecture. Apart from rebuilding Westminster Abbey, he restored and beautified St. Peter’s in 1240. The Chapel was reroofed, the walls replastered, and glazed windows inserted. A contemporary document Cal. Liberate Rolls describes the two ‘large and handsome stalls’ which were made for himself and his queen, and how the statues of four saints (Mary, Peter, Nicholas and Katherine) were repainted. New items included an image of St. Christopher holding the child Jesus, a marble font with marble columns, ‘well and decently carved’, and statues of ‘two fair cherubim standing on either side of the great cross, with cheerful and joyous countenances’, and, finally, a ‘great painted beam’, bearing a crucifix, over the entrance to the chancel.

From one of Henry’s mandates it appears that the Chapel had two altars, one dedicated to St. Peter, the other to St. Mary. When he had finished his work, the Chapel must have looked very fine. The Chapel did not long outlast Henry III’s reign. His son, Edward I, demolished it and between June 1286 and April 1287 built a ‘great new chapel’, as it is called in the accounts of the then Constable of the Tower, Ralph of Sandwich. Today, it is hard to imagine such a building being completed in only ten months.