Church of St Peter ad Vincula

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula sits inside the Inner Ward of the Tower of London, and its name means something unsettling: "St Peter in chains." The name refers to the story of Saint Peter's imprisonment under Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem. But the chains that matter most to this chapel's history are not Peter's. They belong to the queens, ministers, and nobles who were executed at the Tower and then laid beneath its floor.

  Anne Boleyn is buried here. So is Catherine Howard. So is Lady Jane Grey, who was Queen of England for nine days in 1553. Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, both later canonised as martyrs by the Roman Catholic Church, rest here too. The historian Thomas Babington Macaulay called this small cemetery "the saddest spot on the earth."

  How did a modest chapel, twice destroyed and rebuilt over the centuries, become the resting place of so much English history? And what does the building itself reveal about the people who worshipped, and the people who were brought here without mourners?

• 2. Origins and Early History

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  No one knows exactly when the first chapel was built on this ground, or precisely where it stood. Some historians have proposed the chapel predated the Norman Conquest of England, already functioning as a parish church before the Tower was ever conceived as a fortification. Others argue it was founded by Henry I, who reigned from 1100 to 1135, and perhaps consecrated on the 1st of August 1110, the feast day of St Peter ad Vincula.

  If Henry I did found it, the placement was deliberate. A public chapel would have stood outside the Tower's original perimeter walls, allowing the king to be seen worshipping in the open. This was politically useful. It stood in contrast to St John's Chapel, built around 1080 by William I inside the White Tower itself, which served as a private royal space.

  By the reign of Henry III, the chapel had been pulled inside the Tower walls. A writ issued on the 10th of December 1241 ordered the enhancement of the church, and that document is the earliest evidence placing the chapel within the Tower's bailey. The structure at that time had two chancels, one dedicated to St Mary and one to St Peter, with royal stalls that were wainscoted and painted, and two altars dedicated to St Nicholas and St Katherine.

  Henry III also maintained an anchorhold attached to the church, an enclosed cell for a religious recluse. He supported at least three different recluses there: Brother William, an anchoress named Idonee de Boclaund, and Geoffrey le Hermit. After 1312, the church likely hosted the ceremonial vigil for the induction of the Knights of the Bath.

• 3. Rebuilding Under Henry VIII

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  A fire destroyed the chapel in 1512, and the existing building is the structure that replaced it. Sir Richard Cholmondeley, then Lieutenant of the Tower, oversaw the reconstruction between 1519 and 1520 for Henry VIII. The design is attributed to William Vertue.

  The rebuilt chapel is a distinctly Tudor structure. At its west end stands a short tower topped by a lantern bell-cote. Inside, the nave and a shorter north aisle are lit by windows with cusped lights but no tracery, a hallmark of Tudor ecclesiastical design.

  Cholmondeley died in 1521, the year after he completed the work, and his effigy lies under the central arcade. During renovation work in the 19th century, his tomb was opened and found empty, his remains apparently removed at some earlier point. The tomb did contain, however, the original Tudor font, believed to have been hidden inside it before parliamentary troops reached the Tower. That font has since been reinstated in the chapel.

• 4. The Famous Dead

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  George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford and brother of Anne Boleyn, was buried here after his execution in 1536. Anne herself, Henry VIII's second wife and Queen of England, followed shortly after. Catherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, was buried here as well. Lord Guildford Dudley, husband to Lady Jane Grey, was executed on Tower Green and buried here in February 1554.

  Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson, who served as tax collectors for Henry VII, were buried here after their executions. Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's minister, was brought here after his execution in 1540. Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, the brother of Jane Seymour and uncle of Edward VI, followed in 1549. Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, was buried here in 1552. John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, and John Gates, both connected to the 1553 succession crisis, were also laid here.

  James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, was buried beneath the communion table in 1685. Philip Howard, a saint who suffered under the Tudors, was buried here for a time before his body was relocated to Arundel.

  A table on the west wall lists the "remarkable persons" buried in the chapel between 1534 and 1747. Sir Richard Blount, who died in 1564, and his son Sir Michael, who died in 1610, have an impressive monument in the sanctuary. Both were Tudor Lieutenants of the Tower, men who would have overseen many of the executions that filled these graves.

• 5. Macaulay's Elegy

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  Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote about this chapel in his 1848 History of England, and what he produced was less history than lament. He called it "the saddest spot on the earth."

  Macaulay drew a deliberate contrast with Westminster Abbey and St Paul's, where death is paired, as he wrote, with "genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown." At St Peter ad Vincula, he wrote, death is associated instead "with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends."

  He described the men brought here as those who had been "the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts." They arrived, he wrote, by "the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following."

  During renovation work in 1876, three burials were discovered and identified as Anne Boleyn, Margaret Pole the Countess of Salisbury, and John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, confirming what the historical record had long suggested about who lay beneath the floor.

• 6. Parish Status and Military Ties

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  St Peter ad Vincula occupied a peculiar legal position for much of its history. It served as the church of the extra-parochial area called Tower Within, part of the Liberties of the Tower of London, which sat outside the normal parish system. On the 16th of December 1729 the church was added to the bills of mortality, London's records of burials. But it was excluded again in 1730 after a successful claim that it remained extra-parochial.

  Extra-parochial places were eliminated in the 19th century. In 1858 the area became a civil parish under the Extra-Parochial Places Act 1857. The Tower of London liberty was dissolved in 1894, and the parish was absorbed by St Botolph without Aldgate in 1901.

  The chapel also serves as the regimental church of The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. That connection reaches back to 1685, when the Royal Fusiliers were raised to guard the Tower and the artillery train kept there. Officers of the regiment retain the right to marry in the chapel.

  The church's most distinctive interior ornament is a fine 17th-century organ decorated with carvings by Grinling Gibbons. In the north-west corner stands a memorial to John Holland, 2nd Duke of Exeter and a Constable of the Tower, who died in 1447.

• 7. A Chapel Royal Today

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  As a royal peculiar, St Peter ad Vincula falls under the jurisdiction of the monarch rather than the local diocese. The priest responsible is the chaplain of the Tower of London, a canon and member of the Ecclesiastical Household. That canonry was abolished in 1685 but reinstated in 2012, when Roger Hall was installed as the first canon under the restored arrangement.

  The chapel can be visited as part of a specific guided tour within the Tower of London, or by attending the regular Sunday morning service. The chapel's dual life, as a working place of worship and as a site that holds so much of the Tower's darker history, has not changed since Macaulay's visit in the 19th century. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, is among those confirmed to rest beneath its floor.