Church of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower Hamlets

The Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula — "St Peter in chains" — is the chapel within the Tower of London, one of the most historic and poignant churches in England. Its name recalls the imprisonment of St Peter under Herod Agrippa, a fitting dedication for a church that stands within a great fortress and state prison. Though a place of ordinary worship for the Tower's residents and garrison, it is known above all as the burial place of some of the most famous victims of the executioner's axe — among them two queens of England, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, the nine-day queen Lady Jane Grey, and the saint and Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More. The historian Lord Macaulay called it "the saddest spot on earth".

The chapel's origins are ancient and uncertain. Some believe a parish church stood here before the Norman Conquest; others that it was founded by King Henry I and consecrated in 1110 on the feast of St Peter ad Vincula. It originally stood outside the Tower's walls, where the king could be seen worshipping in public, in contrast to the more private chapel of St John within the White Tower. By the mid-thirteenth century, in the reign of Henry III, it had been brought within the Tower walls and become the church for the fortress's inhabitants, and the crypt beneath the present church dates from that time. The chapel even housed an anchorite's cell, where holy recluses lived a life of prayer under royal support.

The present building was raised for King Henry VIII between 1519 and 1520, after a fire had destroyed the earlier church, by the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Richard Cholmondeley, whose own tomb stands within it; it was probably designed by the royal master mason William Vertue. It is a handsome Tudor church, with a short west tower surmounted by a lantern bell-cote, a nave and a shorter north aisle, lit by the plain cusped windows typical of its date. As a "royal peculiar", the chapel falls under the direct jurisdiction of the monarch rather than any bishop, and is served by the chaplain of the Tower, a canon of the Ecclesiastical Household — an office abolished in 1685 but restored in 2012. The chapel is also the regimental church of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, whose connection with the Tower goes back to 1685.

It is for its burials, however, that the chapel is most famous. Within its small space lie the bodies of many of the great figures who fell from power and were executed at the Tower across the Tudor and Stuart ages. Here are the remains of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, the second and fifth wives of Henry VIII, both beheaded on Tower Green; of Lady Jane Grey, queen for just nine days in 1553, and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley; of Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who died rather than accept the King's supremacy over the Church and were later canonised as saints by the Roman Catholic Church; and of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's great minister, who in turn met the axe. To them were added, over the years, the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland, the Duke of Monmouth, and many others — the captains, courtiers and statesmen of fallen greatness whom Macaulay described as carried here "by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following".

The chapel also contains a number of fine monuments, including a memorial to John Holland, Duke of Exeter, a Constable of the Tower who died in 1447, the effigy of Sir Richard Cholmondeley, and a monument to two Tudor Lieutenants of the Tower, Sir Richard Blount and his son Sir Michael, who in their time would have witnessed many of the executions on the green outside. There is also a fine seventeenth-century organ decorated with carvings by the great craftsman Grinling Gibbons. During renovation work in 1876, burials were uncovered and identified as those of Anne Boleyn, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, and the Duke of Northumberland, and the original Tudor font, hidden away — it is thought, from the Parliamentary soldiers of the Civil War — was rediscovered within the empty tomb of Cholmondeley and restored to the chapel.

Today St Peter ad Vincula remains an active Chapel Royal, holding regular Sunday services and welcoming visitors to the Tower, for whom it is one of the most moving places within the fortress — a quiet and beautiful church that holds within its walls so much of the tragedy of English history.

The chapel stands within the Inner Ward of the Tower of London, on Tower Hill beside the River Thames. The Tower itself, with its White Tower, Crown Jewels and Yeomen Warders, Tower Bridge alongside, the historic City of London, the Tower Hill Memorial, and the wider attractions of the capital are all immediately at hand.

From its origins in the twelfth century, through its rebuilding for Henry VIII in 1520 and its long and sombre history as the burial place of the executed prisoners of the Tower — queens, statesmen and saints alike — to its life today as a Chapel Royal, the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula gathers the darkest and most dramatic chapters of English history into one small building. A Tudor chapel within the Tower of London, it remains a place of worship, of memory and of pilgrimage at the very heart of the nation's story.