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The Chapel Royal at Greenwich Palace

INJANUARY 2006 remains of the chapel royal at Henry VII's Greenwich Palace were discovered during routine archaeological monitoring of drainage trenching to the east of Hawksmoor's Lesser Queen Anne Building. Although an archaeological report is yet to be finalised, this volume offered a timely opportunity to discuss briefly the significance of this discovery.! The importance of the new information about the Tudor chapel royal, which was such a focus for the majesty of monarchy and the setting for occasions of great splendour, ceremony and music, cannot be under-estimated. This paper will first describe what was found and then go on to discuss its context and significance. The earliest structural feature found in the excavations was a 3 metre long conglomeration of flint blocks set within a hard mortar (Plate 16A). The full dimensions or orientation of this foundation remains uncertain, though its construction is characteristically late-medieval. Overlying this feature was a Tudor building consisting of three 'rooms'. The first (westernmost) room, truncated by the Hawksmoor building, is identified as the chapel itself. Only a fraction of its original length survives but its internal north-south width is complete and measures 8.5 metres. Its tiled floor survives and an integral doorway, with finely carved stone jambs (Plate 16B), in its south-east corner leads to another room measuring, internally, the same width of 8.5 metres (northsouth) by 5.75 metres (east-west). These two 'rooms' are of one contemporary build and the second has been labelled 'vestry one'. A third room to the east is about 8 metres long, the uncertainty being caused by alterations associated with a fireplace in its east wall, and 5.54 metres wide, north-south. This room was a later addition to the westernmost two but it is almost certainly of (later) sixteenth-century construction. At present we have defined this room as 'vestry two'. The northern walls of these rooms lay along the original riverfront and a small area of ground surface was recorded to the north. Immediately to the east of vestry two, fragments of a cobbled road surface (also found farther south) have been identified with the lane known on later maps as 'The Way to the Crane'. The chapel is clearly identified at the eastern end of the palace complex on a drawing by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde in 1558 and on an anonymous painting at Kingston Lacy, dated to after 1634. The chapel proper has three round-headed