Qualla: St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle

St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. Beneath the choir floor of St George's Chapel, in a small vault dug in 1649, the coffin of King Charles I rests alongside those of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour. Three monarchs in one cramped space - one killed by Parliament, one who killed his own wives, and the one wife who managed to die before he changed his mind. The vault was a hasty compromise. Charles I had just been executed at Whitehall and Parliament needed somewhere to put the body. They lowered him through the chapel pavement and closed it up. The chapel was already what it remained: the most royal church in England outside Westminster, the home of the Order of the Garter, and the place where English monarchy buries its dead. Eight hundred stall plates affixed to the choir stalls record every knight and lady since 1348. Edward IV is here. Henry VI was reburied here. Edward VII, Edward VIII, George V, George VI, Elizabeth II - they all came back to this Perpendicular Gothic chapel in the Lower Ward of their castle.

Image: David Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle: A King's Two Colleges

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Young profile, CC BY 2.0. Edward III founded two religious colleges on the same day in 1348: St Stephen's at Westminster and St George's at Windsor. The Windsor college absorbed an older chapel of St Edward the Confessor that Henry III had built a century earlier. The dedication added the Virgin Mary and ...

Image: Rob Young profile | CC BY 2.0

St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle: Parliament's Pillage

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cristian Bortes, CC BY 2.0. On 23 October 1642, three months into the English Civil War, parliamentary forces broke into St George's Chapel and plundered the treasury. They returned in 1643 to destroy the fifteenth-century chapter house and strip lead from the roofs. Elements of Henry VIII's unfinished fune...

Image: Cristian Bortes | CC BY 2.0

St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle: The Order of the Garter

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0. Edward III's chivalric order, founded in 1348, makes St George's its spiritual home. Every June the surviving Knights and Ladies of the Garter process on foot from the State Apartments down to the chapel for the annual service - a tradition King George VI revived in 1948 for the ...

Image: DeFacto | CC BY-SA 4.0

St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle: Anne of York and a Forgotten Marriage

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rachelle Haun, CC BY 2.0. In the Rutland Chantry, on the chapel's north side, a monumental brass commemorates Anne of York and her husband Sir Thomas St Leger. Anne was Edward IV's elder sister, born in 1439 - and she had a story the chapel quietly preserves. Her first marriage was political; her second, ...

Image: Rachelle Haun | CC BY 2.0

St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle: From the Air

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gavin McWilliam, CC BY-SA 3.0. St George's Chapel sits in the Lower Ward of Windsor Castle, on the north side. From above, the chapel reads as a long buttressed nave running east-west, with the Albert Memorial Chapel to its east, the Curfew Tower at its west end, and the great Round Tower of the castle rising ...

Image: Gavin McWilliam | CC BY-SA 3.0