Divine Kingship and Dynastic Display: The Altar Wall Murals Of St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster

Abstract

Destroyed by fire in 1834, St Stephen's Chapel at the Palace of Westminster was undoubtedly one of the most opulent and enduringly influential English building programmes of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Focusing on the programme of wall-painting which flanked its high altar, this paper seeks to clarify the royal chapel's importance not only in terms of its stylistic innovation, but as an arena for Edward Ill's kingly image-making. The study explores the ways in which the chapel space was used and the audiences for which its dynastically forward-looking images were intended. Scrutinising the representations of Edward III and his family, and the biblical scenes beneath which they kneel, it tests the hypothesis that the Westminster murals reflected more than just conventional mid-fourteenth-century devotional preoccupations and were, in fact, indicative of the Plantagenet's own Christian ideology of his kingship.