Museums, Детальна інформація

As Sovereign of the Order of the Garter, The Queen attends a service in the Chapel in June each year, together with the Knights and Ladies of the

Order. Today thirteen Military Knights of Windsor represent the Knights of the Garter in ST George’s Chapel at regular services. Ten sovereigns are buried in the Chapel, as are buried in the Chapel, as are other members of the royal family, many represented by magnificent tombs.

The Albert Memorial Chapel

The richly decorated interior is a Victorian masterpiece, created by

Sir George Gilbert Scott for Queen Victoria in 1863-73 to commemorate her husband Albert.

The vaulted ceiling is decorated in gold mosaic by Antonio Salviati.

The figures in the false west window represent sovereigns, clerics and others associated with St George’s Chapel. The inlaid marble panels around the lower walls depict scenes from Scripture.

This was the site of one of the Castle’s earliest chapels, built in

1240 by King Henry III and adapted by King Edward III in the 1350s as the first chapel of the College of St George and the Order of the

Garter. When the existing St George’s Chapel was built in 11475-15528, this small chapel fell into disuse. Subsequent plans to turn it into a royal mausoleum came to nothing.

In 1863 Queen Victoria ordered its complete restoration and redecoration as a temporary resting place for Prince Albert.

The Chapel is now dominated by Alfred Gilbert’s tomb of the Duke of

Clarence and Avandale who died in 1892.

The Great Park

The Great Park of Windsor, covering about 4,800 acres, has evolved out of the Saxon and medieval hunting forest. It is connected to the Castle by an avenue of nearly 3 miles, known as the Long Walk, planted by King

Charles II in 1685 and replanted in 1945. The Valley Gardens are open all year round

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Westminster Abbey is one of the most famous, historic and widely visited churches not only in Britain but in the whole Christian world.

There are other reasons for its fame apart from its beauty and its vital role as a centre of the Christian faith in one of the world’s most important capital cities. These include the facts that since 1066 every sovereign apart from Edward Y and Edward YIII has been crowned here and that for many centuries it was also the burial place of kings, queens and princes.

The royal connections began even earlier than the present Abbey, for it was Edward the Confessor, sometimes called the last of the English kings(1042-66) and canonised in 1163, who established an earlier church on this site. His great Norman Abbey was built close to his palace on

Thorney Island. It was completed in 1065 and stood surrounded by the many ancillary buildings needed by the community of Benedictine monks who passed their lives of prayer here. Edward’s death near the time of his

Abbey’s consecration made it natural for his burial place to be by the

High Altar.

Only 200 years later, the Norman east end of the Abbey was demolished and rebuilt on the orders of Henry III, who had a great devotion to Edward the Confessor and wanted to honour him. The central focus of the new Abbey was a magnificent shrine to house St Edward’s body ; the remains of this shrine, dismantled at the Reformation but later reerected in rather a clumsy and piecemeal way, can still be seen behind the High Altar today.

The new Abbey remained incomplete until 1376, when the rebuilding of the Nave began; it was not finished until 150 years later, but the master masons carried on a similar thirteenth-century Gothic, French-influenced design, as that of Henry III’s initial work, over that period, giving the whole a beautiful harmony of style.

In the early sixteenth century the Lady Chapel was rebuilt as the magnificent Henry YII Chapel; with its superb fan-vaulting it is one of

Westminster’s great treasures.

In the mid-eighteenth century the last malor additions - the two western towers designed by Hawksmoor - were made to the main fabric of the

Abbey.

THE NAVE was begun by Abbot Litlington who financed the work with money left by Cardinal Simon Langham, his predecessor, for the use of the monastery. The master mason in charge of the work was almost certainly the great Henry Yevele. His design depended on the extra strength given to the structure by massive flying buttresses. These enabled the roof to be raised to a height of 102 feet. The stonework of the vaulting has been cleaned and the bosses gilded in recent years.