Trinity College Chapel was built by Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth I in the mid-sixteenth century.

Construction began in 1554-55 under Queen Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Mary, a Roman Catholic, was succeeded by her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, who completed the Chapel in 1567, though the date inscribed on the east end of the building is 1564.

The architectural style is Tudor-Gothic, with perpendicular tracery and pinnacles. The roof is of an earlier style than the rest of the building, and may have been re-used from the chapel of King’s Hall, the college which preceded Trinity on this site. Only the walls and roof are of Tudor date. The building measures 205 feet (62.5m) long.

The stalls, wooden panelling, reredos and organ screen date from the early eighteenth century, and the coats of arms above the stalls from 1755-56. Five of the statues in the Ante-Chapel are nineteenth-century, whereas Roubiliac’s famous statue of Newton was carved in the mid-eighteenth century.

The organ was built in 1976 by the Swiss firm Metzler. This mechanical-action instrument incorporates seven ranks of pipework from the organs built for Trinity by ‘Father’ Bernard Smith in 1694 and 1708, and the original cases have been restored.

The stone and marble raised pavement at the east end of the Chapel and the high altar were built in 1636. The painting above the altar of St Michael binding Satan was painted in 1768 by Benjamin West. The elaborate wooden reredos holding the painting is known as the baldacchino; it was built in the early eighteenth century in the Neo-Classical style.

The stained glass windows are mid-Victorian (1871-75).

Numerous Trinity men are commemorated in the building. In addition to the six fine statues in the Ante-Chapel there are 39 burials or interments, 193 commemorative brasses, busts and plaques on the walls, and over a thousand names listed on the two war memorials at either end of the building. All the memorials and internments can be browsed via an interactive index. A full Roll of Honour with details of all the Trinity men who died in World War I and World War II is also available to download.

The College’s choral associations date back to the establishment of The King’s Hall by Edward II in 1317. This College, incorporated by Edward III in 1337, was amalgamated with an adjacent early fourteenth-century foundation, Michaelhouse, when Henry VIII created Trinity in 1546.

From the time of Edward II, Chapel Royal choristers, on leaving the Court, customarily entered The King’s Hall to continue their academic studies, alongside other undergraduates training for service in the royal administration. A considerable proportion of the pensioners and scholars – “the King’s Childer” – admitted to The King’s Hall, from the date of its foundation until the end of Henry V’s reign, were ex-choristers.

The constitution of the mediaeval chapel choir remains obscure. Music doubtless flourished in the College as a practical pursuit, as well as forming one of the disciplines of the quadrivium. Interestingly, the first recorded Doctorate of Music was conferred, in 1461, on a member of The King’s Hall, the then Warden, Thomas St Just.

The choral foundation which Mary Tudor established for Trinity in 1553 – ten choristers, six lay-clerks, four priests, an organist, and a schoolmaster – survived essentially unchanged for over three hundred years.

Among the musicians associated with the choir during this time were the Tudor composers Thomas Preston, organist during Edward VI’s reign; Robert Whyte, a chorister and lay-clerk during the 1550s; and John Hilton the elder, Organist and Master of the Choristers from 1594 to 1609. Robert Ramsey held the post of Organist from 1628 until 1644; one of his lay-clerks was the theorist, Thomas Mace, appointed a ‘singing-man’ in 1635. George Loosemore became Organist at the Restoration. Later choirmasters included James Kent and John Randall during the eighteenth century and Thomas Walmisley during the nineteenth.

During the late 1890s, not long after Vaughan Williams was an undergraduate and Stanford the Organist of Trinity, the College choir-school closed down. Thereafter, a choir of boy trebles (drawn from a local grammar school), lay-clerks (some of whom shared their singing duties with the choirs of King’s and St John’s), and students continued the regular pattern of choral services, under the direction of Alan Gray and his successor, Hubert Middleton, until the 1950s. This traditionally-constituted choir was then replaced by a body of undergraduate tenors and basses when Raymond Leppard became Director of Music.

Trinity’s mixed choir was formed by Richard Marlow in 1982, following the admission of women undergraduates to the College. Originally twenty four choral scholars, the Choir now numbers thirty six undergraduates and postgraduates from across the University.