King's Chapel: The Crown's Unwanted Church

Why is it significant?

Notice the dark, rough-hewn Quincy granite blocks forming the stout walls of King's Chapel, standing stubbornly at the corner of Tremont and School streets. This brooding stone structure hides one of the funniest power struggles in colonial history.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Notice the dark, rough-hewn Quincy granite blocks forming the stout walls of King's Chapel, standing stubbornly at the corner of Tremont and School streets. This brooding stone structure hides one of the funniest power struggles in colonial history. In sixteen eighty-six, King James the Second decreed that Anglican worship must be established in Massachusetts. But Puritan Bostonians detested the Church of England. Every single landowner in town flatly refused to sell land for an Anglican sanctuary.

So Royal Governor Sir Edmund Andros took matters into his own hands: he simply seized a corner of the town's oldest public graveyard! The Puritans were incandescent with rage, but the Crown's chapel rose anyway. Originally built of timber in sixteen eighty-eight, the parish quickly outgrew the wooden structure. In seventeen forty-nine, architect Peter Harrison designed the grand granite exterior you see now.

To avoid interrupting Sunday services during construction, the master builders erected the heavy stone walls completely around the old wooden building. Once the granite shell was finished in seventeen fifty-four, the congregation dismantled the old timber church piece by piece from the inside and passed the lumber right out through the stone windows! Inside hangs an exquisite bell cast in England, which cracked in eighteen fourteen and was recast by Paul Revere, who proudly declared it the sweetest bell he ever cast.

Right outside lies King's Chapel Burying Ground, consecrated in sixteen thirty as Boston's first European cemetery. Interred here is John Winthrop, the visionary Puritan governor who proclaimed Boston a city upon a hill in sixteen thirty. Near him rests Mary Chilton, widely believed to be the very first European woman to step ashore from the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in sixteen twenty. This sacred patch of earth preserves the dramatic collision between Puritan piety and royal ambition.