A royal peculiar, under the jurisdiction of the monarch, the priest responsible for these chapels is the chaplain of the Tower, a canon and member of the Ecclesiastical Household.

At St Peter's west end is a short tower, surmounted by a lantern bell-cote, and inside the church is a nave and shorter north aisle, lit by windows with cusped lights but no tracery, a typical Tudor design.

It would have stood in contrast to the king's use of the more private St John's Chapel, established around 1080 by William I inside the White Tower.

[7] Henry III supported the living expenses of at least three different recluses, both men and women, at the Tower's anchorhold: Brother William,[8] Idonee de Boclaund (an anchoress),[9] and Geoffrey le Hermit.

[15] On 16 December 1729 the church was added to the bills of mortality, a record of burials in London, but was excluded in 1730 because of a successful claim by the inhabitants of it being extra-parochial and outside of the normal parish system.

Others were Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who incurred the wrath of King Henry VIII, and after their execution, they were canonised as martyrs by the Roman Catholic Church; Philip Howard, a third saint who suffered under the Tudors, was also buried here for a time before his body was relocated to Arundel.

[1] Thomas Babington Macaulay memorialised those buried in the chapel in his 1848 History of England: In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than that little cemetery.

Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities; but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame.

Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts.

[25]During renovation work in 1876 three burials were discovered, identified as Anne Boleyn, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, and John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland.

[26][27][28] The tomb of Sir Richard Cholmondeley, a former Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and his wife Elizabeth Pennington has been opened during the renovation, but was found to be empty.