On April 29th 2011 Prince William (of Wales) married his fiancée Kate Middleton in London’s Westminster Abbey.
They are now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.
The Abbey has a long tradition of royal weddings, dating back to the year 1100, when King Henry I of England (a son of William the Conqueror) was married to Matilda of Scotland; Prince William’s grandmother – Queen Elizabeth II was married in the abbey in 1947.
The Abbey’s origins can be traced back to Edward the Confessor, who consecrated the first Abbey on the site in 1065, the location was said to have been the site of a vision of Saint Peter nearby. Edward was one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England (prior to the Norman conquest in 1066) and in 1163 King Henry II oversaw the interment of Edward’s remains in the Abbey as part of his canonisation to Saint Edward.
The current Abbey was built between 1245 and 1517, while the distinctive west towers were added in the 18th century, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor – a student of Sir Christopher Wren. Hawksmoor famously designed six London churches after the great fire on London in 1666, while Wren designed St Pauls Cathedral in the City of London – where Prince Charles married Diana Spencer in 1981.
Geoffrey Chaucer was living and working in the Abbey (as ‘Master of the King’s Works’) at the time of his death in 1400 and was buried in the Abbey’s grounds. In 1556 a more substantial tomb was erected in an area south of the nave, and other writers chose to be buried in what has become known as ‘Poets’ Corner’. Notable writers buried in Poets’ Corner include William Blake, Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson, Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, the Bronte Sisters, William Wordsworth and Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson.
More importantly, since 1066 the Abbey has been the venue for the coronation of every English monarch (with the notable exception of king Henry III – as Westminster was under the control of Louis VIII of France as part of his campaign for the English throne). The scenes in the recent film ‘The Kings Speech’ depicted events in the Abbey before the coronation, but were actually filmed at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, to the north and east of London.
The actual coronation takes place while the monarch is seated in King (or Saint) Edward’s Chair (carved in 1297) which in turn houses the ‘Stone of Scone’ during the period of the coronation, the stone was returned to the Scots in 1996 – the Scots have promised to lend it back for future coronations.