St Peter In Chains
Peter thus was being kept in prison, but prayer by the church was fervently being made to God on his behalf. On the very night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter, secured by double chains, was sleeping between two soldiers, while outside the door guards kept watch on the prison. Suddenly the angel of the Lord stood by him and a light shone in the cell. He tapped Peter on the side and awakened him, saying, “Get up quickly.” The chains fell from his wrists. The angel said to him, “Put on your belt and your sandals.” He did so. Then he said to him, “Put on your cloak and follow me.” So he followed him out, not realizing that what was happening through the angel was real; he thought he was seeing a vision. They passed the first guard, then the second, and came to the iron gate leading out to the city, which opened for them by itself. They emerged and made their way down an alley, and suddenly the angel left him. (Acts 12)
The Feast of St Peter in Chains commemorating the Apostle Peter’s miraculous liberation from prison was first celebrated in the church in Rome named after him in the fifth century. The church known as St Peter ad Vincula contains not only the chains that bound him in the Holy Land but also those placed on him in the Mamertine prison during the reign of Nero. Around the year 450 Pope Leo the Great had these two chains united.
A number of churches in Christendom have also taken that name. In the Tower of London is a chapel known as the Church of St Peter ad Vincula. There are buried many victims of of Henry VIII who were executed in the Tower precincts: two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard; his chief minister Thomas Cromwell; Catholic martyrs, Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher. There are also the remains of those killed by Henry’s daughter, Mary: Lady Jane Grey and her husband Guildford Dudley; John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. The 19th-century English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay said of the chapel:
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.