It is stated that in the year 1506 sufficient progress had been made in the building to admit of the performance of divine service, at which Henry VII and his mother, Margaret Countess of Richmond, Foundress of St. John's and Christ's Colleges, who were on a visit to Cambridge, were present; and it is said that John Fisher, President of Queens' College, Bishop of Rochester, took part as chief celebrant. Professor Willis, in The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, takes exception to this statement. He is of opinion that, as the Screen and Stall work was not finished until 1536, and as the old Chapel[4] did not fall down until 1537 (in fact it was used on the eve of the day on which it fell), it is unlikely that the new chapel was used for service until that time. He further quotes Dr. Caius to strengthen this view.

Henry VII, who has been credited with an excessive tendency to accumulate treasure, was, next to the Founder, much the largest contributor. A short time before his death in 1509[5], moved perhaps to emulate the liberal example of his pious mother, he gave £5,000 to the college, with instructions to his executors to finish the building. May we not also think that Richard Fox, Founder of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Bishop of Winchester from 1500 to 1528, who was Henry VII's constant adviser, Privy Seal, and one of his executors, had something to do with this mark of Henry's generosity and favour? This sum of £5,000 was probably all spent by the beginning of 1512, when the King's executors made over to the Provost and scholars, in 1511-12, a second sum of £5,000.

Thus in 1515, in the 7th year of King Henry VIII's reign, the stonework of the chapel was completed; it had cost, in the present value of money, about £160,000. The stone used in the construction is of different kinds. The white magnesian limestone from Huddlestone in Yorkshire is that which was chiefly used in the lifetime of the Founder. The lower part of the walls was built of this; the upper part was built with stone brought from Clipsham in Rutlandshire in 1477. A third kind, from Weldon in Northamptonshire, was used for the vaulting of the choir and ante-chapel, executed in 1512 and the following years. The north and south porches were vaulted with a magnesian limestone, more yellow in colour, from the Yorkshire quarry of Hampole.

The outside measurement of the chapel from turret to turret is 310 feet, the said turrets being 146 feet high. The four westernmost buttresses on the south and five on the north side are ornamented with heraldic devices, crowns, roses, and portcullises, while on the set-offs separating the stages are dragons, greyhounds, and antelopes bearing shields.

Inside, the chapel is 289 feet long, 40 feet wide from pier to pier, and 80 feet high from the floor to the central point of the stone vault. The tracery of the roof is a fine specimen of the fan-vault which is rarely to be found in Continental architecture, but is the peculiar glory of the English style. It can truly be said that stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density and suspended aloft as if by magic, while the fretted roof is achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb. Similar roofs appear in Bath Abbey (the architect of which was Dr. Oliver King, a member of King's), in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster, in Sherborne Minster, and in the ambulatory of the choir of Peterborough; but the earliest example of this kind of vaulting is the cloister of Gloucester (1381-1412), of which the late Dean Spence speaks in the following lines:

The same words can be applied to this chapel, for here we have the long fan-traceried arch, and beneath are stones and human dust, for many members of King's and others are buried within its walls.