Slottskyrkan

Slottskyrkan was consecrated on 8 December 1754, on the same day as the palace itself, by King Adolf Fredrik and Queen Lovisa Ulrika. It occupies the eastern half of the palace's south wing, spanning the full width of the building across two and a half storeys. The design, chiefly by Nicodemus Tessin the Younger and completed after his death by Carl Hårleman, blends Baroque structure with the lighter, French-inspired Rococo decoration that Hårleman had encountered in Paris. The result is often described as the most monumental Rococo interior in Sweden.

The church's predecessor stood in the old Tre Kronor castle, destroyed by fire in 1697. Remarkably, some fittings survived the blaze, including pew ends made by Georg Haupt the Elder, later installed in the present church, and elements of the original decorative stucco work. Small square mezzanine windows encircling the building are said to be a legacy of Tessin's efforts to reconcile the new church's proportions with the old structure's walls.

The ceiling vault carries three painted panels on the theme of Christ's Ascension, the work of Hårleman together with French painter Guillaume Thomas Taraval and assistant Johan Pasch. French sculptors and craftsmen, including Jacques-Philippe Bouchardon and Jacques Adrien Masreliez, contributed richly gilded decoration throughout, reflecting the practice of employing leading foreign artists on the palace's grandest interiors before Swedish craftsmanship reached comparable levels.

The pulpit, created between 1748 and 1751 largely by Bouchardon, sits beneath a gilded canopy with angel heads and drapery seemingly suspended among painted clouds. The altarpiece sculpture group depicting Christ at Gethsemane has a more complicated history: begun by Bouchardon, reportedly abandoned and restarted by his successor Pierre Hubert L'Archevêque, and finally completed by Johan Tobias Sergel, one of Sweden's foremost sculptors, in 1779. Six apostle statues by Norwegian sculptor Hans Michelsen, originally made for Stockholm's demolished Catholic Eugenia Church, were installed along the walls in the 1840s, considerably later than the church's consecration.

The church's organ history is notable in its own right. The original 1754 instrument by Jonas Gren and Petter Stråhle was replaced more than once during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a digital organ was used temporarily from 1990. A meticulous reconstruction of the eighteenth-century Gren and Stråhle organ, informed by surviving documents and a comparable surviving instrument in Bunge church on Gotland, was completed and brought into use in 1999.