A study of Jacobite reverence for James II, shaped by nostalgia, grievance and the allure of a lost legitimate order, yet lacking the miracle tradition that sustained Henry’s memory. It shows how both men, in different ways, outlived their regimes through the imaginative loyalty of those who needed their kingship long after the crown was gone
About Fallen Kings in difficult times
When a king dies in troubled circumstances, something curious often happens. The political noise fades, the factions disperse and a different kind of story begins to take shape. It’s a story told not in Parliament or on the battlefield, but in chapels, monasteries and the quiet corners of popular memory.
England has seen this pattern more than once. Henry VI, James II and even Edward II all became, in their own ways, figures of devotion after their deaths. Their reputations were reshaped by those who believed that a king who suffered might also be a king touched by grace.
This article explores how the cult of James II developed among English Benedictines in exile, how it compares with the much earlier cult of Henry VI.
James II and VII and the Benedictine Vision of a Suffering King
When James fled to France in 1688, he left a kingdom that didn’t want him, but found support in the monasteries of Saint-Germain and Chaillot, where people viewed his downfall differently. James became seen as a ‘Confessor‘ king in the eyes of the community.
For the Benedictines, James wasn’t a failed ruler. He was a king who had suffered for his faith and united throne and altar. His exile, his losses and his refusal to abandon Catholicism were interpreted as signs of spiritual strength. The monks treated James as a “rex infortunatus”, a king brought low by misfortune rather than sin. They preserved objects linked to him, wrote devotional accounts of his life and commemorated him in their liturgy. These weren’t official relics, but they were handled with the same reverence.
The cult never gained formal recognition from Rome. It remained a Jacobite devotion, cherished by those who believed the Stuarts were the rightful kings of Britain. It endured for decades, sustained by the Benedictines and by Jacobite families who kept portraits, locks of hair and fragments of clothing as reminders of a lost monarch.
Henry VI and the Making of a National Cult
If the cult of James II and VII was narrow and political viewing James as a pious confessor, Henry VI’s was broad and popular.
When Henry died in the Tower of London in 1471, rumours of murder spread quickly. His body was taken to Chertsey Abbey, where miracles were reported almost immediately. Pilgrims came to pray at the tomb of a king who bore the outward symbols of a ‘Passion-bearer‘. Monks collected stories of healings and visions. Henry’s reputation for piety and gentleness, mocked by some during his lifetime, became the foundation of a powerful devotional movement.
The cult grew so rapidly that Richard III felt compelled to move Henry’s body to St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in an attempt to control the narrative. It didn’t work. Under Henry VII, the cult reached its peak. The Tudor king promoted Henry VI as a saintly predecessor whose holiness reflected well on the new dynasty. A formal cause for canonisation was opened in Rome in 1484 and revived in the 1490s. It stalled, but it had real institutional backing.
Henry’s shrine at Windsor became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in late medieval England. The miracle collections survive today in the British Library and remain some of the richest sources for popular devotion in the period.
How the Cults Cooled Over Time
Both cults faded, but for different reasons.
Henry VI’s cult declined because the political need for it changed. Once the Tudors were secure, they no longer required Henry’s sanctity as a prop for their legitimacy. The English Reformation then swept away the structures that supported his veneration. His shrine was dismantled and the pilgrimages stopped.
Henry never disappeared entirely. Antiquarians rediscovered the miracle stories in the seventeenth century. Victorian churchmen revived interest in him as a model of Christian kingship. Today his cause remains technically open in Rome, though it hasn’t advanced in centuries. His tomb in St George’s Chapel still attracts quiet attention from visitors who sense that his story isn’t quite finished.
James II and VII’s cult faded because the Jacobite movement itself declined. After the failure of the 1745 rising, the Stuart claim became a romantic memory rather than a political force. The Benedictine houses that had preserved James’s relics were suppressed during the French Revolution.
Some objects survived and are now held by Downside Abbey and the Royal Stuart Society, but the devotional context has gone. There’s no active cause for James’s canonisation and no sign that one will ever be opened.
A Glance at Edward II
Edward II sits somewhere between the two. His death at Berkeley Castle in 1327 created a memory of a murdered king that never quite faded. His tomb at Gloucester Cathedral became a place of quiet devotion in the fourteenth century.
People left offerings and prayed for his soul. He wasn’t treated as a saint, but he became a figure of pity, a passion-bearer‘, and a warning about the dangers of deposition. His afterlife shows how the death of a king can generate a kind of unofficial cult even without miracles or monastic promotion.
Why These Royal Afterlives Still Matter
What links Henry VI, James II and VII and Edward II is the way their deaths opened the door to alternative narratives. Official histories might dismiss them as weak or incompetent, but monastic communities and loyal supporters found in them a different kind of kingship.
They became symbols of endurance, fidelity and the cost of power. Their cults cooled as political needs changed, but they never vanished entirely. They survive in archives, in chapels, in the work of historians and in the quiet persistence of memory.
For readers following this Henry VI series, the comparison with James II is especially revealing. Both kings were shaped by the communities that mourned them, and they became more powerful in death than they ever were in life. They remind us that kingship isn’t only about ruling. It’s also about how a nation remembers when they are gone.
The Following are further Reading or form part of the Henry VI series exploring his life, death and posthumous reputation of King Henry VI
King Henry VI of England vanished
The Strange Company of Saints: Martyrs, Passion‑Bearers, and the Rest of Us
How Royal Cults Fade and Endure: Henry VI, James II and the Long Memory of Fallen Kings
Henry VI of England: too pious to be a King
Henry VI: A sufferer of mental illness
- Leigh Ann Craig. “Royalty, Virtue, and Adversity: The Cult of King Henry VI.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2003, pp. 187–209. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4054134. Accessed 12 May 2026.
- Parvini, Neema. “Personal Action and Agency in Henry VI.” Shakespeare’s History Plays: Rethinking Historicism, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 122–73. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1wf4c98.11. Accessed 12 May 2026.
FAQ
Royal cults tend to survive when three conditions align. A violent or unjust death that can be framed as martyrdom. A community with something to gain from sustaining the memory (monastic houses, regional elites, or political factions). A symbolic usefulness that outlives the dynasty itself (Henry VI as a miracle‑working king; James II as a Catholic confessor‑king in exile).
James II’s memory endured because it served as a touchstone for legitimacy. Jacobite writers, clergy, and exiles portrayed him as, a wronged monarch, a Catholic confessor, and a symbol of dynastic continuity. His image was cultivated in: sermons at the Stuart court in Saint‑Germain,
printed panegyrics, and the devotional culture surrounding his tomb at the English Benedictine monastery in Paris.
Henry VI’s cult had institutional anchors that the Jacobites never possessed… majot shrines such as Windsor and Chertsey, Major miracle collections compiled by acceptable clerics, pilgrimage traffic that generated income. The Jacobite cause lacked a central shrine, a stable homeland base, and a continuous clerical apparatus to promote devotion. Henry VI became a local and national saintly figure, whereas the Jacobite kings remained dynastic symbols whose relevance depended on a political project that eventually collapsed.