Most Stuart rulers were buried in Westminster Abbey, but they were not given the grand architectural programmes associated with Plantagenet or Tudor kings. Their burials were shaped by political instability, financial constraint, and the fact that several reigns ended in crisis or exile. The result is a royal dynasty whose physical presence in the English funerary landscape is surprisingly muted.

The Protestant Revolution and later anti‑Jacobite measures led to the neglect, dispersal, or deliberate erasure of Stuart memorial culture. Jacobite burials and monuments were not preserved with the care given to reigning dynasties. Some sites were stripped of meaning, others left unmarked, and the political climate made commemorating the exiled line dangerous or unwelcome.

Members of the exiled Stuart line were interred in Rome, and their tombs survive in the Vatican. These spaces preserve a quiet, foreign strand of Stuart memory, one shaped by exile, Catholic identity, and the political impossibility of commemorating them at home.