In 1471, King Henry VI of England died in the Tower of London amid disputed circumstances. Between his death and Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s, he was venerated as a saint and martyr. Modern historians have generally dismissed this cult as a political phenomenon, created and used by the Tudors as they sought legitimacy. While there is some truth in that assessment, political allegiance was only a part of the impetus for the participation of Henry’s devotees in the cult. Alongside carefully crafted (and perhaps, artificial) portrayals of Henry’s virtues lay something else his former subjects found compelling: his very real political failures, and more importantly the adversity that they engendered. Henry’s devotees used these royal adversities as the basis from which to imagine a sympathetic relationship between themselves and “good King Herre” in which he had great concern for their fatal and near-fatal emergencies. These neglected devotional aspects of Henry VI’s cult are the subject of this article.

Lollardy, the native English heresy vigorously suppressed since the early fifteenth-century, did not die with its suppression in the wake of the rebellion of Sir John Oldcastle in 1414. A century later Lollard beliefs remained current, albeit in varied forms. The most consistent features in this eclectic religious system were the possession and reading of English translations of the Scriptures, a sacramentarian view of the Eucharist, and an often vehement anticlericalism. With few exceptions Lollardy was the preserve of the unlearned; based on the religious fringes of towns and the greater cities, rather than in the learned centers of the universities or the Court.

In 1763 few Europeans doubted the enormous importance of their Caribbean possessions, a fact indicated by the ready willingness of the French to cede Canada in order to regain British-occupied Martinique. The British were no different, and in the West Indies they were in the process of establishing a New World aristocracy whose riches were based upon African slavery and the production of tropical crops. The British prized their Caribbean territories, especially since the sugar revolution that had begun during the mid-seventeenth century first in Barbados where the crop had become dominant by 1660 and then in Jamaica. British planters continued their success in the Leeward Island settlements of Antigua, St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat, where entrepreneurs converted their lands to sugar cane by the early 1700s. West Indian planters became influential within the British Empire, and exercised profound social, political, and economic importance in the metropolis. By the eighteenth century they were the richest colonists within the empire; they were landed aristocrats who could have vied in wealth and prestige with their counterparts in Britain.