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.