The English Benedictine Community of St Edmund was first founded as a priory in Paris's Rue Saint Jacques in 1615 by the Archbishop of Rheims, Dom Gabriel Gifford. In its classical church of 1674-7 would be deposited the mortal remains of James II and many English Catholic Jacobites.
James II died in 1701 and his body (minus brain, heart and entrails, all of which were dispatched elsewhere) was placed in a sarcophagus (consisting of two wooden coffins and one of lead) in St Edmund's chapel. Lights were kept burning at his tomb until the Revolution; in 1789 the priory had 15 choir monks.
