He was created Duke of Gloucester and Earl of Cambridge by Charles II (in 1660), but died suddenly of smallpox not long afterwards, much to his brother's distress. Decades later, during the exclusion crisis, Henry was looked back on as a kind of 'lost leader'; as what might have been a legitimate, warlike, Protestant alternative to the equally unpalatable choices of the Dukes of York (later James II) and Monmouth (James Scott).