Butler, James, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormond

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Butler, James, Twelfth Earl and First Duke of Ormond

James Butler, twelfth earl and first duke of Ormond (1610–1688), lord lieutenant of Ireland, was born on 19 October 1610 at Clerkenwell, London, into the greatest of the old English families. Placed as a royal ward under the direction of the archbishop of Canterbury, he grew up a committed adherent of the Protestant Established Church. Inheriting the earldom (1633), he sat in the 1634–1635 Irish parliament. With the outbreak of the Irish rising in October 1641, he was given command of the king's army in Ireland. When the Gaelic Irish were joined by the Catholic Old English, including prominent figures related to Ormond, his loyalty to the king never wavered. He was made marquis of Ormond in August 1642, soon after the outbreak of the English civil war. Having agreed to a truce with the Catholic Confederates (September 1643), he was soon after appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland with instructions to negotiate a peace that would free up an army to support the beleaguered king in England. Ormond's task was complicated by the king's secretly authorizing the earl of Glamorgan to offer the Confederates more favorable terms on both religion and land than the Protestant Ormond would have thought prudent or proper. When the Glamorgan initiative ended in failure, Ormond reopened talks with the Confederates. The ensuing first Ormond peace (March 1646) was condemned by Archbishop Rinuccini, the papal nuncio, who excommunicated its adherents and secured its repudiation by the Catholic Confederacy (February 1647). The military failure of the king's cause in England, together with the seeming impossibility of agreement with the Confederates in Ireland, led Ormond to surrender Dublin to a parliamentary army under Colonel Michael Jones (June 1647). He left for England in late July, meeting the king and later traveling to Paris to confer with the queen. He returned to Ireland in the autumn of 1648. With news that the king was to stand trial, it was imperative for all who feared the parliamentary radicals in England to unite, and a new peace (the second Ormond peace) was agreed in January 1649. In the summer Ormond's attempt to take back Dublin ended in a rout at Rathmines. When Oliver Cromwell and a huge English army arrived in August, Ormond was in no position to take them on, though he had some modest, if short-lived, successes. Relations with the Catholic bishops again deteriorated, his position became untenable, and he left for France in December 1650.

Throughout the 1650s Ormond was one of Charles II's closest advisors at the exiled Stuart court, and so he remained immediately after the Restoration (1660). Appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland, he arrived in Dublin (July 1662) in time to give the royal assent to the Act of Settlement (1662). Faced with Catholic disappointment at the limited scope for restoration of confiscated estates, and with Protestant fears that the court of claims was conceding too much, he recognized that a second land act was necessary and was in London in 1664 to 1665 while the terms of the Act of Explanation (1665) were hammered out.

The most consistent aspect of Ormond's government was unequivocal support for the established church. He tolerated Protestant dissent only to the extent that it did not threaten the Church of Ireland, and his generally suspicious attitude toward the Catholic clergy was the result of his experience in the 1640s. The encouragement that he gave to the supporters of a Catholic remonstrance of loyalty was as much designed to provoke division among Catholic clergymen as to find a basis on which the Catholic Church might be tolerated. His inability to manage government finances was used by his enemies at Whitehall to argue for his recall, and whatever the king's reasons, Ormond was replaced as viceroy in 1669.

Reappointed for his last stint as viceroy (1677–1685), he maintained a stable order in Ireland while England was engulfed by the popish plot and exclusion crises. In James II's reign he went into retirement in England after a public life whose guiding principles were loyalty to the Crown, the established church, and the house of Ormond.