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On a recent browse through the Barbican Library's London collection, I picked up a book of London street names and by chance saw an entry for "Ormond(e) Yard" in St. James's Square, SW1. I was struck by the apparent incongruity of a London street referencing a name I was more familiar with from school history in Ireland - that of the great Norman lordship of the Butlers of Ormond in counties Tipperary and Kilkenny.
What I didn't appreciate until I started following the trail of Ormond Yard was that the 'Old English' Butlers of Ormond had become the leading dynastic family of Ireland through loyalty to the English crown, making Kilkenny a 'Second Pale' in addition to the more familiar Pale around Dublin. But what had led to the Butlers living in the most fashionable urban development in 17th-century London?
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Following the research thread...
The invaluable resource British History Online confirms that Ormond Yard is the only remnant of Ormond House which previously occupied the site of today's Chatham House, 10 St.James's Square, London SW1. The Ormond House mansion had originally been built for Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans, close confidant of the monarchy at the courts of Charles I (r. 1625-1649) and Charles II (r. 1660-1685) and the freeholder of the fashionable development that was St. James's Square. Jermyn is memorialised today as "the founder of the West End", having become the first non-royal person to develop a London estate following the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660.
St. James's Square and the surrounding estates of west London quickly became the preferred town residences for the aristocracy and courtiers attending the nearby Royal Palace of Westminster.
Historian Derek Keene described these post-Restoration spaces as having:
"a physical and even a moral quality of their own, allowing for display, the circulation of coaches, and self-conscious association with the monarch. Never before had ideas of aristocratic lordship received such a coherent and overt expression in London's fabric".
The making of Ormond House
In 1682, Jermyn sold his mansion to the 12th Earl of Ormond James Butler (1610-1688), newly elevated by Charles II in the English peerage as the 1st Duke of Ormond. We can get a real sense of the social status that came with his new address from the comment made by one of Butler's sons:
"how ill it would look now you are an English Duke to have no house there"
And in a reminder that history is written not just in texts, Ormond House was later immortalised in music as the home of the 1st Duke's grandson, James Butler (1665-1745) 2nd Duke of Ormonde. He was a renowned military leader who fought for King William III (r. 1689-1702) of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
The dance tune 'Ormond House' was first recorded in the 1701 edition of the English country dancing manual, Playford’s Dancing Master: The Compleat Dance Guide. These English country dances are still popular today. If you're musically minded and would like to transport yourself back in time to Ormond House of the early 1700s through the medium of dance, you can find the music score and dance steps on the Playford's Dancing Master website.
The other key resident of Ormond House was the 1st Duchess of Ormonde, Elizabeth Butler (1615-1684), born Elizabeth Preston and Lady Dingwall, daughter of and heiress to Ireland's Countess of Desmond Elizabeth Preston née Butler. This portrait of Elizabeth in all her finery with the eldest of her ten children does not convey just how much she was an astute political operator during the tumultuous years of 1641-1659 when the Irish Catholic rebellion of 1641 was followed by the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Her husband's biographer Thomas Carte described Elizabeth as:
"very intrepid in her nature; not knowing what fear was in any circumstance of danger or in any surprise whatever"
Elizabeth's letters reveal how she successfully navigated her familial, fiscal, and political responsibilities throughout her married life. You can see these in Kilkenny Castle's online exhibition, 'The noblest Person, the Wisest Female'. They include a letter of 6 Jan 1683 to her younger son, the Earl of Arran, describing the price paid for for the St. James's Square mansion - £9,000 (over £1 million today) - as "a good bargine" .
By the time the Butlers bought Ormond House in 1682, they had been been Ireland's premier power couple for two decades. After the unstable years of 'the Interregnum' which followed the 1649 execution of Charles I, the English Parliament had restored the monarchy in 1660. The newly appointed king, Charles II, elevated his loyal subject James Butler, 12th Earl of Ormond, to the rank of Duke first in the Irish peerage in 1662 and then in the English peerage in 1682.
1660: Ireland's power couple*
*Part II of this blog topic explores the making in London of this power couple prior to 1660.
James and Elizabeth were the first of the Irish aristocracy ever to achieve the rank of Duke and Duchess in the English peerage, making them the most pre-eminent of the crown's subjects in the kingdom of Ireland. Being a Duke in the English peerage meant James could sit in the House of Lords at Westminster - a privilege denied to those who were only nobility in the Irish peerage.
James had previously been the Viceroy (also known as the Lord Deputy or Lord Lieutenant) of Ireland for Charles I during 1643-1647 and 1648-1649. Those were the years of the Irish Catholic Confederate rebellion, the Cromwellian conquest in Ireland, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms across England, Scotland and Ireland which culminated in the execution of Charles I.
With the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, James was re-appointed Viceroy of Ireland for 1662-1668 and 1677-1685. Elizabeth as Vicereine had the highest social status and power of any Irish woman living in Ireland or England at this time until her death in 1684. The Butlers lived only intermittently in Dublin Castle, the seat of English rule in Ireland, but James' legacy is still visible in the urban fabric of Dublin today. He was responsible for the development of St. Stephen's Green and the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, with the latter becoming a defining image of the 17th century city.
The rise and fall of the 2nd Duke of Ormonde
On the death of James Butler in 1688, his 23 year old grandson James Butler (1665-1745) became the 2nd Duke of Ormonde. He went on to hold many important political and military positions under William III of Orange (r. 1689-1702), the Protestant monarch who replaced the Catholic James II (r. 1685-1688), and William III's devoutly Anglican successor Anne (r. 1702-1714). However, he fell out of favour with her Protestant heir-apparent Prince George of Hanover, the future George I (r. 1714-1727). James eventually threw his support behind the claims to the throne of the Catholic son of the deposed James II and fled London in 1715. For the rest of his life, he lived in exile in France as a 'Jacobite' in service of the deposed Stuart monarchy.
Tensions arising from the unsuccessful Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1719 were likely behind a murder trial at London's Old Bailey court in 1720. A tavern dispute over musicians performing 'The Duke of Ormond's March' ended in the stabbing of one Nicholas Moore who had raised a toast to the 2nd Duke of Ormonde.
You can read the original trial transcript on the website Proceedings of the Old Bailey.
Dukedom and Ormond House are lost
The Westminster Parliament confiscated ('attainted') the privileges and estates of the disgraced 2nd Duke of Ormonde. Ormond House in St. James's Square and 'Ormonde Lodge', a great house located close to the old royal palace in Richmond west of London, were sold at auction by the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates in 1717.
Ormond House was bought for £7,500 by a well to do Irish attorney, Robert Hackett, who is thought to have been the Duke' of Ormonde's own clerk in Kilkenny. Hackett outbid James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon, who had been raised to the rank of Duke of Chandos on the very day of the auction. But Chandos went on to buy Ormond House from Hackett soon after for the sum of £10,000 - over £1.1 million in today's money.
St. James's Square was still clearly the place to live for a newly ennobled Duke
- but there were to be no further Dukes of Ormonde in England or Ireland.
Most of us who grew up learning history in Ireland will be familiar with the phrase that the 'Old English' Norman invaders of the 12th century like the Butlers of Ormond became ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. But allegiances and identities were in reality far from clearcut between the three main political-cultural groupings who made up society across the island of Ireland by the early modern period:
the original Gaelic Irish
the Norman 'Old English', also known as the Anglo-Normans or Hiberno-English
the 'New English' settlers granted land in Ireland by England's monarchs and parliaments during the 16th- and 17th-century conquests.
What struck me the most about James and Elizabeth Butler's story was how much they had 'a foot in both camps', being simultaneously of Kilkenny and London. It makes me wonder how many other Irish figures were similarly products of the historic entanglement of Ireland and Britain? What do you think?
Do share your thoughts and questions in the Comments section below!
Blog sources & further resources
Ormond House
British History Online is a very rich online collection of material relating to British, Irish, and imperial histories.
The 1960 Survey of London includes a general history of St. James's Square as well as the specifics of numbers 9-10-11 St. James's Square which today occupy the site of the mansion that was Ormond House.
Arthur Irwin Dasent, The History of St. James's Square and the Foundation of the West End of London With a Glimpse of Whitehall in the Reign of Charles the Second (London: Macmillan, 1895)
This old text (available via Google Books) is a very engaging read. It includes a description of Ormond House (p. 35) and a very evocative account (pp. 89-94) of when it was the residence of "the great Duke of Ormond, the only man who has ever been four times Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland...and his scarcely less distinguished grandson".
London and Dublin in the time of the Butlers
Back in 1998, an academic conference in Dublin examined the questions of how similar and different Dublin and London were in the early modern period. The collection of essays produced afterwards, Two Capitals: London and Dublin, 1500–1840 (Oxford, 2002) is freely available online at The British Academy and well worth dipping into.
The Introduction, by the editors Peter Clark and Raymond Gillespie, highlights how much the cities and their peoples were entangled by different 'forms of dialogue, interaction, and emulation'.
Derek Keene's essay (quoted earlier), Growth, Modernisation and Control: The Transformation of London’s Landscape, c.1500-c.1760, contextualises the aristocratic development of St. James's Square where the Ormonds had their town residence.
For a shorter alternative to the Two Capitals essays on Dublin at the time of the 1st Duke of Ormond:
Music as history
You can find other tunes named after the Ormonds on Traditional Tune Archive.
The Butlers of Ormond
The Kilkenny Castle website provides an overview of key figures in the Butler dynasty of Ireland, from the 12th to the 20th century. These include the formidable Lady Margaret Butler, Countess of Ormond who was grandmother to Anne Boleyn, the second of the six wives of Henry VIII.
James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde, was a highly influential figure in the early modern history of the 'Three Kingdoms' of England (including Wales), Scotland, and Ireland.
The impact of his rule as Viceroy of Ireland and the legacy he created for the different social groups that made up 17th century Ireland has long been a topic of debate. See for example:
Billy Kelly, 'Most Illustrious Cavalier’ or ‘Unkinde Desertor’? James Butler, First Duke of Ormond 1610-1688', History Ireland, Issue 2 (Summer 1993), Volume 1.
T.C. Barnard, 'Introduction', in The Dukes of Ormonde, 1610-1745, edited by Toby Christopher Barnard and Jane Felon (Boydell & Brewer, 2000).
Elizabeth Butler, 1st Duchess of Ormonde, has only become the subject of historical research more recently as seen in the Kilkenny Castle online exhibition about her letters. This talk by Dr. Naomi McAreavey, adviser to that exhibition, demonstrates how historical research can act as 'recovery work' which brings overlooked people into focus.
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