How did James Butler (1610-1688), 12th Earl of Ormond, and Elizabeth Butler (1615-1684), 12th Countess of Ormond, first rise to the positions of Viceroy and Vicereine of Ireland?
Updated 22 August 2024: Thank you to the many reviewers of the website. In response to requests for more signposting to London locations and to assist with site navigation, I have updated this post. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic.
In the last blog post, we explored how the name of Ireland's great Norman lordship - the Butlers of Ormond in Kilkenny and Tipperary - became associated with St. James's Square in fashionable west London after the Restoration of the monarchy of the 'Three Kingdoms' of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1660.
In this post, we're going back further in time to discover the earlier London origins of the man who became James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde (Irish) in 1662, 1st Duke of Ormonde (English) in 1682, and four times Viceroy (a.k.a. Lord Deputy, Lord Lieutenant) of Ireland.
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1629: Making a marriage
This story begins with something akin to a scene from Game of Thrones. On Christmas Day 1629 somewhere in London, the 19 year old James Butler, grandson of and heir to the 11th Earl of Ormond Walter Butler (d. 1633), was married to his 14 year old cousin Elizabeth Preston, born Elizabeth Preston and Lady Dingwall, daughter of and heiress to Ireland's Countess of Desmond Elizabeth Preston née Butler.
This was a dynastic wedding, designed to reunite the great Ormond estate in Ireland.
The estate had been divided by conflicts within the Butler family and the intervention of the English crown. In 1618, the first Stuart king James I of England (r. 1603-1625) & VI of Scotland (r. 1567-1625) had prevented James' grandfather Walter Butler (d. 1633) the 11th Earl of Ormond -- a staunch Catholic nicknamed ‘Walter of the Beads and Rosaries’ and a prominent leader of Old English opposition in the Irish Parliament -- taking possession of his rightful inheritance in Ireland.
James I, successor to the last Tudor monarch Elizabeth I. had already directed the City of London in 1609 to finance the Protestant Plantation of Ulster and now wanted to ensure the head of this powerful Irish dynasty was Protestant and loyal.
1622: But first, making James Butler a Protestant...
In 1622, James I had made another intervention of questionable legality. He designated 12 year old James Butler a royal ward, following the death of James's father Thomas Butler, Viscount Thurles (d. 1619).
The infant James Butler had been born at Newcastle House in Clerkenwell, another of London's sites of post-Reformation development, which was then the home of his English Catholic maternal grandparents. And the young James had been sent to Catholic school in Finchley, north of London, by his newly widowed mother Lady Thurles, Elizabeth Butler née Poyntz.
But, as a royal ward and under the tutelage of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the young James Butler became an ardent Protestant. He wrote in later life that:
"My father and mother lived and died Papists, and bred all their children so, and only I, by God’s merciful providence, was educated in the true Protestant religion"
1625: ...and then, submitting to the King
In 1625, Walter stopped resisting James I's intervention which had divided his Irish inheritance. He was released from London's Fleet prison, where he had been held since 1619, and regained possession of half the Butler estate in Ireland.
Despite being in great debt, Walter then paid the enormous sum of £15,000 (over £1.8 million today) for the right to marry his grandson James to Elizabeth Preston, heiress to the Countess of Desmond who had been granted half of Walter's estate by James I in 1618.
The marriage reunited the Ormond estate of almost 300,000 acres spread across seven Irish counties.
1633-1652: Rise & fall of the Ormonds
James and Elizabeth became the 12th Earl and Countess of Ormond upon Walter's death in 1633. As Earl, James did not however make the effort to build relationships with the people of Kilkenny who lived under the Butler lordship. His Protestant faith also set him apart from most of his Butler kin and other Kilkenny landowners. This contributed to a paradoxical outcome of the Irish Catholic rebellion of 1641.
From 1642, the 'Second Pale' of Kilkenny became the seat of the Irish Catholic Confederation set up by Old English, Gaelic Irish and some New English Catholics to govern much of Ireland. While James Butler was away leading the Royalist army of Charles I (r. 1625-1649) against the Irish Confederate rebel forces, Elizabeth directed affairs at Kilkenny Castle and protected Protestants who took shelter there from the conflict.
By 1647, the first English Civil War had seen the Parliamentarians defeat the Royalists allied to Charles I. And in Ireland, James Butler (Lord Lieutenant of Ireland since 1643) surrendered Dublin to the Parliamentarians. It is thought he believed the monarchy would be safer with the English Parliamentarians than with the Irish Catholic Confederacy.
But in 1649, the Parliamentarian victors in the Second English Civil War executed Charles I and declared England a republic ('the Commonwealth').
In Ireland, the Parliamentarian's New Model Army under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) crushed the Irish Catholic Confederates who were by now allied with the Royalist faction. The military leadership of James Butler, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland again since 1648, failed to protect the towns of Drogheda and Wexford from massacre by Cromwell's forces.
By 1652, the Butlers and the future Charles II were all in exile in France. Lack of income from the Butler's Irish estates saw Elizabeth successfully petition Cromwell that she and the children be allowed return to her personal estate at Dunmore House in Kilkenny.
"while permission was granted to her (as a woman), unlike her husband, she was not perceived as a threat to the commonwealth regime". - Historian Damien Duffy
1660: The Ormonds rise again
As covered in the previous blog post, the Restoration of the monarchy of Charles II in 1660 saw James and Elizabeth reunited after eight years apart and elevated to the pinnacle of English and Irish society. James, newly ennobled in the Irish peerage as the 1st Duke of Ormonde, returned to Ireland in 1660. His musical reception at Dublin, the long-established heart of the English 'Pale', in Ireland, provides another reminder of the deeply entangled cultures and hybrid identities of early modern Ireland.
1660: "Thugamar Féin an Samhra lin" [We Brought the Summer With Us]
According to the late 18th century Belfast-born music collector Edward Bunting, this ancient Gaelic Irish tune of celebration for Bealtaine [the month of May] was:
I think we can assume James would have understood the words being sung in welcome, even though the song came from the Gaelic Irish tradition and his teenage years in London were designed to make him Protestant and loyal to the crown.
During his time as a young man living with his grandfather Walter Butler on Drury Lane near Covent Garden, he had made a point of "conversing with such gentlemen of Ireland as spoke the language of the original inhabitants of that kingdom". As a result, he understood the Irish language "perfectly well, and could speak it well enough in familiar things".
1680s: The highest English honours in death
For James and Elizabeth Butler, 1st Duke and Duchess of Ormonde, having some form of Hiberno-English hybrid identity was no barrier to their receiving the honour of burial in the Anglican Cathedral of Westminster Abbey. There is an obvious irony in the fact that the Ormond vault was a space previously occupied by the remains of Oliver Cromwell. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the former Lord Protecto' of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland and members of the Cromwell family had been unceremoniously exhumed.
If you visit Westminster Abbey, look for the RAF carpet at the east end of the Lady Chapel. The Ormond Vault lies beneath. There is no visible memorial to Ireland's Butlers of Ormond who helped to shape the turbulent years of the 1600s across the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland.
I was surprised when I came across the references to James Butler learning Irish in London and the singing of Thugamar Féin an Samhradh Linn by his welcome reception in Dublin. It made me wonder just how porous was the boundary between the different versions of Englishness and Gaelic Ireland at this time? And how James and Elizabeth Butler viewed their own identities?
I like the term 'archipelagic', used by Dr. Naomi McAreavey, to describe the Butlers. It means they embodied 'a fundamental interconnectedness' across the 'Atlantic archipelago' of the Kingdoms of England & Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
What do you think?
Blog sources & further resources
The Butlers of Ormond
Part I of this blog post includes details of various sources about the lives of James and Elizabeth Butler, the 1st Duke and Duchess of Ormond.
On the Kilkenny Castle website, you can find a romantic account of James and Elizabeth's early courtship in London.
Historian Eamonn Darcy provides a useful summary of why the Cromwellian conquest was 'not a simple Irish versus English affair'.
Find out more about how Elizabeth Butler successfully navigated the events of the 1641 Irish Catholic rebellion and subsequent Cromwellian conquest of Ireland:
Naomi McAreavey, ‘Female alliances in Cromwellian Ireland: the social and political network of Elizabeth Butler, marchioness of Ormonde’, Irish Historical Studies, 45:167 (2021), 22-42.
Damien Patrick Duffy, The Ormond women: family, power and politics c.1450s–1660, PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth (2018). [Elizabeth Butler is discussed on pages 362-371].
Ormond history in material culture
Irish coins like those in the image at the top of this blog post - "Ormond Money" - are another aspect of this history. The British Museum online catalogue contains many examples of the silver coins produced in Ireland during the period of the Catholic Confederation while James Butler was Viceroy (a.k.a. Lord Lieutenant, Lord Deputy) for Charles I.
The Ormond burials in Westminster Abbey and the absence of any visible memorials are discussed in A.P. Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (London: Murray, 1886), in particular on page 212.
Ormond history in music
If you would like to play the version of Thugamar Féin am Samhradh Linn published by Edward Bunting in 1796, you'll find the score at 61 on page 33 of A general collection of the ancient Irish music: containing a variety of admired airs never before published, and also the compositions of Conolan and Carolan here.
The origins of the song and how it evolved into different versions are discussed in the appendix to this academic paper: George Broderick, 'Manx traditional songs and song-fragments in the end-phase of Manx Gaelic: from the Clague music collection (1890s)', Studia Celtica Fennica, 15 (2018), 1-27.
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