The latter years of his life were spent chiefly at Avignon, where Lady Mary Wortley Montagu saw him in 1733, the year of his second wife's death. He died himself 16 Nov. 1745. His remains were brought to England and buried in the family vault in King Henry VII's chapel in Westminster Abbey. With the death of his brother Charles, earl of Arran, in 1758 the titles of the family became extinct.
The second Duke of Ormonde, though in a sense born to greatness, certainly did not contrive to achieve it. The exceptional popularity which he enjoyed in England in the earlier half of his life is easily accounted for. Swift, describing the French ambassador to Stella, says that ‘he is a fine gentleman, something like the Duke of Ormonde, and just such an expensive man.’ He was not less munificent than he was wealthy, gracious in manner, and high-church in opinions. In other respects, too, he fell in with the then popular ideal of a patriotic English statesman, though really as little capable in the cabinet as on the battle-field, where, according to Prior (Carmen Seculare), his glory paled neither before that of his ancestors nor before that of King William himself. His loftiness of spirit was, however, not altogether for show, if St. Simon's anecdote be true, that he refused large domains offered to him in Spain as the price of conversion to the church of Rome, while we know that he declined to follow Bolingbroke in attempting to persuade the Pretender to abandon this faith. Except by virtue of his rank and position, he was as a politician throughout his life what Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says he was in 1733, quite insignificant. He never accomplished anything of importance except when by separating the British troops from those of the allies in Flanders he enabled his tory colleagues to conclude peace with dishonour.
There is a half-length portrait of the duke by Michael Dahl in the National Portrait Gallery.
[A useful biographical sketch of the second Duke of Ormonde is given in Lodge's Peerage of Ireland, ed. Archdall, 1789, iv. 59–64 note. Several facts concerning his early days and family connections will be found in Carte's Life of [the first] James, Duke of Ormonde, vol. iv. ed. 1851. Of his proceedings immediately before and after his flight to France, Bolingbroke gives an untrustworthy account in the Letter to Sir William Windham. Other modern authorities are Lord Macaulay's History of England; Lord Stanhope's Reign of Queen Anne (1870), and History of England from the Peace of Utrecht (1858); Smollett's History of England; O. Klopp's Fall des Hauses Stuart (1875–1881); Coxe's Life of Marlborough; and, more especially, F. W. Wyon's History of Great Britain during the reign of Queen Anne (2 vols. 1876).]
BUTLER, JAMES ARMAR (1827–1854), captain in the army, born in 1827, was the fourth son of Lieutenant-general the Hon. Henry Edward Butler, who had served in the 27th regiment in Egypt, and afterwards as a colonel in the Portuguese army at Busaco, where he was wounded. He was nephew of Somerset Richard Butler, third earl of Carrick. He was educated on the continent and at Sandhurst, and received his commission as an ensign in the 90th regiment in 1843. He served in the Caffre war of 1846–7, was promoted lieutenant in 1847, and purchased his captaincy in the Ceylon rifle regiment in May 1853. He was in England on furlough in the summer of 1854, when the war between Russia and Turkey had just broken out, and since he could not hope to be ordered with the expeditionary force, he set out with a friend, Lieutenant Charles Nasmyth, of the Bombay artillery, to see the fighting. The two friends went first to Omar Pasha's camp at Shumla; but as he did not seem inclined to advance, they asked leave to join the garrison at Silistria, to which the Russian army had laid siege on 19 May. Butler and Nasmyth soon obtained over the garrison the same absolute power that Eldred Pottinger acquired at Herat. The key to the fortress was believed to be the earthwork known as the Arab Tabia, and this work was perpetually bombarded and mined by the Russians, and attacked by heavy columns at all hours of the day and night. Mussa Pasha, the Turkish commandant, was killed, and so was the Russian commanding engineer; but still Omar Pasha would not send help, and when General Cannon (Behram Pasha) did introduce his brigade, he dared not keep it there, and retired within two days. On 13 June Butler had been slightly wounded in the forehead; privation and hard work made the wound dangerous, and on 22 June, two hours before the Russians retired, the hero of Silistria—who deserves the credit, though but a young English captain of twenty-seven, of defeating a whole Russian army—died peacefully without knowing of his triumph. On 14 July, before the news of his untimely death arrived, he had been gazetted a major in the army, and lieutenant and captain in the Coldstream guards.
[For the siege of Silistria see Nasmyth's letters to the Times in 1854; for a short memoir, Nolan's Illustrated History of the War against Russia, 2 vols. 1855–7; and generally, for the effect of the defence, Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea, chap. 30.]
