Charles Butler, 1st Earl of Arran

Charles was born on 4 September 1671.[1] He was the second and youngest surviving son of Thomas Butler and his wife Emilia. His father was known as Lord Ossory. He was heir apparent of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond but predeceased him and so never became duke. The Butlers were an Old English family. James's mother was Dutch. She descended from a cadet branch of the House of Nassau. Both parents were Protestant. They married on 17 November 1659.[2] They had eleven children.[3]

Charles appears below at the bottom of the list of siblings as the youngest:

1. Elizabeth (died 1717), married William Stanley, 9th Earl of Derby in 1673;[4]
2. Henrietta (died 1724), married Henry de Nassau d'Auverquerque, 1st Earl of Grantham.[5]
3. Amelia (died 1760), inherited from her brother Charles and never married;[6]
4. James (1665–1745), became the 2nd Duke of Ormond and was attainted in 1715;
5. Charles (1671–1758), the subject of this article;

On 8 March 1693, Butler was created Earl of Arran (of the second creation) in the Peerage of Ireland. The following year, on 23 January 1694, he was further created Baron Butler, of Weston in the County of Huntingdon, in the Peerage of England. Arran was a Lord of the Bedchamber to King William III, a Lieutenant-General in the Army, Colonel of the 3rd Troop of Horse Guards, Governor of Dover Castle, and Master-General of the Ordnance from 1712 to 1714.

Elizabeth Butler (Christian Friedrich Zincke)

On 3 June 1705 he married Elizabeth Crew, Countess of Arran, daughter of Thomas Crew, 2nd Baron Crew and his second wife, the former Anne Airmine, daughter of Sir William Airmine, 2nd Baronet in Oatlands, at Weybridge in Surrey.[8] The marriage was childless.

His eldest brother got involved in the Jacobite rising of 1715 and was attainted, whereupon all his honours were assumed to have been forfeit. However, it was later ruled that the attainder, enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain, applied only to his British titles (i.e. those in the Peerages of England and Scotland), and not to his Irish titles. Lord Arran therefore de jure succeeded on his brother's death on 5 November 1745 as 3rd Duke of Ormonde in the Peerage of Ireland, but was never aware of so succeeding. As such, he was the fourth and last member of the Kilcash branch of the family to succeed to the titles.

In 1721 he was allowed by act of the English Parliament to buy back the family estates that had been forfeited under his brother's attainder.[9]

On 2 January 1722, the Old Pretender (Jacobite "King James III") created Charles Duke of Arran in the Jacobite Peerage of England.[10]

He died at his lodgings at Whitehall on 17 December 1758 and was buried in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster.[11]

On his death, the Earldom of Arran, the Barony of Butler (of Weston) and the Jacobite Dukedom of Arran (such as it was) became extinct, along with the Dukedom and Marquessate of Ormonde. The rest of his de jure Irish titles, including the Earldom of Ormonde, passed to his kinsman John Butler, but remained dormant.

His claim to the Barony of Butler (of Moore Park) and the Lordship of Dingwall (both attainted along with the English Dukedom of Ormonde) passed to his niece, Lady Frances Elliot, eldest daughter of the 1st Earl of Grantham and Arran's sister, the former Lady Henrietta Butler, and eventually passed to the Earls Cowper (descendants of Lord Grantham's youngest daughter), the attainder finally being reversed in 1871 in favour of the 7th Earl.

Horace Walpole called him "an inoffensive old man, last of the illustrious house of Ormonde, and much respected by the Jacobites".

• Burke, Bernard (1949), A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the British Empire (99th ed.), London: Burke's Peerage Ltd.
• Cokayne, George Edward (1910), Gibbs, Vicary (ed.), The complete peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant, I (2nd ed.), London: St Catherine Press - AB-ADAM to BASING (for Arran)
• Davies, J. D. (2004), "Butler, Thomas, sixth earl of Ossory (1634–1680)", in Matthew, Henry Colin Gray.; Harrison, Brian (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 9, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 226–229, ISBN 0-19-861359-8
• Debrett, John (1816), Peerage of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 1 (10th ed.), London: F. C. and J. Rivington - England (for his sister Elizabeth, cited here because the corresponding page is missing in the 1828 edition.)
• Dunboyne, Patrick Theobald Tower Butler, Baron (1968), Butler Family History (2nd ed.), Kilkenny: Rothe House
• Lodge, John (1789), The Peerage of Ireland, 4, Dublin: James Moore - Viscounts (for Ossory under Butler, Viscount Mountgarrett)
• Ruvigny, Melville Henry, Marquis de (1904), Jacobite Peerage Baronetage Knightage and Grants of Honour, Edinburgh: T C & E C Jack

• Genealogy of Lt.-Gen. Charles Butler, 1st Earl of Arran on the Peerage website