sold to the crown for the great sum of £216,000 his ancestral right to the prisage of wines in Ireland. For his brother and heir, created Lord Ormonde of Llahthony at the coronation of George IV., the Irish marquessate was revived in 1825 and descended in the direct line.
The earls of Carrick (Ireland 1748), Viscounts Ikerrin (Ireland 1629), claim descent from a brother of the first Ormonde earl, while the viscounts Mountgarret (Ireland 1550) spring from a younger son of Piers, the Red Earl of Ossory. The barony of Caher (Ireland 1543), created for Sir Thomas Butler of Chaier or Caher-down-Eske, a descendant in an illegitimate branch of the Butlers, fell into abeyance among heirs general on the death of the 2nd baron in 1560. It was again created, after the surrender of their rights by the heirs general, in 1583 for Sir Theobald Butler (d. 1596), and became extinct in 1858 on the death of Richard Butler, 13th baron and 2nd viscount Caher, and second earl of Glengall. Buttler von Clonebough, genannt Haimhausen, count of the Holy Roman Empire, descends from the 3rd earl of Ormonde, the imperial title having been revived in 1681 in memory of the services of a kinsman, Walter, Count Butler (d. 1634), the dragoon officer who carried out the murder of Wallenstein.
See Lancashire Inquests, 1205–1307; Lancashire and Cheshire Record Society, xlviii.; Chronicles of Matthew Paris, Roger of Hoveden, Giraldus Cambrensis, &c.; Dictionary of National Biography; G. E. C.’s Complete Peerage; Carte’s Ormonde papers; Paston Letters; Rolls of parliament; fine rolls, liberate rolls, pipe rolls, &c. (O. Ba.)
BUTLER, ALBAN (1710–1773), English Roman Catholic priest and hagiologist, was born in Northampton on the 24th of October 1710. He was educated at the English college, Douai, where on his ordination to the priesthood he held successively the chairs of philosophy and divinity. He laboured for some time as a missionary priest in Staffordshire, held several positions as tutor to young Roman Catholic noblemen, and was finally appointed president of the English seminary at St Omer, where he remained till his death on the 15th of May 1773. Butler’s great work, The Lives of the Saints, the result of thirty years’ study (4 vols., London, 1756–1759), has passed through many editions and translations (best edition, including valuable notes, Dublin, 12 vols. 1779–1780). It is a popular and compendious reproduction of the Acta Sanctorum, exhibiting great industry and research, and is in all respects the best work of its kind in English literature.
See An Account of the Life of A. B. by C. B., i.e. by his nephew Charles Butler (London, 1799); and Joseph Gillow’s Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics, vol. i.
BUTLER, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1818–1893), American lawyer, soldier and politician, was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire, on the 5th of November 1818. He graduated at Waterville (now Colby) College in 1838, was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1840, began practice at Lowell, Massachusetts, and early attained distinction as a lawyer, particularly in criminal cases. Entering politics as a Democrat, he first attracted general attention by his violent campaign in Lowell in advocacy of the passage of a law establishing a ten-hour day for labourers; he was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1853, and of the state senate in 1859, and was a delegate to the Democratic national conventions from 1848 to 1860. In that of 1860 at Charleston he advocated the nomination of Jefferson Davis and opposed Stephen A. Douglas, and in the ensuing campaign he supported Breckinridge.
After the Baltimore riot at the opening of the Civil War, Butler, as a brigadier-general in the state militia, was sent by Governor John A. Andrew, with a force of Massachusetts troops, to reopen communication between the Union states and the Federal capital. By his energetic and careful work Butler achieved his purpose without fighting, and he was soon afterwards made major-general, U.S.V. Whilst in command at Fortress Monroe, he declined to return to their owners fugitive slaves who had come within his lines, on the ground that, as labourers for fortifications, &c., they were contraband of war, thus originating the phrase “contraband” as applied to the negroes. In the conduct of tactical operations Butler was almost uniformly unsuccessful, and his first action at Big Bethel, Va., was a humiliating defeat for the National arms. Later in 1861 he commanded an expeditionary force, which, in conjunction with the navy, took Forts Hatteras and Clark, N.C. In 1862 he commanded the force which occupied New Orleans. In the administration of that city he showed great firmness and severity. New Orleans was unusually healthy and orderly during the Butler régime. Many of his acts, however, gave great offence, particularly the seizure of $800,000 which had been deposited in the office of the Dutch consul, and an order, issued after some provocation, on May 15th, that if any woman should “insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and shall be held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” This order provoked protests both in the North and the South, and also abroad, particularly in England and France, and it was doubtless the cause of his removal in December 1862. On the 1st of June he had executed one W. B. Mumford, who had torn down a United States flag placed by Farragut on the United States mint; and for this execution he was denounced (Dec. 1862) by President Davis as “a felon deserving capital punishment,” who if captured should be reserved for execution. In the campaign of 1864 he was placed at the head of the Army of the James, which he commanded creditably in several battles. But his mismanagement of the expedition against Fort Fisher, N.C., led to his recall by General Grant in December.
He was a Republican representative in Congress from 1867 to 1879, except in 1875–1877. In Congress he was conspicuous as a Radical Republican in Reconstruction legislation, and was one of the managers selected by the House to conduct the impeachment, before the Senate, of President Johnson, opening the case and taking the most prominent part in it on his side; he exercised a marked influence over President Grant and was regarded as his spokesman in the House, and he was one of the foremost advocates of the payment in “greenbacks” of the government bonds. In 1871 he was a defeated candidate for governor of Massachusetts, and also in 1879 when he ran on the Democratic and Greenback tickets, but in 1882 he was elected by the Democrats who got no other state offices. In 1883 he was defeated on renomination. As presidential nominee of the Greenback and Anti-Monopolist parties, he polled 175,370 votes in 1884, when he had bitterly opposed the nomination by the Democratic party of Grover Cleveland, to defeat whom he tried to “throw” his own votes in Massachusetts and New York to the Republican candidate. His professional income as a lawyer was estimated at $100,000 per annum shortly before his death at Washington, D.C., on the 11th of January 1893. He was an able but erratic administrator and soldier, and a brilliant lawyer. As a politician he excited bitter opposition, and was charged, apparently with justice, with corruption and venality in conniving at and sharing the profits of illicit trade with the Confederates carried on by his brother at New Orleans and by his brother-in-law in the department of Virginia and North Carolina, while General Butler was in command.
See James Parton, Butler in New Orleans (New York, 1863), which, however, deals inadequately with the charges brought against Butler; and The Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General B. F. Butler: Butler’s Book (New York, 1893), to be used with caution as regards facts.
BUTLER, CHARLES (1750–1832), British lawyer and miscellaneous writer, was born in London on the 14th of August 1750. He was educated at Douai, and in 1775 entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He had considerable practice as a conveyancer, and after the passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791 was called to the bar. In 1832 he took silk, and was made a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn. He died on the 2nd of June in the same year. His literary activity was enormous, and the number of his published works comprises about fifty volumes. The most important of them are the Reminiscences (1821–1827); Horae Biblicae (1797), which has passed through several editions; Horae Juridicae Subsecivae (1804); Book of the Roman Catholic Church (1825), which was directed against Southey and excited
