Shortly before the Execution of Charles I in January 1649, he agreed the Second Ormonde Peace, an alliance between the Confederation and Royalist forces which fought against the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.

After the Stuart Restoration in 1660, Ormond became a major figure in English and Irish politics, holding many high government offices such as Chancellor of the University of Oxford.

[2] James's mother, Lady Thurles, was English and Catholic, a daughter of Sir John Pointz of Iron Acton, Gloucestershire, and his second wife Elizabeth Sydenham.

Shortly after his birth, his parents returned to Ireland where they were welcome to Black Tom, the 10th Earl of Ormond but not to Walter his heir apparent, who had opposed James's father's marriage into the English Poyntz family, who were Catholic but only gentry.

While the title was secure, the Ormond lands were claimed by Richard Preston, 1st Earl of Desmond, who had married Elizabeth, Black Tom's only surviving child.

[6] On 26 May 1623, King James I, made Thurles a ward of Richard Preston, Earl of Desmond, and placed him at Lambeth, London, under the care of George Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury to be brought up as a Protestant.

Five children survived into adulthood:[17] Thurles's career began in 1633 with the appointment as head of government in Ireland of Thomas Wentworth, the future Earl of Strafford, by whom Ormond was treated with great favour.

[29] Wentworth planned large-scale confiscations of Catholic-owned land, both to raise money for the crown and to break the political power of the Irish Catholic gentry, a policy which Ormond supported.

In April he relieved the royalist garrisons at Naas, Athy and Maryborough, and on his return to Dublin he won the Battle of Kilrush against a larger force.

The English Civil War, which started in September 1642, had removed the prospect of more reinforcements and supplies from England, and indeed the king desired to recall troops.

In addition, the Scots Covenanters, who had landed an army in the northeast of Ireland at Carrickfergus to counter the Catholic rebellion in that part of the country in early 1642, had subsequently put northeast Ireland on the side of the English Parliamentarians against the king; and the relatively strong Protestant presence in and around Derry and Cork City was inclined to side with the Parliamentarians as well, and soon did so.

[35] Isolated in Dublin in what was now a three-sided contest, with the king desiring to reduce the Irish Royal Army, Ormond negotiated a "cessation" or ceasefire for a year with the Confederates.

The truce began on 15 September 1643,[36] By this treaty the greater part of Ireland was given up into the hands of the Catholic Confederation (leaving only districts in the north, the Dublin Pale, round Cork City, and certain smallish garrisons in the possession of Protestant commanders).

Ormond's assigned mission was to prevent the king's Parliamentarian enemies from being reinforced from Ireland, and to aim to deliver more troops to fight for the Royalists in England.

[41][42] However, the Confederates' General Assembly in Kilkenny rejected the deal, partly due to the influence of the pope's ambassador (nuncio) Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, who worked to dissuade the Catholics from entering into a compromise.

He, therefore, applied to the English Long Parliament and signed a treaty with them on 19 June 1647 delivering Dublin into the hands of the Parliamentarians on terms that protected the interests of both royalist Protestants and Roman Catholics who had not actually entered into rebellion.

[citation needed] On 8 August 1647 the combined royalist and parliamentarian troops won the major Battle of Dungan's Hill against the Confederates.

Ormond attended King Charles during August and October 1647 at Hampton Court Palace, but in March 1648, in order to avoid arrest by the parliament, he joined the Queen and the Prince of Wales at Paris.

[54] Ormond, though desperately short of money, was in constant attendance on Charles II and the Queen Mother in Paris, and accompanied the King to Aix and Cologne when he was expelled from France by the terms of Mazarin's treaty with Cromwell in 1655.

[57] On the return of Charles to England as King in 1660, Ormond was appointed a commissioner for the treasury and the navy, made Lord Steward of the Household, a Privy Councillor, Lord Lieutenant of Somerset (an office which he resigned in 1672), High Steward of Westminster, Kingston and Bristol, chancellor of Trinity College Dublin, Baron Butler of Llanthony and Earl of Brecknock in the peerage of England; and on 30 March 1661 he was created Duke of Ormond in the Irish peerage[58] and made Lord High Steward of England, for Charles's coronation that year.

At the same time, he recovered his enormous estates in Ireland, and large grants in recompense of the fortune he had spent in the royal service were made to him by the king, while in the following year the Irish Parliament presented him with £30,000.

He was dignified and proud of his loyalty, even when he lost royal favour, declaring, "However ill I may stand at court I am resolved to lye well in the chronicle".

He made no complaint, insisted that his sons and others over whom he had influence should retain their posts, and continued to fulfil the duties of his other offices, while his character and services were recognised in his election as Chancellor of the University of Oxford on 4 August 1669.

[63] In 1670, an extraordinary attempt was made to assassinate the duke by a ruffian and adventurer named Thomas Blood, already notorious for an unsuccessful plot to surprise Dublin Castle in 1663, and later for stealing the royal crown from the Tower.

Ormond was attacked by Blood and his accomplices while driving up St James's Street on the night of 6 December 1670, dragged out of his coach, and taken on horseback along Piccadilly with the intention of hanging him at Tyburn.

[64] The outrage, it was suspected, had been instigated by Buckingham, who was openly accused of the crime by Lord Ossory, Ormond's son, in the king's presence, and threatened by him with instant death if any violence should happen to his father.

These suspicions were encouraged by the improper action of the king in pardoning Blood, and in admitting him to his presence and treating him with favour after his apprehension while endeavouring to steal the crown jewels.

In 1673, he again visited Ireland, returned to London in 1675 to give advice to Charles on affairs in parliament, and in 1677 was again restored to favour and reappointed to the lord lieutenancy.

Subsequently, Ormond lived in retirement at Cornbury in Oxfordshire, a house lent to him by Lord Clarendon, but emerged in 1687 to offer opposition at the board of the Charterhouse to James's attempt to assume the dispensing power and force upon the institution a Roman Catholic candidate without taking the oaths.

wrote that with him disappeared the greatest and grandest figure of the times, and that Ormond's splendid qualities were expressed with some felicity in verses written on welcoming his return to Ireland and printed in 1682:[64]