Hamilton then joined the exile court on its wanderings and returned to England with the king at the Restoration.
Hamilton left the Catholic church to marry a Protestant and the king then appointed him a groom of his bedchamber.
In 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Hamilton lost a leg in a sea-fight with the Dutch and died from the wound a few days later.
[3] His father supported the Marquess of Ormond in the Irish Confederate War and the Cromwellian conquest[4] and called himself a baronet.
[7] Viscount Thurles (courtesy title) predeceased his father, Walter Butler, 11th Earl of Ormond, and therefore never succeeded to the earldom.
[10][4] James's place of birth and the date of his parents' marriage are affected by errors caused by confusing his father with his granduncle, George Hamilton of Greenlaw and Roscrea.
Hamilton's parents had married in 1635, despite earlier dates reported in error due to the mistaken identity.
It has long been believed that James, aged about 16 or 17, his mother and siblings lived in Roscrea, County Tipperary, and were spared when on 17 September 1646, the Confederate Ulster army under Owen O'Neill captured Roscrea Castle from the Munster confederates and killed everybody else in the castle.
[g] In the late 1650s before the Battle of the Dunes (1658), Hamilton was lieutenant-colonel of Middleton's Scottish regiment of foot, which was part of James II's Royalist Army in Exile,[27][28] but he seems to have lost his post to William Urry when Newburgh became colonel.
[32] About that year Charles allegedly also created Hamilton's father baronet of Donalong and Nenagh,[c] but the king, if he really went that far, refused to go further because the family was Catholic.
He was given a triangular piece of ground at the southeast corner of the park where the street called Hamilton Place, named after him, is now.
His brother, Anthony Hamilton, describes him in the Mémoires du comte de Grammont as follows (translated by Horace Walpole): The elder of the Hamiltons, their cousin, was the man who of all the court dressed best: he was well made in his person, and possessed those happy talents which lead to fortune, and procure success in love: he was a most assiduous courtier, had the most lively wit, the most polished manners and the most punctual attention for his master imaginable: no person danced better, nor was any one a more general lover: a merit of some account in a court entirely devoted to love and gallantry.
Compliance avoided him problems similar to those experienced by his younger brother George, who was dismissed from the Life Guards in 1667 due to his religion[48] and then took French service.
[58][59] Hamilton was killed in the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–1674) while embarked with his regiment on the new ship-of-the-line Royal Charles, Prince Rupert's flagship.
He was buried on 7 June in Westminster Abbey[65] where his uncle James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, erected a monument to his memory.