Lieutenant-General Sir William Francis Butler, GCB, PC (Ire) (31 October 1838 – 7 June 1910) was a British Army officer and writer.

[4] Butler married on 11 June 1877 Elizabeth Thompson, an accomplished painter of battle scenes, notably The Roll Call (1874), Quatre Bras (1875), Rorke's Drift (1881), The Camel Corps (1891), and The Dawn of Waterloo (1895).

Butler again served with General Wolseley in the Zulu War (as brevet lieutenant-colonel), the campaign of Tel-el-Kebir (after which he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Queen) and the Sudan in 1884–86, becoming colonel on the staff 1885 and brigadier-general 1885–86.

He served as brigadier-general on the staff in Egypt until 1892 when he was promoted to major-general and stationed at Aldershot,[4] subsequent to which he was given command of the South-Eastern District in March 1896,[5] resident as Lieutenant of Dover Castle.

[6] In 1898 he succeeded General Sir William Howley Goodenough as commander-in-chief in South Africa, with the local rank of lieutenant-general.

[2] In June 1906, he was elevated as a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in the 1906 Birthday Honours,[9] and in 1909 he was sworn of the Irish Privy Council.