d the name of a
scholar, while of the 6th earl, master of every European tongue and
ambassador to many courts, Edward IV. is said to have declared that were
good breeding and liberal qualities lost to the world they might be found
again in John, earl of Ormonde. The earls were often absent from Ireland on
errands of war or peace. James, the 5th earl, had the English earldom of
Wiltshire given him in 1449 for his Lancastrian zeal. He fought at St
Albans in 1455, casting his harness into a ditch as he fled the field, and
he led a wing at Wakefield. His stall plate as a knight of the Garter is
still in St George's chapel. Defeated with the earl of Pembroke at
Mortimer's Cross and taken prisoner after Towton, his fate is uncertain,
but rumour said that he was beheaded at Newcastle, and a letter addressed
to John Paston about May 1461 sends tidings that "the Erle of Wylchir is
hed is sette on London Brigge."

To his time belongs a document illustrating a curious tradition of the
Butlers. His petition to parliament when he was conveying Buckinghamshire
lands to the hospital of St Thomas of Acres in London, recites that he does
so "in worship of that glorious martyr St Thomas, sometime archbishop of
Canterbury, of whose blood the said earl of Wiltshire, his father and many
of his ancestors are lineally descended." But the pedigrees in which
genealogists have sought to make this descent definite will not bear
investigation. The Wiltshire earldom died with him and the Irish earldom
was for a time forfeited, his two brothers, John and Thomas, sharing his
attainder. John was restored in blood by Edward IV.; and Thomas, the 7th
earl, summoned to the English parliament in 1495 as Lord Rochford, a title
taken from a Bohun manor in Essex, saw the statute of attainder annulled by
Henry VII.'s first parliament. He died without male issue in 1515. Of his
two daughters and co-heirs Anne was married to Sir James St. Leger, and
Margaret to Sir William Boleyn of Blickling, by whom she was mother of Sir
James and Sir Thomas Boleyn. The latter, the father of Anne Boleyn, was
created earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde in 1529.

In Ireland the heir male of the Ormonde earls, Sir Piers Butler--"red
Piers"--assumed the earldom of Ormonde in 1515 and seized upon the Irish
estates. Being a good ally against the rebel Irish, the government
temporized with his claim. He was an Irishman born, allied to the wild
Irish chieftains by his mother, a daughter of