Power, Richard (c.1630–1690), 1st earl of Tyrone , soldier and politician, was the eldest son (there was also a daughter) of John Power (c.1597–1666), 5th Baron Le Power and Coroghmore, of Curraghmore, Co. Waterford, and his wife, Ruth Power (née Pypho), daughter and heir of Robert and Kinbrough Pypho, of St Mary's Abbey, Dublin. His father became mentally ill from about 1630, a circumstance which seems to have protected him from confiscation and transplantation. His mother was dead by 17 June 1642, on which date Richard was in the care of his grandmother, Kinbrough Pypho.
Power was governor of Waterford city in 1661 and sat for Co. Waterford in the Irish house of commons from that year until, on the death of his father, he went to the house of lords as 6th Baron in 1666. He was appointed to the privy council in March 1667.
He was captain of a company of foot in 1661, and colonel of the Orange regiment of foot by August 1670. In 1671 he was one of about twenty officers dismissed for signing a petition to the government complaining of arrears of soldiers’ pay due from the tax farmers; it was said that the earl of Ranelagh (qv) had pressed the government to deal harshly with the petitioners. He was colonel in August 1672 of a regiment of marines assembled in Ireland for service in the Anglo-Dutch war of 1672–3; he accompanied them to England in September 1672, but it is not known if he served with them.
He was granted the territory of the Decies in Co. Waterford in April 1673 and was created Viscount Decies and earl of Tyrone in October of that year. During the episode of the popish plot he was one of the principal Irish sufferers, and certainly the closest to the heart of government. Although indictments of him for high treason at Waterford in August 1679 and March 1680 were rejected, he was imprisoned in Dublin castle from December 1679 to January 1680, and in London from December 1680 to February 1684.
In his defence against the charge of treason he vehemently insisted on his protestantism, yet he appeared openly as a catholic in the reign of James II (qv), who appointed him to the privy council in May 1686, made him lord lieutenant of Co. Waterford, and (for his sufferings) placed him on the Irish pension list at £300 in 1688. He was colonel of a new regiment of foot in October 1688 and sat in the house of lords in the Irish parliament summoned by James in 1689. He was taken prisoner at the surrender of Cork in September 1689 and taken to the Tower of London. He died there between 27 October and 1 November 1690 and was buried at Farnborough, Hampshire.
He had married, in 1654, Dorothy, eldest daughter of Arthur Annesley, 1st earl of Anglesey (qv). They had three sons, the eldest of whom predeceased him, and his titles and lands passed in turn to the remaining sons, both protestants. John Power (c.1665–93), soldier, was styled Viscount Decies , 1673–90, and became 2nd earl of Tyrone in 1690. He was forced by his father in May 1673, when he was not yet eight years old, to marry his father's ward Catherine Fitzgerald. The girl, a niece of the boy's father, was the heir to the Fitzgerald estates at Dromana, Co. Waterford, which the earl wished to unite with his own. The ceremony was performed by the archbishop of Canterbury, but was repudiated in 1675 by the girl and subsequently annulled. John Power, who did not remarry, was said to have served on the Williamite side at the siege of Derry and was attainted by the 1689 Jacobite parliament in which his father sat. He obtained in 1692 the reversal of his father's posthumous outlawry (of 1691) as a Jacobite. John Power died 14 October 1693, and was succeeded by his younger brother James Power (1667–1704), 3rd earl of Tyrone , soldier and politician, who was said to have been forced by his father to serve in his own regiment in the service of James II, but who submitted to William at the surrender of Waterford in July 1690. He took his seat in the Irish house of lords in 1695 and was governor of the city and county of Waterford from 1695 to his death in 1704. His estates passed to his daughter but the title became extinct.