(Jenico) Nicholas Dudley Preston, 17th Viscount Gormanston (born 19 November 1939), is a British hereditary peer who sat (as Baron Gormanston) in the House of Lords until 1999. [1]
An Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Lord Gormanston is the premier viscount in the Peerage of Ireland (created 1478). [2]
The only son and heir of Captain the 16th Viscount Gormanston (1914–1940) [3] and Pamela Hanly, daughter of Captain Edward Hanly and Lady Marjorie Feilding (daughter of the 9th Earl of Denbigh), he succeeded to the family titles before his first birthday; the 16th Viscount (Captain Jenico William Preston, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry) was killed in action at Dunkirk during the Battle of France, 1940.
His maternal great-grandfather was General Sir William Butler, of Bansha Castle, County Tipperary, and his great-grandmother was the celebrated Victorian painter, Elizabeth Thompson (later Lady Butler). The 14th Viscount Gormanston GCMG was his paternal great-grandfather.
A Roman Catholic like his forebears, Lord Gormanston attended the Benedictine school of Downside, Somerset. A connoisseur of art, he lives in Kensington, London.
The ancestral seat, Gormanston Castle in County Meath, Ireland, is no longer in the family's possession. The castle is fully maintained by the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor (OFM), bought in 1947. Shortly after its purchase, the order opened a boarding school for boys, Gormanston College, in the adjacent grounds; the college has since become a co-educational day school.
In 1974, Viscount Gormanston married his first wife Eva-Antonie Landzwójczaka (1955–1984). The marriage produced two sons: [4]
Viscount Gormanston married, secondly, Lucy Arabella Fox (born 1960) on 2 November 1997.[ citation needed ]
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Nicholas Preston, 6th Viscount Gormanston (1606–1643) sat in the House of Lords of the Irish Parliament of 1634–1635 and sided with the insurgents after the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
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