Jenico Preston, 17th Viscount Gormanston
Nicholas Dudley Preston, 17th Viscount Gormanston, a British hereditary peer, sat as Baron Gormanston in the House of Lords until 1999.
An Anglo-Irish aristocrat, Lord Gormanston is the Premier Viscount of Ireland.Family background
The only son and heir of Lieutenant the 16th Viscount Gormanston and Pamela Hanly, daughter of Captain Edward Hanly and Lady Marjorie Feilding, he succeeded to the family titles before his first birthday; the 16th Viscount 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, aka Lady Butler. The 14th Viscount Gormanston GCMG was his paternal great-grandfather.
A Roman Catholic like his forebears, Lord Gormanston attended the Benedictine school at Downside, Somerset. He is a connoisseur of art and 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, 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 coeducational day school.Personal life
By his first wife, Eva-Antonie Landzwójczaka, Viscount Gormanston has two sons:
He married second Lucy Arabella Fox, the daughter of the actor Edward Fox and his first wife, the actress Tracy Reed.
