Jenico Preston, 17th Viscount Gormanston

Jenico Nicholas Dudley Preston, 17th Viscount Gormanston, 4th Baron Gormanston (born 19 November 1939), is an Anglo-Irish peer.

Gormanston is the only son of Jenico William Preston, 16th Viscount Gormanston (1914–1940) and Pamela Hanly, daughter of Captain Edward Hanly and Lady Marjorie Feilding (daughter of Rudolph Feilding, 9th Earl of Denbigh). A Roman Catholic Anglo-Irish aristocrat, he is the Premier Viscount of Ireland. Like his forebears, Lord Gormanston attended the Benedictine academy of Downside School. His great-grandfather was Sir William Francis Butler of Bansha Castle, County Tipperary, and his great-grandmother was the celebrated Victorian artist Elizabeth Thompson, a.k.a. Lady Elizabeth Butler.

He succeeded to the title before his first birthday, when his father died in action at Dunkirk during the Battle of France, 1940. He is a connoisseur of art and lives in Kensington, London. His ancestral seat is Gormanston Castle in County Meath, Ireland, though it is no longer in the family's possession. The castle is fully maintained by the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor (OFM), bought c. 1950. 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

Lord Gormanston has been married twice. He married Eva Antonie Landzianowska (1974–1984); they had two sons, the Hon. Jenico Francis Tara Preston, born in 1974, and the Hon. William Luke Preston, born in 1976. After his first wife's death he married Lucy Arabella Fox, the daughter of the actor Edward Fox and his first wife, the actress Tracy Reed.

Ancestry