Background
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).
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).
Like his forebears, Lord Gormanston attended the Benedictine academy of Downside School.
A Roman Catholic Anglo-Irish aristocrat, he is the Premier Viscount of Ireland. His great-grandfather was Sir William Francis Butler of Bansha Castle, County Tipperary, and his great-grandmother was the celebrated Victorian artist Elizabeth Thompson, aka 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. 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.