Robert Preston, 1st Viscount Gormanston

Robert Preston, 1st Viscount Gormanston (1435–1503) was an Irish peer and statesman of the fifteenth century who held the offices of Deputy to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Lord Deputy of Ireland.

He was the son of Christopher Preston, 3rd Baron Gormanston and Jane d'Artois: his mother was the daughter of Sir Jenico d'Artois, a soldier from Gascony who had entered the English royal service in the 1390s and who later became a substantial landowner in Ireland, (hence the unusual boy's name Jenico, which was common in later generations of the Preston family). Robert succeeded his father as 4th Baron Gormanston in 1450; his mother some years later remarried Giles Thorndon, formerly Lord Treasurer of Ireland. He had close ties to Rowland FitzEustace, 1st Baron Portlester, who married his cousin, Marguerite d'Artois, and through Portlester became allied to his son-in-law, the 8th or "Great Earl" of Kildare.

In 1460, during the brief period when Richard of York controlled the royal government in the name of Henry VI, the office of Lord Chancellor of Ireland was held by John Dynham, 1st Baron Dynham and Preston was appointed his deputy. In 1478 he was raised to the degree of viscount. The following year Edward IV appointed his second son Richard, who was four years old, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Gormanston was appointed Lord Deputy.

After the downfall of the House of York, Gormanston, like most of the Anglo-Irish nobility, supported the claims of the pretender to the Crown, Lambert Simnel against the new Tudor dynasty . Simnel's cause was decisively crushed at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487. LIke most of his peers Gormanston was pardoned for this act of treason in 1488 and restored to favour. In 1493 Henry VII reappointed him Lord Deputy: he held a Parliament at Drogheda, and a council at Trim, attended by Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare and most other leading Anglo-Irish magnates, where Gormanston bound them all to keep the peace. The council does not seem to have produced any useful results: soon afterwards Gormanston, Kildare and other nobles were summoned to England to account for their governance of Ireland. Gormanston died in May 1503.

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