Born: May 23rd, 1951
Died: June 18th, 2025
When, in 1976, Henry Mount Charles, who died on June 18th, aged 74, took possession of Slane Castle, his ancestral mansion overlooking the Boyne, he was determined not to be stuck in the traditional aloof isolated mould of ascendancy life but to make Slane and himself part of modern Ireland.
Showing considerable entrepreneurial flair, inherited from his maternal grandfather, the founder of Navan Carpets, he opened a restaurant, where occasionally he waited on tables, and then a nightclub. He let Slane for films, sometimes acting as an extra himself; RTÉ used it to film episodes of The Riordans.
He deployed the natural amphitheatre formed by the grounds in front of the castle for rock concerts. Before the first one in 1981, he braved threats to him as “a British toad” from people demanding that he not go ahead with the event while hunger strikers were dying in Northern Ireland. Performances by Thin Lizzy, U2, The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen were early successes.
[ Henry Mount Charles, owner of Slane Castle, dies aged 74Opens in new window ]
In 1984, when Bob Dylan performed, fans who gathered on the Saturday for the Sunday performance went wild, causing much damage locally.
In other years the concerts were more orderly events, becoming a regular feature of Irish summers, with enthusiastic attendances in tens of thousands.
“The internal anger and frustration I have about being made to feel an outsider in my own country and an irrelevant anachronism,” Mount Charles wrote, “has been eased by music, and most especially by the concerts at Slane”. With his aquiline features, he was a striking figure; his trendy dress and long hair cemented his image as a modern man and won him popularity. He was affable to all-comers.
[ Henry Mount Charles: a life in picturesOpens in new window ]
He was less successful as a politician. How far this was due, as he himself believed, to prejudice against his aristocratic background and how far to aspects of his personality, is an open question.
Henry Vivien Pierpont Conyngham was born in Dublin’s Rotunda on May 23rd, 1951, the eldest of three sons of the then Earl and Countess of Mount Charles. As was customary, young Henry, whose title was Viscount Slane, was reared below stairs. Mary Brown, a Kerry woman who was housekeeper, became a surrogate mother: he remained devoted to her and dedicated his memoir Public Space, Private Life published in 1987 to her memory.
He went to school at Headfort in Kells, Co Meath, and later at Harrow in England, where he claimed he was taunted for being Irish. He spent a year working with an Anglican mission in South Africa, putting himself in peril of the anti-apartheid laws by having an affair with a Zulu nurse. “I was a wild boy then,” he recalled.
He was an undergraduate at Harvard in 1971 when he married Juliet Kitson, stepdaughter of oil tycoon J Paul Getty. The couple subsequently settled in London and Henry joined the publisher Faber & Faber. He was adept at striking hard bargains for the sale of rights on books it published.
It was the decision of his father to move to the Isle of Man out of range of the short-lived wealth tax in Ireland that opened the way for Henry to return in 1976 to his beloved Slane. By then he had succeeded his father as Earl of Mount Charles on the death of his grandfather Marquess Conyngham and styled himself thereafter (not quite correctly) as Lord Henry Mount Charles.
Taking Garret FitzGerald’s constitutional crusade, and its commitment to pluralism, as an invitation to members of the Protestant ascendancy to participate in Irish politics, he joined Fine Gael. His assumption that he would be given a big role without working his way up through local politics was almost fulfilled when, in 1984, he came within six votes of being selected by a delegate conference to stand for the European Parliament.
Indignant not to be added to the ticket, he resigned from Fine Gael, which was then in government, describing it as a party of floundering hopes and its constitutional crusade as a damp squib. He attempted to form a New Departure Party but attracted few recruits. When other disenchanted Fine Gaelers joined with Desmond O’Malley and opponents of Charles Haughey’s leadership in Fianna Fáil to form the Progressive Democrats, they decided it was best to leave Mount Charles alone.
He returned to Fine Gael. In the 1992 general election, he polled well as its second candidate in Louth, indicating a personal popularity of which the party never again availed. He stood for the Dublin University constituency in the Seanad in 1997 but, not being a Trinity graduate, he stood little chance.
[ Henry Mount Charles praises ‘one of the best Slanes ever’Opens in new window ]
He gave needless ammunition to those who alleged he was more British than Irish, a charge that enraged him, when he announced he would take his seat in the House of Lords when his father died. In the event, the automatic right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords was abolished before this could happen.
For all his privilege and wealth, Henry Mount Charles’s life was quite troubled. He confessed that the upset of his father leaving his mother while he was a teenager had filled him with anger. It foreshadowed the breakdown of his own early marriage and the subsequent departure of his children with their mother to England.
Having renewed his domestic happiness with his marriage in 1985 to Iona Grimston, daughter of the Earl of Verulam, he then felt “emotionally scarred” by what he saw as the lenient treatment meted out to the killers of his English gamekeeper four years later.
This was compounded by a fire in Slane Castle, which he suspected was arson. He began to drink heavily and, on his own account, was forced ultimately to undergo therapy to cope with an underlying anger. As revealed in his memoir and various frank interviews, he was an emotional, somewhat volatile, person in need of constant affirmation and quite vulnerable.
It was a tribute to his resilience that he maintained a good work rate managing his various business ventures, including the Slane Distillery he started in 2009, which was taken over in 2015 by Brown-Forman, the group behind Jack Daniel’s whiskey in the United States.
A column in the Irish Daily Mirror under the byline “Lord Henry” satisfied his need to be a public voice.
He had been suffering from lung cancer since 2013 and was lyrical in praise of the team in St James’s Hospital that looked after him. He was present at the concert at Slane in June 2019 but did not feel up to discharging his old role as a DJ.
He is survived by his wife Iona and their daughter Tamara, as well as the three children of his first marriage, Alexander, Wolfe and Henrietta.
His elder son, Alexander, succeeds him as Marquess Conyngham, the title Henry Mount Charles inherited on the death of his father in 2009 but rarely used.
