[3] He had already been created Viscount Enniskillen in the Peerage of Ireland in 1776[4] and had inherited the title Baron Mountflorence, of Florence Court in the County of Fermanagh,[5] which had been created in the Peerage of Ireland in 1760 for his father John Cole, who had earlier represented Enniskillen in the Irish House of Commons.

He was succeeded by his son, the fourth earl, who represented Enniskillen in Parliament as a Conservative.

He attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and then served with the Irish Guards during the Second World War, rising to the British Army rank of Captain.

Cole became very involved in colonial politics in Kenya in the late 1950s, serving as a Member of the Legislative Council (M.L.C.)

He also took part in the conferences at Lancaster House leading up to Kenya's independence, which was achieved within the Commonwealth in December 1963.

Shortly after succeeding to the Peerage, the new Lord Enniskillen returned to Northern Ireland.

He and his American second wife, Nancy, a former junior diplomat with the United States Foreign Service, lived at Florence Court (newly restored by the National Trust) in southwest County Fermanagh from 1963–72, when they relocated to Kinloch House, , Amulree, Perthshire, Scotland.

The 6th Lord Enniskillen had only two children, both by his first wife, Sonia Mary Syers, whom he married on 31 July 1940.

The 7th Lord Enniskillen lives on his 40,000 acre estate near Lake Naivasha in the former 'White Highlands' in southern Kenya.

The ancestral seat, certainly from the late 1750s, of the Cole family was Florence Court in south-west County Fermanagh.

The heir presumptive is the present holder's first cousin Berkeley Arthur Cole (born 1949).