Richard Butler, 17th Viscount Mountgarret

Richard Henry Piers Butler, 17th Viscount Mountgarret (8 November 1936 – 7 February 2004), was an Anglo-Irish aristocratic British Army officer, landowner and hereditary peer.

Born at Knaresborough, the son of Piers Butler, 16th Viscount Mountgarret and Elizabeth Christie,[1] he was educated at Eton and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

In the words of his Guardian obituary, Yorkshire CCC was "a snakepit of competing egos, ruinously split over [Sir] Geoffrey Boycott's role, taking [Viscount] Mountgarret's large and entirely unapologetic personality to thump them all back together".

Disposing of Nidd Hall in the late 1960s to pay off inheritance taxes, Mountgarret removed to the 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) estate in South Stainley, near Ripon, later selling the lordship of the manor of Stanbury.

[4] In 1982, Mountgarret fired a shotgun at a hot-air balloon manned by tourists which floated low over his Yorkshire grouse moor: he was fined £1,800 by Skipton magistrates.