his first book of poetry for decades, The Domino Hymn, which contains references to his illness — the title refers to the fact that he was a "domino patient", i.e. one who received a heart from a fellow patient undergoing a heart-and-lung transplant. He later also released Third Day with a mix of new and collected poetry. A "Collected Poems" was released in 2014, and reissued in 2017. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Personal life Residences Gowrie inherited Castlemartin House and Estate at Kilcullen in County Kildare, Ireland, from his great-aunt, Sheelagh Blacker, in 1967, and later sold it to Tony O'Reilly. He lived partly in Ireland until 1983, and then, selling his Kildare house to Ronnie Wood, moved to the Welsh Marches village of Llanfechain in what was formerly Montgomeryshire. Lord Gowrie presided over the local show in Llanfechain in 1998, and attended the regional literary festival. He maintained a London home for much of his adult life, during his time in ministerial office in Covent Garden, latterly a house in Kensington. Family Gowrie married Xandra (Alexandra) Bingley, daughter of Colonel Robert Bingley, on 1 November 1962. They had one son, Patrick Leo Brer Hore-Ruthven, born 4 February 1964. Generally known as Brer Ruthven, he became a database developer and musician. Brer Ruthven married Julie Goldsmith and had one son, Heathcote Patrick Cornelius Ruthven, born 28 May 1990. Gowrie and Alexandra Bingley, who became a writer and editor, divorced in 1973. On 2 November 1974, Gowrie married Adelheid Gräfin von der Schulenburg (b. 24 October 1943), who was the sixth and youngest child and fifth daughter of Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg (1902–10 August 1944), a German Graf (Count) and one of the leaders of the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, and his wife Charlotte Kotelmann. He was known to describe himself as "an Irishman with a Scots title, married to a German" and to say "I am a Nationalist, not a Unionist". Friends Gowrie remained friends with Lowell, his poetic mentor, and was a pallbearer at his funeral. He has also been closely associated with Edward Plunkett, the Anglo-Irish painter. He described Margaret Thatcher, Francis Bacon and Andrew Lloyd Webber as among his best friends. He had come to know Bacon later in life, but discovered that they had both partly grown up around the same small town, Kilcullen in