"On Saturday 6 May the hispanist and historian Lord Hugh Thomas of Swynerton, patron of the Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli since the constitution of its first board of trustees, passed away at his home in London. In the meetings of this governing body, he always stood out for his interest in gaining a thorough knowledge of the monumental, movable and documentary heritage of the Foundation, as a way of satisfying the insatiable intellectual curiosity towards the Hispanic world that was awakened on his first trip to Spain in 1955. This Hispanic inclination of his eruopeanism found its first written expression in 1961 in his famous "The Spanish Civil War", a work translated into fifteen languages, and he later became interested in the American world and in the expansion of Hispanic civilisation throughout Europe and America in the 16th century, to which he devoted more than fifty years of research. His cosmopolitan, humanist, vitalist and optimistic personality leaves an indelible memory in the Foundation".
