Arundel Castle

Roger de Montgomery, a cousin of William the Conqueror, had stayed behind in Normandy to keep the peace there while William was away in England. His reward was extensive land in the Welsh Marches and across the country, together with one fifth of Sussex — the Arundel Rape — granted as part of a much larger honour of hundreds of manors, and he was declared the first Earl of Arundel. He began work on the castle in around 1067. What he raised was a motte-and-bailey.

In 1102 the forces of Henry I besieged Arundel after its holder, Robert of Bellême, rebelled. The siege ended with the castle surrendering to the king. It passed afterwards to Henry's widow, Adeliza of Louvain, and her second husband William d'Aubigny. In 1139, during the early years of the Anarchy, the couple received Adeliza's stepdaughter the Empress Matilda at Arundel.

Adeliza died in 1151 and William in 1176, and the castle descended through the d'Aubigny line until the death of Hugh d'Aubigny, 5th Earl of Arundel, in 1243. John FitzAlan then inherited the castle and the honour of Arundel through his mother, and in 1433 Henry VI recognised him as having held the earldom of Arundel by right.

The FitzAlan male line ended with Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, whose daughter and heiress Mary FitzAlan married Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, in 1555; the castle and the earldom passed to their descendants. Arundel has been the seat of the Earls of Arundel since the 11th century, and of the Dukes of Norfolk since the Howards inherited it.

In December 1643 Sir William Waller brought a Parliamentarian army against the castle. The 800 royalists inside surrendered after eighteen days. Parliament ordered the castle slighted in 1653, though the weather probably did more damage to it than the demolition gangs.

delete - move the Charles II paragraph ahead of the slighting order so the section reads forward. On 14 October 1651, Captain Morley, who held Arundel for Parliament, was out hunting when he nearly took Charles II and Colonel Phillips. Charles was on the run after the Royalist defeat at Worcester; his party dismounted as though to make the descent of the hill easier, and let Morley's riders run past.

Arundel was not the Howards' favourite residence, and for generations the Dukes of Norfolk spent their time and money on other ducal estates, Norfolk House in London among them. Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk, began restoring and improving the castle in 1787, and had Francis Hiorne build the folly that still stands on the hill above Swanbourne Lake. William Raphael Eginton supplied the stained glass, including three full-length portraits of barons of King John's time for the baronial hall.

Henry Howard, 13th Duke, remodelled the interior in time for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who stayed for three days in 1846; the work added a suite of six rooms on the second floor of the south-east range, with the furniture designed by the firm of Morant. The 15th Duke then restructured the castle from 1875 to 1905 to designs by Charles Alban Buckler, the building work carried out by Rattee and Kett of Cambridge. The result is a Gothic Revival castle over an 11th-century core.

The 16th Duke intended to hand Arundel to the National Trust, but after his death in 1975 the 17th Duke cancelled that plan, setting up an independent charitable trust to guarantee the castle's future and overseeing further restoration. It was listed Grade I in 1949 and scheduled as a monument in 1976. On 21 May 2021 thieves broke in and took gold rosary beads described as irreplaceable, carried by Mary, Queen of Scots, to her execution in 1587, along with coronation cups given by monarchs to the Earl Marshal.