Sir Richard FITZ ALAN D'ARUNDEL (1306?-1376)

	Richard Fitz Alan D'Arundel		Eleanor and her second husband, Richard Fitzalan, 10th Earl of Arundel

Name:	Richard FITZ ALAN D'ARUNDEL 1,2
Sex:	Male
Name Prefix:	Sir
Nickname:	"Copped Hat"
Father:	Edmund FITZ ALAN D'ARUNDEL (1285-1326)
Mother:	Alice DE WARENNE (1287-bef1338)

Individual Events and Attributes

Birth	1306 (app)	Sussex, England
Title		Earl of Warren (Warenne)
Occupation (1)	frm 1331 to 1376 (age 24-70)	Earl of Arundel
Occupation (2)	1334 (age 27-28)	Justiciar of North Wales
Occupation (3)	1338 (age 31-32)	Commander of the English Army
Occupation (4)	1340 (age 33-34)	Joint Lieutenant of Aquitaine
fought		the Battle of Crécy as one of the three principal English commanders
Occupation (5)		Governor of Caernarfon Castle
Occupation (6)		Sheriff of Caernarvonshire
Occupation (7)	frm 1347 to 1376 (age 40-70)	Earl of Surrey
Death	24 Jan 1375/76 (age 69-70)	Arundel Castle, Sussex, England 3
Burial		Chichester Cathedral, Sussex, England

Additional Information

Burial

He and his second wife Eleanor of Lancaster's tombstones are famously the subject of the poem "An Arundel Tomb" by Philip Larkin.

Marriage

	Eleanor Plantagenet of Lancaster		Eleanor and her second husband, Richard Fitzalan, 10th Earl of Arundel		Betchworth Castle

Spouse	Eleanor Plantagenet OF LANCASTER (1318?-1372)
Children	Richard FITZ ALAN (1346-1397)
	John D'ARUNDEL ( -1379)
Marriage	5 Feb 1344/45 (age 38-39)	Ditton Church, Stoke Poges, Bucks

Individual Note 1

Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel and 10th Earl of Surrey (9th Earl of Arundel per Ancestral Roots) (c. 1306 – 24 January 1376) was an English nobleman and medieval military leader.

 

FitzAlan was the eldest son of Edmund FitzAlan, 9th Earl of Arundel (8th Earl of Arundel per Ancestral Roots), and Alice de Warenne. His maternal grandparents were William de Warenne and Joan de Vere. William was the only son of John de Warenne, 7th Earl of Surrey.

 

He was born 1306 in Sussex, England and died 24 January 1376 in Sussex, England.

 

Around 1321, FitzAlan's father allied with King Edward II's favorites, Hugh le Despenser, 1st Earl of Winchester and his namesake son, and Richard was married to Isabel le Despenser, daughter of Hugh the Younger. Fortune turned against the Despenser party, and on 17 November 1326, FitzAlan's father was executed, and he did not succeed to his father's estates or titles.

 

However, political conditions had changed by 1330, and over the next few years Richard was gradually able to reacquire the Earldom of Arundel as well as the great estates his father had held in Sussex and in the Welsh Marches.

 

Beyond this, in 1334 he was made Justiciar of North Wales (later his term in this office was made for life), Sheriff for life of Caernarvonshire, and Governor of Caernarfon Castle. He was one of the most trusted supporters of Edward the Black Prince in Wales.

 

Despite his high offices in Wales, in the following decades Arundel spent much of his time fighting in Scotland (during the Second Wars of Scottish Independence) and France (during the Hundred Years' War). In 1337, Arundel was made Joint Commander of the English army in the north, and the next year he was made the sole Commander.

 

In 1340 he fought at the Battle of Sluys, and then at the siege of Tournai. After a short term as Warden of the Scottish Marches, he returned to the continent, where he fought in a number of campaigns, and was appointed Joint Lieutenant of Aquitaine in 1340.

 

Arundel was one of the three principal English commanders at the Battle of Crécy. He spent much of the following years on various military campaigns and diplomatic missions.

 

In 1347 he succeeded to the Earldom of Surrey (or Warenne), which even further increased his great wealth. (He did not however use the additional title until after the death of the Dowager Countess of Surrey in 1361.) He made very large loans to King Edward III but even so on his death left behind a great sum in hard cash.

 

By his first marriage to Isabel le Despenser (living 1356), he had one child:

 

-Edmund de Arundel, who was bastardized by the annulment, married Sybil, daughter of William Montacute, 1st Earl of Salisbury.

 

By the second marriage to Eleanor of Lancaster, he had 3 sons and 3 surviving daughters:

 

-Richard, who succeeded him as 11th Earl of Arundel

-John Fitzalan,1st Baron Maltravers, who was a Marshall of England, and drowned in 1379

-Thomas Arundel, who became Archbishop of Canterbury

-Joan (1348 - 7 April 1419) who married Humphrey de Bohun, 7th Earl of Hereford

-Alice (1350 - 17 March 1416), who married Thomas Holland, 2nd Earl of Kent

-Eleanor Fitzalan (1356 - before 1366).

 

Richard Fitzalan and his second wife Eleanor of Lancaster's tombstones are in Chichester Cathedral and famously the subject of the poem "An Arundel Tomb" by Philip Larkin.⁴

Individual Note 2

An Arundel Tomb

by Phillip Larkin

 

Side by side, their faces blurred,

The earl and countess lie in stone,

Their proper habits vaguely shown

As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,

And that faint hint of the absurd—

The little dogs under their feet.

 

Such plainness of the pre-baroque

Hardly involves the eye, until

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still

Clasped empty in the other; and

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

 

They would not think to lie so long.

Such faithfulness in effigy

Was just a detail friends would see:

A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace

Thrown off in helping to prolong

The Latin names around the base.

 

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The air would change to soundless damage,

Turn the old tenantry away;

How soon succeeding eyes begin

To look, not read. Rigidly they

 

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light

Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths

The endless altered people came,

 

Washing at their identity.

Now, helpless in the hollow of

An unarmorial age, a trough

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins

Above their scrap of history,

Only an attitude remains:

 

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

 

 

Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb” from Collected Poems.

Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1988)⁵

Individual Note 3

FitzAlan was also responsible for the building of the FitzAlan Chapel, built posthumously according to his will at Arundel Castle.⁶

Individual Note 4

Richard FitzAlan II, 10th or 3rd Earl of Arundel and 9th Earl of Surrey, Justiciar of North Wales, one of the Regents of England in 1355, b. 1313 (he came of age in 1334), d. 24 Jan. 1375/6 at Arundel, and buried at Lewes, near his wife. He was restored to his fathers honours and estates in 1330-31 (4 Edw. III). On 30 June 1347, on the death without legitimate issue of his maternal uncle, John, Earl of Surrey and Sussex, he succeeded to the estates of the Warenne family.[16] He m. (1) (marriage annulled 4 Dec. 1344) Isabel le Despenser, by whom he had issue. The Complete Peerage castigates this noble for his cynical treatment of this wife, in order whom to discard, he pursuaded the obsequious Pope Clement VI to bastardize his issue by her. His second wife was a first cousin to his first, and a papal dispensation was granted (retroactively, as it would seem) on 4 March 1344/5. In his interesting will, the earl requests burial “near to the tomb of Eleanor de Lancaster, my wife; and I desire that my tomb be no higher than hers; that no men at arms, horses, hearse, or other pomp, be used at my funeral, but only five torches … as was about the corpse of my wife, be allowed.” He leaves “to Richard, my son and heir, my best coronet, and I charge him on my blessing to keep it during his life, and then to leave it to his heir, and so to remain from heir to heir, Lords of Arundel, in remembrance of me.”[17] He m. (2) (as her second husband) 5 Feb. 1344/5 at Ditton⁷

Sources

1	Weis, Frederick Lewis & Sheppard, Walter Lee, Jr, "Ancestral Roots of Certain American Colonists Who Came to America before 1700: Lineages from Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Malcolm of Scotland, Robert the Strong, and other Historical Individuals". p 31, 20-30; 31, 20-30; 36, 28-33; 70, 60-32.

2	Weir, Alison, "Britain's Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy" (Vintage, 2008). p 79 - 80.

3	"Arundel Castle". http://www.arundelcastle.org/_pages/03_visitor_info.htm.

4	"Wikipedia". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_FitzAlan,_10th_Earl_of_Arundel.

5	"The Poetry Foundation". http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/237912.

6	"Wikipedia". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundel_Castle.

7	"Genealogy Page of John Blythe Dodson". http://cybrary.uwinnipeg.ca/people/Dobson/genealogy/ff/FitzAlan/FitzAlan-AT.cfm.