# Arundel Castle

castle in West Sussex, England, UK

Arundel, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1067 CE

## Story

• Arundel Castle is a motte-and-bailey fortress above the River Arun in West Sussex, begun after the Norman Conquest by Roger de Montgomery.
• The shell keep, gatehouse and barbican survive from the medieval castle, inside ranges later rebuilt for the dukes of Norfolk.
• Empress Matilda was received here in 1139, and in the English Civil War the castle was taken first by Royalists and then by William Waller.
• Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk, rebuilt the house from the 1780s, and Charles Alban Buckler remodelled it for the 15th Duke around 1900.
• Excavation under the former car park found walls believed to be the Holy Trinity Hospital, and the Collector Earl’s Garden opened on that ground in 2008.

## Visiting

The castle and gardens are closed for the season and open from Thursday 25 March 2027 until Sunday 31 October 2027. Tickets for 2027 are on sale from early February 2027. The gardens and the Fitzalan Chapel are open from 10.00am to 5.00pm, the keep is open from 10.00am to 4.30pm, and the castle rooms are open from 12.00 noon to 5.00pm. Last admission is at 4.00pm.
The castle is closed on Mondays, except bank holidays and during August. Tickets may be bought online or at the ticket office, and payment at the ticket office is by credit or debit card only. A child ticket is not allowed without an adult ticket, and unaccompanied children aged 5 to 16 are not allowed to enter. Only assistance dogs are allowed to enter.
Heely shoes are not allowed inside the castle unless the wheels stay retracted. Still photography is allowed inside the castle, video is allowed in the grounds and gardens, and tripods are not allowed. Bicycles, roller skates, skateboards and scooters are not allowed in the castle, grounds or gardens. Drones are not allowed in the grounds or gardens.
Prams and pushchairs are not allowed through the castle rooms and are left at the visitor entrance. A Historic Houses card allows garden admission only, is not valid on event days or in March and April, and does not by itself allow admission to the castle rooms. An accompanying carer of an adult visitor receives free admission, and proof may be requested at the ticket office. The Gardeners World two-for-one card is no longer accepted for admission, a change in force since 14 June 2021.
A Plant Fair ticket at £5, covering the fair and not the gardens, is sold on the day at the ticket office and is not sold online.

## History

Arundel Castle stands above the River Arun in West Sussex. Roger de Montgomery began it in the years after the Norman Conquest, with the start placed anywhere from about 1067 to before 1086. The motte and two baileys have been compared with Windsor, and the mound is variously put at about 20 metres high and at over 100 feet from the dry moat.

The lower gatehouse is possibly his work of the late eleventh century. Between 1101 and 1102 the castle surrendered to Henry I after Robert of Bellême rebelled. Henry I later left the castle, in dower, to his second wife, Adeliza of Louvain.

In 1138 Adeliza married William d’Aubigny, and in 1139 they received Empress Matilda during the Anarchy. William fought for Stephen, who made him Earl of Arundel, and in 1155 Henry II confirmed the earldom and gave him the castle in his own right. Accounts of the shell keep credit William, or Henry II during a period of royal ownership, or a start by Robert of Bellême finished by Henry I.

The keep served as both fort and residence, with a forebuilding, a well tower, a wall-walk and a vaulted store in the motte. Much of the wall-walk and the forebuilding was renewed around 1900, and the interior is difficult to reconstruct. A Romanesque doorway beside the forebuilding was long taken for the original entrance.

The honour passed from the d’Aubignys to the Fitzalans after Hugh, the 5th Earl, died in 1243, and from the Fitzalans to the Howards when Mary Fitzalan married the 4th Duke of Norfolk in 1555. The barbican and the upper gatehouse are placed in the late thirteenth century. The north-east range may have been rebuilt in the early sixteenth century.

The Howards remained at the centre of national politics. Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel, died in the Tower in 1595 for his faith. His son, Thomas Howard, the Collector Earl, gathered the paintings and sculpture with which the house is still associated.

In the English Civil War a small garrison gave the castle up to Ralph Hopton’s Royalists on 2 December 1643. William Waller then besieged it from 19 December, and the Royalist defenders surrendered on 6 January 1644. Another account speaks of 800 Royalists and a surrender after 18 days.

Parliament ordered the castle slighted in 1653. In October 1651 Charles II, fleeing from Worcester, narrowly avoided a party from the Parliamentary garrison.

The Howards did little to the damaged house until the 8th Duke’s repairs of about 1718. Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk, who succeeded in 1786, rebuilt it with Francis Hiorne and then James Teasdale. Only the library of 1801 survives from that work. The Baron’s Hall was first used on 5 June 1815.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stayed for three days in 1846, in rooms prepared by the 13th Duke. From the 1870s Henry Fitzalan-Howard, the 15th Duke, had Charles Alban Buckler rebuild the chapel, the halls and most of the ranges. The work was finished around 1900, or by other accounts in 1903 or 1905, and the house was given electric light, lifts and central heating.

The 17th Duke set up a charitable trust after 1975 rather than complete a plan to give the castle to the National Trust. Isabel Bannerman and Julian Bannerman designed the Collector Earl’s Garden on the old car park, and Charles, later King Charles III, opened it on 14 May 2008.

Excavation there found medieval walls believed to be the Holy Trinity Hospital, or Maison Dieu, and a post-medieval house. Adeliza had been a benefactor of a leper hospital at Arundel. The two are not proved to be one building.

A gate of chalk rubble and Caen stone, found by the cricket ground, is dated on style to the late eleventh or early twelfth century. In January 2019 a water-pipe trench in that ground found only the fill of an undated pit or ditch. On 21 May 2021 thieves took the gold rosary Mary, Queen of Scots, carried to her execution, together with coronation cups and other gold and silver from a display cabinet. None of those objects had been recovered by September 2021.

The castle remains a seat of the Dukes of Norfolk. The Norman keep, gatehouse and barbican still stand inside a house remade for the 11th and 15th dukes, and the whole is listed at Grade I and scheduled as a monument.

## Photographs

- [This is a photo of scheduled monument number — Tim Sheerman-Chase](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Arundel_Castle_7.jpg)
- [Arundel Castle — Paul Gillett](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/2083004_cb788d1c.jpg)
- [Arundel Castle (detail), West Sussex A telephoto assisted image from London Road near St Nicholas's Church. Arundel Castle is a restored mediaeval castle. It — Roger Kidd](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Arundel_Castle_%28detail%29%2C_West_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1650648.jpg)
- [castle — Lucik123](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Arundel_Castle_%2801%29.jpg)
- [Arundel Castle — Cadmus](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Arundel_castle_%28garden%29.jpg)
- [Archway, Arundel Castle — Alistair Cunningham](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Archway_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [Arundel Castle — Nilfanion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Arundel_Castle_%282749%29.jpg)
- [Arundel Castle — Nilfanion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Arundel_Castle_%282750%29.jpg)
- [Arundel Castle — Nilfanion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Arundel_Castle_%282753%29.jpg)
- [Arundel Castle — Nilfanion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Arundel_Castle_%282755%29.jpg)

## Sources

- [Arundel Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundel_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Castle history](https://www.arundelcastle.org/castle-history/) — Arundel Castle
- [Opening times and prices](https://www.arundelcastle.org/opening-times/) — Arundel Castle
- [Arundel Castle](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1027926) — Historic England
- [Arundel Castle](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1012500) — Historic England
- [Arundel Castle Car Park, Arundel](https://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?resourceID=1032&uid=MWS8310) — Heritage Gateway
- [Shell-keeps Catalogue: Arundel](https://castlestudiesgroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Shell-Keeps-Catalogue1-Arundel-low-res-05-09.pdf) — Castle Studies Group
- [Memoirs of the Collector Earl's Garden at Arundel](https://www.sussexgardenstrust.org.uk/article/memoirs-of-the-development-of-the-collector-earls-garden-at-arundel/) — Sussex Gardens Trust
- [Archaeological works at Arundel Castle Cricket Club](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1184350&recordType=GreyLitSeries) — Archaeology Data Service
- [A Medieval Gate in the Earthworks at Arundel](https://doi.org/10.5284/1086253) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Siege of Arundel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Arundel) — Wikipedia
- [Mary Queen of Scots gold rosary stolen from Arundel Castle](https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/mary-queen-scots-gold-rosary-beads-stolen-castle-raid-2021-05-24/) — Reuters
- [Arrest over artefacts stolen from Arundel Castle](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/theft-arundel-castle-artefacts-b1924963.html) — The Independent
- [Empress Matilda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Matilda) — Wikipedia
- [English Civil War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War) — Wikipedia
- [Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard,_11th_Duke_of_Norfolk) — Wikipedia
- [Charles Alban Buckler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Alban_Buckler) — Wikipedia
- [Francis Hiorne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Hiorne) — Wikipedia
- [Isabel Bannerman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Bannerman) — Wikipedia
- [Anne Arundell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Arundell) — Wikipedia
- [Charles III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_III) — Wikipedia
- [William d'Aubigny, 1st Earl of Arundel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_d%27Aubigny,_1st_Earl_of_Arundel) — Wikipedia
- [Adeliza of Louvain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeliza_of_Louvain) — Wikipedia
- [Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Howard,_13th_Earl_of_Arundel) — Wikipedia
- [Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Howard,_14th_Earl_of_Arundel) — Wikipedia
- [Roger de Montgomery, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_de_Montgomery) — Wikipedia
- [William Waller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Waller) — Wikipedia
- [Arundel Castle 7.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_Castle_7.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [2083004 cb788d1c.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2083004_cb788d1c.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arundel Castle (detail), West Sussex - geograph.org.uk - 1650648.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_Castle_(detail),_West_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1650648.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arundel Castle (01).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_Castle_(01).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arundel castle (garden).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_castle_(garden).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Archway - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archway_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arundel Castle (2749).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_Castle_(2749).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arundel Castle (2750).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_Castle_(2750).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arundel Castle (2753).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_Castle_(2753).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Arundel Castle (2755).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arundel_Castle_(2755).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Arundel Castle stands on a spur above the River Arun in Arundel, West Sussex. It is a restored and remodelled medieval castle, and it has been a seat of the Earls of Arundel and the Dukes of Norfolk since the eleventh century. The plan is a motte and two baileys, a form compared with Windsor, with the mound set in the re-entrant angle between the two wards. One account puts the motte at some 75 metres across at the base and 20 metres high. A measured account of the shell keep gives the motte height as 70 feet, which is 20 metres, the internal diameter of the keep as 60 by 67 feet, or 18.3 by 20.5 metres, and the shell wall as 30 feet, or 9.14 metres. Another account puts the shell keep at 20 by 18 metres, with walls 9 metres high, and treats it as a twelfth-century replacement. The castle’s own account says the motte, an artificial mound, stands over 100 feet high from the dry moat. These figures do not cancel one another. Height from the dry moat is not the same measurement as the height of the mound, and an external span is not the same as an internal diameter.

The oldest feature is that motte. Work is placed at the end of the eleventh century, and the dates given for the start are close but not identical. One account says Roger de Montgomery began the castle in around 1067. Another says the motte was constructed in 1068 and the gatehouse in 1070. A third says he founded the castle before 1070. A fourth says it was established before 1086. The lower part of the gatehouse is described as possibly late eleventh century, built for him. He had been granted Arundel by William the Conqueror as part of a much larger honour of hundreds of manors. He is called the first Earl of Arundel and the first Earl of Shrewsbury, and he died in 1094. His own lineage is given as the son of Roger de Montgomery, seigneur of Montgomery, whose father was probably a grandnephew of Duchess Gunnor, wife of Duke Richard I of Normandy, the great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. The castle’s history calls the same man a cousin of William. He had stayed in Normandy to keep the peace there while William was in England, and he was rewarded with extensive lands in the Welsh Marches and with one fifth of Sussex, the Rape of Arundel. The elder Roger’s lands in central Normandy, chiefly in the valley of the River Dives, passed to him.

Between 1101 and 1102 the castle was besieged by the forces of Henry I after its holder, Robert of Bellême, rebelled. The siege ended with the castle surrendering to the king. Robert of Bellême, born about 1052 and still living after 1130, was seigneur de Bellême, seigneur de Montgomery, viscount of the Hiémois, third Earl of Shrewsbury and Count of Ponthieu. He was one of the prominent figures in the competition for England and Normandy among the sons of William the Conqueror. A later rebellion of his, against Henry I in 1110 to 1112, is a separate episode from the surrender of this castle. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis, writing of that later rebellion, called him grasping and cruel, an implacable persecutor of the Church and the poor, and a tyrant who had disturbed the land. Those stories of brutality may have fed the legend of Robert the Devil. They are not a description of the 1101 siege itself.

Henry I, king from 1100 until his death on 1 December 1135, settled the castle and lands by his will, in dower, on his second wife, Adeliza of Louvain. Adeliza, also called Adelicia, Adela, Adelais and Aleidis, was born about 1103 and died in March or April 1151. She was queen from 1121 to 1135. She was the eldest child of Godfrey I, Count of Louvain, and Ida of Chiny, and she married Henry in 1121, when she was about eighteen and he was about fifty-four. His only legitimate son, William Adelin, had died in the White Ship in 1120, and Henry hoped for another son. The marriage produced no children. Adeliza seems to have encouraged French poetry and other arts at court and to have played little part in politics. Henry left the throne to his daughter, Empress Matilda, and Adeliza was among those who swore to support her stepdaughter.

As queen dowager, Adeliza spent three years in a convent. In 1138 she married William d’Aubigny, the first Earl of Arundel, and she had seven children by him. The castle’s account says she married William d’Albini II three years after Henry’s death, which falls in the same year. In 1139, during the early years of the Anarchy, Adeliza and William received Empress Matilda at the castle. In 1150 Adeliza left her husband for Affligem Abbey in Brabant, and she died the following year. She was a major benefactor of leper hospitals at Wilton in Wiltshire and at Arundel.

Empress Matilda, also called Empress Maud or Athelicia, was born about 7 February 1102 and died on 10 September 1167. She was the eldest child and only surviving daughter of Henry I and his first wife, Matilda of Scotland. As a child she was sent to Germany and married to the future emperor Henry V. She was consort from 1110 until 1125, travelled with him to Italy in 1116, was crowned empress in St Peter’s, and acted as imperial regent in Italy. They had no children. When Henry V died in 1125, Lothair of Supplinburg took the imperial crown. After the White Ship, Henry I recalled her and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou to protect his southern borders. His court swore loyalty to her and to her successors, a choice that was unpopular. Henry died in 1135. Her cousin Stephen of Blois took the crown, with the backing of the English Church.

The civil war that followed is the Anarchy, dated 1138 to 1153. In 1139 Matilda crossed to England to take the kingdom by force, supported by her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and by her uncle David I of Scotland, while Geoffrey concentrated on Normandy. Her reception at this castle belongs to that crossing. In 1141 her forces captured Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln, but the attempt to crown her at Westminster collapsed before the London crowds. She was never formally declared queen. She was titled Lady of the English, in Latin domina Anglorum. Robert was captured after the Rout of Winchester in 1141, and she exchanged Stephen for him. That winter Stephen besieged her at Oxford Castle. She escaped at night across the frozen River Isis, the Thames, to Abingdon. The war then settled into a stalemate, with Matilda holding much of the south-west and Stephen the south-east and the Midlands, and with local barons holding large parts of the rest. She returned to Normandy in 1148, leaving their eldest son, Henry, to continue in England. After the Treaty of Wallingford he was recognised as Stephen’s heir, and he became king in 1154. Matilda kept her court near Rouen, advised her son, tried to mediate in the Becket controversy, founded Cistercian houses, and was buried under the high altar at Bec Abbey. Her tomb was later moved to Rouen Cathedral.

William d’Aubigny, also William d’Albini, William de Albini and William de Albini II, was born about 1109 and died on 12 October 1176. He was the son of William d’Aubigny and Maud Bigod, daughter of Roger Bigod of Norfolk. He fought for King Stephen, who made him first Earl of Arundel, more precisely Earl of Sussex, and then Earl of Lincoln. His first known appearance as earl was at Christmas 1141. In 1143, as Earl of Lincoln, he confirmed a gift of land around Arundel to Affligem, with his brother Olivier present. In 1153 he helped arrange the truce between Stephen and Henry Plantagenet, the Treaty of Wallingford, which ended the Anarchy. When Henry became Henry II, the king confirmed the earldom and gave William direct possession of Arundel Castle, in place of the hold he had previously had in the right of his wife, who had died in 1151. The castle’s account says that Henry II, in 1155, confirmed William d’Albini II as Earl of Arundel, with the honour and castle, and that Henry II built much of the oldest part of the stone castle. The same account says William built the stone shell keep on the motte. He remained loyal to Henry II during the revolt of Henry the Young King in 1173 and helped defeat it. He also built Castle Rising in Norfolk, later sold to Queen Isabella, who lived there after her fall in 1330. He is the first proven English supporter of the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem, and before 1146 he had given the order land at Wymondham and built a leper hospital near his castle in Norfolk.

Who raised the shell keep, and when, is not a single settled fact. The castle’s account credits William d’Albini II. The listing of the building places the middle stage of the gatehouse, the keep, and the cellars under the south-east range, on style, in the late twelfth century, possibly in his tenure. A survey of published comment finds that writers often assume three things at once: that the motte is eleventh century, that William d’Albini built the shell keep around 1140, and that the forebuilding was added later, with suggestions running from the late twelfth century to the fourteenth. An alternative is that Henry II built the keep in a period of royal ownership. Another is that Robert of Bellême began it at the end of the eleventh century and that Henry I completed it, an idea drawn from a likeness to Gisors in Normandy. The keep has both a defensive and a residential character. The defensive parts are a forebuilding with a portcullis, wing walls with approaching stairs, and a battlemented wall-walk. The residential parts are a chapel in the forebuilding, a deep well in an adjoining tower, an upper-floor fireplace, a ground-floor oven, a vaulted store undercroft within the motte, and a garderobe on the wall-walk. There were no windows in the outer wall. Views outward were from the wall-walk only.

The fabric has been heavily renewed, and the interior is hard to read. Work of about 1900, and later, rebuilt the wall-walk and battlements, added much new facing, renovated the forebuilding and the well tower, and may have reset details in the wrong places, including internal corbels. It is not certain that the present chapel in the forebuilding had a medieval predecessor, or that the shutters follow fixings in the original masonry rather than a later design. A band of ashlar at first-floor level allows an assumption of two-storey ranges, but that assumption cannot be shown all the way round. Drainage chutes in the buttresses sit at an unclear relation to any internal roof. The garderobes were on the wall-walk, and one now empties through a buttress. Much of the forebuilding, including the twin lancet windows above the first storey, appears to have been rebuilt in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The portcullis and its mechanism now seen at the entrance are a modern reproduction, worked from the chamber above. A hooded fireplace with a curving back and a herring-bone tiled fire-back has a parallel at Ogmore, where a similar fireplace has been placed in the early or middle twelfth century. An on-site reconstruction offers the keep as it might have looked in 1190. That picture is uncertain. One reading of the blocked original entrance is that the earliest forebuilding may have been a solar tower rather than an entrance lobby.

A large Romanesque doorway stands beside the forebuilding and is not built into it. It was long assumed to be the original entrance, later blocked when the forebuilding was added, and it has been placed perhaps around 1140. It has no capitals or imposts. It appears in no pictorial source before the early nineteenth century, though it may have been hidden by ivy. An engraving of the 1780s, from a survey made for the 10th Duke just before the 11th Duke restored the south bailey, shows no obvious drawn evidence of that door, which may have been under the ivy. A view of 1747 and a drawing of 1780 show the upper forebuilding in a similar state. A drawing of the interior in about 1780 shows steps down into the underground store, the stair to the wall-walk, the blocked entrance, and a second, lower arch of which there is now no trace. The doorway has been comprehensively renovated, perhaps in the nineteenth century, and its decorative authenticity has been questioned. The double chevron around the arch is a motif also used in East Anglia, and a link has been suggested with William’s Castle Rising. There is no easily available modern plan of the shell keep. The traditional view, that the keep was the lord’s residence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and then declined as the bailey ranges improved from the thirteenth century, cannot be pressed. The domestic layout cannot now be reconstructed, and if the forebuilding was added as late as the early fourteenth century the idea of an early decline is unsafe. The keep may have stayed in use for a long time, with internal changes that cannot now be recovered.

Apart from occasional reversions to the Crown, the castle’s account traces a direct descent from 1138 to the present, carried by women from the d’Albinis to the Fitzalans in the thirteenth century and from the Fitzalans to the Howards in the sixteenth, and calls it the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk and their ancestors for over 850 years. Adeliza died in 1151 and William in 1176. The castle then passed down the d’Aubigny line until Hugh, the 5th Earl of Arundel, died in 1243. John Fitzalan inherited the castle and honour in right of his mother. By an admission of Henry VI in 1433 he was later treated, retrospectively, as de jure Earl of Arundel. The Fitzalan male line ended with Henry, the 12th Earl. His daughter and heiress, Lady Mary Fitzalan, married the 4th Duke of Norfolk in 1555, and the castle and earldom passed to his descendants.

The later medieval stonework is phased by style rather than by a single building account. The barbican, the upper stage of the gatehouse, the north-west buttress and the well tower of the keep are placed in the late thirteenth century, possibly in the time of Richard, the first Earl of Arundel of that line, who received the grant of a fair to help pay for repairs. Curtain wall and towers around the north end are medieval, of uncertain date, and were restored in the late nineteenth century. The north-east range may have been rebuilt in the early sixteenth century, possibly by William, the 11th Earl, and its general form is said to be the same as it was then. A painting in the castle is cited for that range. The keep and curtain are also summarised as twelfth century and thirteenth century respectively, and the domestic buildings on the south-east as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reconstructions of the part destroyed in the English Civil War.

From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth the Howards were at the front of English politics, through the Wars of the Roses, the Tudor court and the English Civil War. The 2nd Duke of Norfolk, who lived from 1443 to 1524, was the victor of Flodden. Lord Howard of Effingham, with Francis Drake, repelled the Armada in 1588. The Earl of Surrey, the Tudor poet and courtier, was executed in 1547. His father, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, who lived from 1473 to 1554 and was uncle of Anne Boleyn and of Catherine Howard, both wives of Henry VIII, escaped execution because Henry VIII died the night before it was due. The 4th Duke, who lived from 1536 to 1572, was beheaded for plotting to marry Mary, Queen of Scots. The family has counted two cardinals and a saint. Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel, was born on 28 June 1557 and died on 19 October 1595. He lived mainly under Elizabeth I, was charged with being a Roman Catholic, with leaving England without leave, and with a share in Jesuit plots, and was sent to the Tower in 1585. He spent ten years there and died of dysentery. He was canonised in 1970 as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. The castle’s account says he died in the Tower for his faith.

His son, Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, was born on 7 July 1585 and died on 4 October 1646. He is the Collector Earl. He was a magistrate, diplomat and courtier under James I and Charles I, and he made his name as a collector and a Grand Tourist rather than as a politician. At his death he held 700 paintings, with large collections of sculpture, books, prints, drawings and antique jewellery. Most of his marble carvings, the Arundel marbles, passed in time to the University of Oxford. He is sometimes numbered the 21st Earl, if a supposed second creation of 1289 is set aside, or the 2nd Earl, if his father’s earldom is treated as a new creation. He was also 2nd or 4th Earl of Surrey, and he was created 1st Earl of Norfolk in a fifth creation of that title. The castle’s account credits him with many of the treasures still associated with the house. The garden made here in the twenty-first century was based on the seventeenth-century garden at his London house, which had been shaped by his travels in Europe and especially in Italy.

The English Civil War, also called the Great Rebellion, was a series of civil wars and political struggles between Royalists and Parliamentarians in the kingdom of England from 1642 to 1651. It formed part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, from 1639 to 1653, and it is divided into the First English Civil War and the Second, with the Anglo-Scottish war of 1650 to 1652 sometimes called the Third. The first war was fought over the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I. It ended in June 1646 with the king in custody. Most of those who went to war in 1642 had wanted Parliament to share in government, not to abolish the monarchy. Charles’s refusal to concede led to stalemate, and fear of radicals in the New Model Army, among them Oliver Cromwell, helped produce an alliance of moderate Parliamentarians and Royalists, backed by the Covenanter Scots. Defeat in the second war led to the execution of Charles I in January 1649 and to the Commonwealth. Charles II was crowned king of Scotland in 1650 in return for promising a Presbyterian church in England and Scotland. The war that followed ended with a Parliamentarian victory at Worcester on 3 September 1651. The Commonwealth proved unpopular, and it ended with the Restoration in 1660. The wars left England and Scotland on a path toward parliamentary monarchy. The nicknames Cavalier and Roundhead began as insults. The 1640s also produced a flood of pamphlets and newsbooks.

At the end of 1642 the south-east was largely in Parliament’s hands, with pockets of Royalist support in Hampshire and Kent. In an offensive of October 1643 led by Ralph Hopton, the Royalists entered Sussex. A small garrison at this castle surrendered without fighting on 2 December. Hopton’s habit of trying to hold many towns left those garrisons isolated, and the Royalists had no mobile army that could relieve them quickly. The castle’s own shorter account says that in 1643, during the First English Civil War, the castle was besieged and that the 800 Royalists inside surrendered after 18 days. The account of the siege dates Waller’s attack from 19 December 1643 to the surrender on 6 January 1644. Severe weather and poor roads meant the place could not be relieved. The castle’s longer history says that during the war of 1642 to 1645 it was badly damaged when it was twice besieged, first by Royalists who took control, then by a Parliamentarian force of Cromwell’s party led by William Waller. Those two seizures match the bloodless Royalist takeover of 2 December and the Parliamentarian siege that followed. Sir William Waller, born about 1598 and died on 19 September 1668, commanded Parliamentarian armies in the first war. He was MP for Andover in the Long Parliament from 1640, gave up his commands under the Self-denying Ordinance in 1645, and belonged to the moderate Presbyterian side. He was one of the Eleven Members excluded by the army in July 1647 and was excluded again by Pride’s Purge in December 1648 because he would not support the trial of Charles I. He was arrested more than once under the Commonwealth, sat in the Convention Parliament, and died at Osterley Park. In 1643 he wrote to his Royalist friend Ralph Hopton that he detested this war without an enemy, and that they were both on a stage and must act the parts assigned to them without personal animosity.

In 1653 Parliament ordered the slighting of the castle. The same account adds that weather probably destroyed more than the demolition did. The domestic ranges on the south-east are the later rebuilding of what the war destroyed. Earthworks of an outer bailey are described as constructed in 1643, and a later driveway at the Park Gates was found to have been cut through them. The castle is said to survive well despite the slighting and the rebuilding after the war, with the Norman gatehouse and keep, the curtain, the outer bailey and the Civil War defences still readable. The scheduled area includes the motte and bailey, the outer bailey to the north-east, the square earthwork called the bowling green, and the fishponds on the east. The buildings around the quadrangle are excluded from that scheduling because they were extensively altered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are listed at Grade I. The ground beneath them is included. A reservoir to the north is excluded.

On 14 October 1651 Captain Morley, who held the castle for Parliament, was out hunting and almost captured Charles II and Colonel Phillips. Charles was fleeing the defeat at Worcester. His party dismounted as if to walk down the hill, and Morley’s group ran past them.

For a long time after the war the castle stayed with the Howards but was not their favourite house. The dukes put their effort into other estates, including Norfolk House in London. Little was done to repair the damage until about 1718, when Thomas, the 8th Duke of Norfolk, who lived from 1683 to 1732, carried out some repairs. James Gibbs supplied plans for that duke. They may have been for the south-east range. A plan from before the late eighteenth-century rebuilding is illustrated in a history of western Sussex published in 1836.

Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk, was born on 15 March 1746 and died on 16 December 1815. He was styled Earl of Surrey from 1777 to 1786, and he succeeded his father, Charles Howard, the 10th Duke, and Catherine Brockholes, in 1786. He was a Whig, in opposition to George III. He renounced Catholicism in order to enter politics, and he remained a supporter of Catholic emancipation and an opponent of the war with the American colonies. He sat in Parliament from 1780 to 1784 and was a lord of the treasury in the Portland cabinet in 1783. In 1798 he was dismissed from the lord lieutenancy of the West Riding for toasting “Our sovereign’s health, the majesty of the people” in terms that displeased George III. He wrote Historical Anecdotes of some of the Howard Family, issued in 1769 and again in 1817. He was a friend of Bysshe Shelley and in 1786 allowed Shelley to make out the patent for a baronetcy. Shelley’s Castle Goring takes one side as a partial copy of this castle. The castle’s history remembers Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk, perhaps unfairly, as the Drunken Duke, and as a friend of the Prince Regent. He was noted for convivial habits. Thomas De Quincey quotes him as purposing to be drunk the next Monday, wind and weather permitting. He married Marion Coppinger on 1 August 1767. She died a year later in childbirth. On 6 April 1771 he married Frances Scudamore, who became insane soon after the marriage and was kept shut away until her death in 1820. He left no legitimate heir. The lands and titles passed to his fourth cousin, Bernard.

He spent heavily on rebuilding and refurbishing the castle after he inherited. One account dates the start of that restoration to 1787. The architect at first was Francis Hiorne, who died in 1789. James Teasdale, otherwise little known, then signed the plans. Of that rebuilding, only the library, completed in 1801, survives. The campaign was finished by 5 June 1815, when the Baron’s Hall was first used. He died the following December. A later rebuilding replaced Teasdale’s fifteenth-century detail with thirteenth-century detail. Francis Hiorne, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries from 7 April 1784, was an architect and builder in Warwick, the son of William Hiorne and Mary Duncalfe. He died on 9 December 1789. His works include galleries at St Mary’s, Warwick, in the 1769 reconstruction, St Mary’s at Tetbury from 1771 to 1781, St Anne’s in Belfast from 1772 to 1776, later demolished, St Bartholomew’s at Tardebigge, St Mary and St Giles at Stony Stratford, and the tower at this castle dated 1789 to 1790. That tower is the folly on the hill above Swanbourne Lake, commissioned for the 11th Duke. The dates on the tower run across the month of his death. Around 1816 William Raphael Eginton described stained glass he had supplied: three full-length portraits of barons of the time of King John, in the Baronial Hall.

A watching brief on three flights of steps in the Tilting Yard found that they were built in the late eighteenth century, possibly as part of a Duke of Norfolk’s reconstruction in 1777. That year falls while the future 11th Duke was still Earl of Surrey, and before his own succession in 1786. The note does not name which duke. The same watching brief recorded the driveway at the Park Gates cutting the 1643 outer-bailey earthworks.

In 1846 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert stayed for three days. They came from Osborne House. The 13th Duke had the castle remodelled internally for the visit. A suite of six rooms was built on the second floor of the south-east range. The furniture was designed by the firm of Morant, and the bedroom and library furniture was specially commissioned from a leading London maker. A portrait of the queen by William Fowler had been commissioned by the 13th Duke in 1843. A 2026 exhibition at the castle, prepared by the duke’s librarian and the castle archivist, is titled around Victoria and the dukes, and it runs from the 12th Duke’s organisation of her coronation in 1838, through her friendship with the 13th Duke and Duchess Charlotte and the 1846 visit, to Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897 in Arundel and Sheffield, and to the 15th Duke’s organisation of her funeral in 1901.

Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk, was born on 27 December 1847 and died on 11 February 1917. He was styled Lord Maltravers until 1856 and Earl of Arundel and Surrey from 1856 to 1860. He was a Unionist politician and a philanthropist, Postmaster General from 1895 to 1900, and he is remembered for Roman Catholic causes and for Sheffield. One account says he began restructuring the castle in 1875 and carried it on to 1905. Another dates the rebuild of the chapel, the Baron’s Hall, the rest of the south-west range, the south-east range apart from the cellar, and the north-east range above and north of the library, to 1890–1903. The castle’s account says the restoration was completed in 1900. The architect was Charles Alban Buckler, and the building work was done by Rattee and Kett of Cambridge. The house was among the first English country houses fitted with electric light, integral fire-fighting equipment, service lifts and central heating. The gravity-fed domestic water also supplied the town. Electricity cost over £36,000 to install. The carved chimneypiece in the Drawing Room cost £150.

Charles Alban Buckler was an author, topographer, architect, artist and officer of arms. His life is dated 1825 to 1905 in one heading and his birth is given as 1824 in the account of his family. He was the son of the architect John Chessell Buckler and the grandson of John Buckler. He studied medieval art, and with his father he wrote on the abbey church of St Alban, published in 1847. He became a Catholic in 1844 and designed many Catholic churches in England. When his father died in 1851 he was one of six surviving children. In the 1870s Henry Fitzalan-Howard, 15th Duke of Norfolk, commissioned him to rebuild this castle. The duke, as Earl Marshal, nominated him Surrey Herald Extraordinary, and Queen Victoria accepted the nomination on 16 July 1880. He died in 1905 and was buried in the churchyard of St Edward the Confessor at Sutton Park, a church he had designed. His rebuilding here is described as a thorough replacement of Teasdale’s fifteenth-century detail with thirteenth-century detail.

The 16th Duke planned to give the castle to the National Trust. After his death in 1975 the 17th Duke cancelled that plan, set up an independent charitable trust to secure the castle, and oversaw restoration. By early 2020 the gardens had been substantially improved under the head gardener Martin Duncan, who had worked at the castle since 2009 and received the Kew Guild Medal in 2018. The work included a wild water garden around the medieval friary ponds.

The Collector Earl’s Garden was designed by Isabel Bannerman and Julian Bannerman and opened in 2008 as a tribute to the Collector Earl. Isabel Bannerman, born on 14 March 1962, is a garden designer and writer. A gardener’s memoir of the same project spells her name Isobel. She and Julian were commissioned by the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk. The garden’s centrepiece is called Oberon’s Palace in one account and Oberon’s Temple in another. It is a green-oak pavilion with a shellwork grotto and a fountain that carries a golden corona when the water rises. The structures follow the seventeenth-century garden at the Collector Earl’s London house. The garden was opened on 14 May 2008 by Charles, then Prince of Wales. He is King Charles III, born Charles Philip Arthur George on 14 November 1948, eldest son of Elizabeth II and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He was created Prince of Wales in 1958, his investiture was in 1969, and he became king on his mother’s death in 2022, the oldest person to accede to the British throne and the longest-serving heir apparent and Prince of Wales. He has argued for the conservation of historic buildings and for traditional architecture, and he founded the experimental town of Poundbury. Isabel Bannerman and her husband designed a stumpery at Highgrove, his private house, in the late 1990s, and in 1997 she received a royal warrant from him as Prince of Wales. Their Arundel garden received a Carpenters’ Guild award in 2008.

The garden stands on the former car park. The former head gardener, in post from 1994 to 2011, recalled that the car park broke the quiet of the restored Victorian glasshouses, and that the duchess agreed to extend the flower garden across it. When the tarmac came up, digging found the foundations of a medieval leper hospital and the brick outlines of houses. He understood that the duke had moved that part of the town more than a century earlier to make a fruit and vegetable garden. An evaluation before the garden was made used eight trenches, two of 15 by 1.4 metres and six of 20 by 1.4 metres. All but one produced archaeological material. Substantial stone structures occupied the northern half, and a post-medieval stone dwelling lay in the southern part of one trench. Packed mortar floors and heavy wall footings were read as evidence of a building of more than one storey, and also as a dwelling. A street and a small stone structure were seen on the east. The excavation that followed confirmed medieval remains believed to be the Holy Trinity Hospital, or Maison Dieu, and a post-medieval building thought to match a structure drawn in 1785 and 1807, together with path surfaces. Adeliza’s benefaction to a leper hospital at Arundel is a separate documented fact. The excavated walls are believed to be that hospital. The reports do not set out a proof that every wall belongs to her foundation.

Other digging has been thinner. Before a swimming pool was built, a small amount of medieval pottery was found, and some waste flakes of flint that could not be given a prehistoric date. Fourteenth-century documents suggest buildings in that part of the bailey, but no structural evidence of them was found. On the north side of the cricket ground, storm damage to the earthworks exposed a masonry gate through the town defences. Two walls of mortared chalk rubble, about 2.4 metres wide and 10 metres long, flank a roadway, with stepped reveals of dressed Caen stone. On style it is placed in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, with parallels at castle gates such as Sherborne, Tickhill and Castle Acre. It has been suggested that the gate was inserted into existing burh defences, that those defences replaced an earlier defended burh at Burpham in the Arun valley, and that the gate went out of use in the late eleventh century when new defences were built and the High Street changed alignment. In January 2019 a watching brief during the laying of a water pipe at the cricket ground found only the upper fill of a pit or ditch of unknown date. The cricket ground in the castle grounds has, since 1895, seen matches from local youth sides to international teams.

On the evening of Friday 21 May 2021 a burglar alarm sounded at 10.30pm. Staff were alerted, and the police arrived within minutes. Historic objects valued at more than £1 million were taken from a display cabinet in the part of the castle open to visitors. Among them were the gold rosary beads that Mary, Queen of Scots, carried to her execution in 1587. The police said the rosary was of little value as metal and irreplaceable as heritage. Also taken were seven gold or silver-gilt coronation cups, of George II, George III, George IV, William IV, George V, George VI and Elizabeth II, a gold Earl Marshal’s baton, a gold and enamel baton, ten silver-gilt apostle spoons, a silver-gilt casket with hunting and fishing scenes, and a silver-gilt mug. A burnt-out vehicle was found abandoned. The castle’s shorter account calls the cups coronation cups given by monarchs to the Earl Marshal, and calls the rosary irreplaceable. In September 2021 a 45-year-old man was arrested in Eckington in Worcestershire and released under investigation. Warrants were executed in Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, and six other men were arrested in relation to other offences. As of that September account, none of the objects had been recovered. The castle’s description of the collection still includes personal possessions of Mary, Queen of Scots, with furniture from the sixteenth century, tapestries, clocks, and portraits by Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Mytens, Lawrence, Reynolds, Canaletto and others.

The castle has been used as a filming place. In 1988 it stood in for Windsor in the Doctor Who serial Silver Nemesis. It stood in for Windsor again in The Madness of King George in 1994. It was a location for The Young Victoria in 2009 and for Wonder Woman in 2017. In Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur it is the castle of Anglides, the mother of Alisander le Orphelin.

The name Anne Arundell belongs to a different person from the holders of this castle, and it has to be kept separate from them. Anne Arundell, later Anne Calvert, Baroness Baltimore, was born about 1615 or 1616 and died on 23 July 1649. She was the daughter of Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour, by his second wife Anne Philipson, and the wife of Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, who founded the province of Maryland in 1634. A settlement for the marriage was made on 20 March 1627/28. The colony was named Maryland after Henrietta Maria, the French-born consort of Charles I. Anne Arundel County in Maryland was named after Anne Arundell, and a later naval transport carried the county’s name. She was the mother of nine children, of whom four reached adulthood, including Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, born on 27 August 1637, who became Lord Proprietor of Maryland. She was buried at St John’s parish church in Tisbury, Wiltshire. Nothing in her life, as it is recorded, places her as a resident or a builder of this castle.

What the visitor meets is therefore a Norman motte, gatehouse and shell keep, a medieval barbican and curtain, Civil War earthworks, and a house largely remade between the 1780s and 1903 for two dukes of Norfolk, still lived in by their successors and opened, in season, with the gardens. It is a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument. It is not a single-period fortress, and the disagreements over the keep, the two sieges of the 1640s, and the hospital under the garden are part of its history rather than obstacles to it.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/arundel-castle