Dust, dirt, and silence; the cadaver tomb, Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel Castle, West Sussex

I visited the Fitzalan chapel in Arundel principally to see the rare and famous cadaver tomb of John Fitzalan, the 7th Earl of Arundel (1408 – 1435) but found that there was much more to see in a place where the Earls of Arundel and Dukes of Norfolk have been interred for more than 600 years. The chapel itself is unique in England; although it occupies the chancel of the Anglican parish church of St Nicholas it is the private property of the Dukes of Norfolk and has a separate entrance in the castle grounds. The Norfolks were famous recusants during the reformation and the chapel has remained a Roman Catholic place of worship throughout its 650-year history. The current church was founded in 1380, by Richard the 4^th Earl of Arundel, as a collegiate chapel but he is not buried here. The 4th Earl rebelled against King Richard II and was executed for high treason in 1397. Some say that ‘Torment me not long, strike off my head in one blow,’ were his last words, pleading with the executioner to make a clean job of it, others claim his corpse stood up after the fatal slice and, headless as it was, still managed a final recitation of the Lord’s prayer before his soul departed to meet its maker. The paternoster declaiming body was buried at the church of the Augustin Friars, near Old Broad Street. 

The Earl’s son Thomas was just 16 at the time of his father’s execution but Richard II stripped the boy of the lands and titles he should have inherited from his father. He was placed under the supervision of the King’s half-brother John Holland, the Duke of Exeter. Thomas chafed under the close confinement and humiliating treatment meted out to him by Holland, particularly resenting being given the job of removing and cleaning Exeter’s soiled boots. At the first opportunity he fled into French exile where his older cousin took to join forces with Henry Bolingbroke, the son of John of Gaunt and Richard II’s estranged cousin. The 18-year-old Thomas accompanied Bolingbroke back to England in 1399 when the King was taking part in a military campaign in Ireland. Bolingbroke’s armed uprising against the crown soon gathered sufficient momentum to persuade Richard, from his refuge in Conway Castle, to abdicate in return for assurances that he would not be executed. Bolingbroke was crowned King Henry IV in October 1399, but Richard died, almost certainly deliberately starved to death, in Pontefract Caste just four months later. Thomas was rewarded with the return of the family lands and titles and became the 5th Earl of Arundel after acting as King Henry’s butler at his coronation. He served his king loyally, helping to put down rebellions in the Welsh Marches and in the North, and eventually becoming one his most trusted advisors. When the King’s sister, Phillipa of Lancaster, was married to Dom João I of Portugal to help cement an Anglo-Portuguese alliance, Thomas Fitzalan was reciprocally married to the Portuguese king’s illegitimate daughter, Beatrice de Avis de Coimbra. It was Beatrice who commissioned the magnificent tomb for her husband that stands in the Chapel; Thomas had contracted dysentery at the siege of Harfleur in 1415, fighting for Henry V.  The severity of the infection forced him to return home, where he died on his 34th birthday, the 13th October.  A miserable bacterium took from him the opportunity of becoming one of the happy few, the band of brothers, that fought in the glorious victory of the battle of Agincourt, which took place just 12 days after his death. The Earl’s tomb occupies the most prominent position in the chapel, immediately in front of the high altar. Alabaster figures of Thomas and Beatrice, carved by the royal workshops, stand on a chest tomb on which are carved twenty-eight figures. The original iron hearse still survives and surrounds the tomb, but now serves as a candle holder.  In the castle, hanging in a winding corridor that leads to the guest bedrooms, is a water colour of the Chapel showing what I assume is an antiquary, sitting cross legged by the 5th Earl’s tomb consulting a manuscript spread open across his knees. There was no artist information or date but I was very taken with the humble picture that had been relegated to hang with prints and watercolours of flowers and birds in a part of the castle presumably rarely visited by the family. I tried to take a photograph, but the picture is behind glass and my shot shows as much of me and my fellow visitors shuffling along the narrow corridor as it does of the original painting.    

The 5th Earl had no legitimate offspring and so his titles passed to a cousin, John Fitzalan. The 5th Earl’s sisters conformed themselves to the loss of the title (which was entailed to male heirs) and Arundel castle but vigorously disputed that the deceased Earl’s other land holdings should pass to his heir.  Like every other red-blooded male in the kingdom the 6th Earl spent his life fighting the French and the Scots though he was often distracted by the continual legal skirmishing imposed on him by his battling female cousins. The dispute was only settled 12 years after the 6th Earl’s death, when the 7th Earl was finally confirmed as the sole and unconditional heir. It is the 7th Earl who is commemorated in the splendid cadaver tomb that I was so keen to see. No one seems to be exactly sure how many cadaver, or transi, tombs survive in England. Some experts say 33, others 43 or 44. All agree that most transi tombs show isolated sculpted cadavers; there are only about 10 in the country which, like the Arundel tomb, have two effigies, with the living shown above the dead in a double decker arrangement. Like his father and his great uncle, John Fitzalan, the 7th Earl spent the majority of his short adulthood in France, enthusiastically dedicating himself to the continuation of the 100 Years War and earning himself the sobriquet of ‘the English Achilles’ in the process.  On 1st June 1435 he led his men against a superior French force at Gerboray; during the engagement his leg was shattered by a shot from a culverin. Unable to flee the battlefield he was taken prisoner by the French and despite being heavily wounded refused to let himself be treated. As his condition deteriorated a French surgeon amputated his right let despite the Earl’s protests, but it did no good and he died on the 12th June. The French chronicler Jehan de Waurin maintained that the Earl had been buried in the church of the Gray Friars at Beauvais and for this reason the cadaver tomb in the chapel was believed to be a cenotaph, until it was opened in the late 1850’s by the Duke of Norfolk’s chaplin.

In June 1860 the Rev. Canon Tierney, the Chaplin of the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel, wrote a letter to the secretary of the Sussex Archaeological Society, William Durrant Cooper. Cooper was a lawyer and noted antiquary, a native of Lewes who lived at Guildford Street in Russell Square at that time and was the solicitor of the Reform Cub and the Vestry of St Pancras. The Canon’s letter was published in Volume 12 of the society’s journal, the Sussex Archaeological Collections. ‘Mr Dear Sir,’ wrote Tierney ‘I have long wished to send to the Society an account of the opening of the tomb (hitherto regarded only as a cenotaph), and of the consequent discovery of the remains, of one of the most illustrious among the Earls of Arundel, and most renowned among the warriors of the fifteenth century.’  Tierney had been contacted by the Rev. R. W. Eyton, the vicar of Ryton in Shropshire and the author of the 12 volumes of The Antiquities of Shropshire. Eyton had been researching a Shropshire ancestor, Fulke Eyton, who was born around 1440 and seems to have been in the service of John Fitzalan, the 7th Earl of Arundel, in some capacity. On the 8th February 1451 in the castle of Shrawardine in Shropshire (the castle belonged to the Fitzalans) Fulke Eyton wrote out his last will and testament. 400 years later his descendant, the Rev. Ayton, consulted a copy of the will held in the Prerogative Court at Canterbury and was struck by the following passage:

Also I woll that my Lord of Arundell, that now is, aggre and compoune with you, my seide Executours, for the bones of my Lord John his brother, that I brougte oute of France; for the which cariage of bone, and oute of the frenchemenns handes delyveraunce, he owith me a ml. marc and iiii c. and aftere myn Executours byn compouned with, I will that the bones ben buried in the Collage of Arundell, after his intent; and so I to be praide fore, in the Collage of Arundell and Almeshouse, perpetually.

The only illustration from Tierney's letter to William Durrant Cooper, showing the excvation of the tomb

Fulke’s ‘my Lord John’ is the 7th Earl and Fulke is claiming to have brought out of France the Earl’s corpse, his bones, which still seem to be in his possession. For this signal service to the Fitzalans Fulke says he is owed 1400 marks and once the executors of the will have been ‘compounded’ with, he wills that the Earl’s bones be buried in the College, the Chapel at Arundel, according to the Earl’s wish. No one knew is Fulke’s executors had received the 1400 marks or if they had handed over the body of the late Earl. The Rev. Eyton contacted Tierney as Chaplin of the Duke of Norfolk and Tierney did what any sensible person would do to settle the question – he dug the 7th Earl up to see if he was really there;

It was evident that only an examination of the spot could answer these questions; and accordingly, I resolved at once to solicit permission from the Duke of Norfolk for that purpose. The permission was readily granted; but delays, arising from various causes, occurred in the execution of the design; and thus, it was not until Monday, the 16th of November, 1857, that we could enter on the work. On that day, the Duke, accompanied by some of the junior members of his family, and several friends who were visiting at the castle, proceeded to the chapel. I own that my hopes of success were not very sanguine.  The tomb stands in an opening, formed for its reception, in the wall between the two chapels,- the principal Collegiate Chapel on the south, and the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin on the north. Its sides, divided into arches, are open; and, as it was supposed to stand on the solid foundation of the wall which had been cut away for its admission, the only place (so it seemed) in which the body could have been deposited, would be some small vault, close to the foundation wall, either on the north, or on the south side.

After digging on the south side of the monument to a depth of about 3 feet Tierney says it became evident that there was nothing to be discovered. He was about to order the workmen to fill in the hole again when it occurred to him to sound what he assumed to be the foundations of the wall that had been removed when the monument was placed within the arch. At the second stroke of the pickaxe the seemingly solid wall gave way to reveal a chamber within which ‘lay the remains of which we were in search. As, with the single exception of a small portion of one of its sides, the coffin, which had inclosed them, was entirely decayed and gone, the bones were at once exposed to view. They were perfectly sound, and evidently those of a man more than six feet in height. The larger and longer ones had retained their places tolerably well; but the skull, no doubt in the process of removal to England, had been shaken from its socket, and had rolled back to some distance from the rest. Not the least interesting feature in our discovery, however, was the evidence presented to us of the identity of the remains. The Earl's death, as you will recollect, was the result of his wound. The limb had been shattered; and there can be no doubt that amputation would be resorted to. Now, among the remains, only the bone of one leg could be found.’ Completely satisfied that this one legged skeleton were the mortal remains of John Fitzalan, Tierney had them replaced in their sepulchre before sealing up the burial chamber, filling up the hole with the removed earth and replacing the flagstones. 

In the 1870’s the catholic 14th Duke of Norfolk found himself in a dispute with the Anglican vicar of Arundel over who owned the Fitzalan Chapel. The vicar, supported by the Bishop of Chichester was convinced that the Duke had no title to the chapel which was part of the fabric of the parish church.  Following the dissolution of the Chantries in 1547 Edward VI had sold the Chantry of Arundel, which included the chapel, to the 12th Duke of Arundel, making the chancel of the church the private property of the Howards. During the civil war Commonwealth soldiers were barracked in the chancel, causing great damage. The family paid little subsequent attention to the chapel and it fell into a ruinous state of neglect. The vicar launched an action in the courts and the Duke responded initially by building a wall between the chancel and the rest of the church and then by restoring the chapel. The action rumbled on for several years until in 1879 Judge Coleridge, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, finally decided in favour of the Duke. One newspaper, The Brief noted that “it may be an anomaly that a Roman Catholic Chapel should obtrude in a Protestant place of worship, but in this case litigation has done no good.” The Times had no sympathy for the Vicar of Arundel; “In ordinary circumstances the difficulty would not have arisen. Had the Howards accepted the Reformation, they would doubtless have settled very peremptorily the question of the nature of the property held in the Fitzalan Chapel by the college they dispossessed. As the townsmen and successive vicars of Arundel have for the past three hundred and fifty years gone on very comfortably without insisting that their great rector and landlord should show the title under which he buries his dead next door to their church, they must not anticipate much compassion now that it is judicially pronounced that he has been burying them under his own roof and not under theirs.”

An unexpected outcome of the dispute was the 14th Duke became the first for a hundred years to decide to be buried in the chapel along with his wife Augusta in a wonderful example of a high Victorian mausoleum containing white marble effigies by the sculptor Matthew Noble. Noble is responsible for many church monuments and funerary memorials and examples of his work can be found in York Minster, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. He was also responsible for the now lost bust of Thomas Hood which stood on Hood’s grave in Kensal Green. The two figures stand on identical stone Gothic revival tomb chests of Purbeck Marble designed by M. E. Hadfield, a prominent Catholic architect. Despite the renovations carried out in the chapel the Brighton Herald reporting on the burial of the Duke’s wife aid that “the dust and dirt and silence of the bat-haunted Fitzalan Chapel at Arundel, the burial place of the Howards, were disturbed on Wednesday, when the remains of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk (Augusta Mary Minna Catherine) mother of the present Duke, were placed to rest among the long line of ancestors who lie there.”

The 15th Duke is also buried beneath a tomb chest of Purbeck marble with a brass effigy. I have no details of the artist unfortunately. The Dundee Courier of Friday 16 February 1917 gives an interesting account of the Dukes funeral;

FUNERAL OF THE DUKE OF NORFOLK. AN IMPRESSIVE SERVICE. The funeral of the Duke of Norfolk took place yesterday at Arundel. Overnight the casket containing the body had been conveyed in a waggon lined with moss and flowers and drawn by horses to the chapel in the castle, where Canon MacCall conducted a brief choral service, which was attended only by the Duchess, her relatives, and immediate family friends. At 9.30 yesterday morning the remains were conveyed from the castle to St Philip Neri Church. The gathering for the procession to the church was large and of a most representative character. The road from the castle gates was lined on either side by some 400 members of the Sussex Volunteer Regiment selected from the nine battalions, the late Duke having been Honorary Colonel of the regiment, and in the progress of which from the commencement of the war he took the keenest interest. Requiem Mass was celebrated at the church at eleven o'clock. In the procession the Boy Scouts carried the colours presented to them by the Duke just before the war. They were tied with black bows, and the boys wore crepe round their hats. Preceding the waggon bearing the coffin, was carried the Duke's coronet, and immediately behind followed his Grace's charger, with the white and gold cloth used in State processions. The young Duke walked with Lord Edmund Talbot. Then followed many tenants and employees, and boys wearing black sashes and girl’s, who wore crepe veils, from the Roman Catholic schools founded by his Grace. Bringing up the rear was the Bishop of Southwark and other clergy. The sight of the solemn procession deeply affected the many local people lining the pavements. High Mass at St Philip was conducted by the Bishop of Southwark and was deeply impressive. After the service the coffin was borne back the Castle, the remains being deposited in the historic Fitzalan Chapel. The Duchess of Norfolk did not attend High Mass St Philip Neri but was present with her children the private service at Fitzalan Chapel, where the remains were interred. A solemn mass of requiem was celebrated at the Brompton Oratory, London, yesterday, and was attended members of the Royal Family, many members of the Diplomatic Corps, and distinguished relatives and friends of the late Duke. The Prince of Wales was represented by Hon. Sir Sidney Greville, Queen Alexandra by Earl Howe, and the Duke and Duchess of Connaught by Colonel Sir Malcolm Murray. Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, attended person.

The entrance to the Fitzalan chapel in the grounds of Arundel Castle