Arundell had a younger brother, Charles, and two sisters, Dorothy and Jane.[2] Little is known of their early lives, except that after the execution of their father in 1552 their mother took her children to live in the Holy Roman Empire, where the family used the name of Howard. For this reason, Arundell is sometimes referred to as Matthew Arundell-Howard.[4][5] In 1554, two years after his father's death, when he was about twenty-one, the Arundells were "restored in blood", meaning that their father's attainder was reversed so far as it affected them, and Arundell gradually succeeded in regaining most of his father's lost estates in Dorset and Wiltshire.[2]
Sir Thomas Arundell's main seat, Wardour Castle, had been held by knight service of the Earl of Pembroke, so had escheated to Pembroke in 1552. In 1570 Arundell was able to buy it back to live in, together with the manor of Sutton Mandeville, and the next year Lord Pembroke granted him the site of Shaftesbury Abbey.[8] As well as living at Wardour, the Arundells kept a town house in London.[2] They had two sons.[1]
His brother Charles Arundell (died 1587) was openly a recusant and fled the country after the Babington Plot. In the 1580s he was seen as a leader of the English Roman Catholic exiles in France.[11] Arundell's own elder son was imprisoned as a suspected Imperial spy, but Arundell himself conformed to the Church of England. In 1588, Arundel was one of a small number of knights considered for a peerage on account of "great possessions". The following year he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Wiltshire.[10]
Sir John Harington (1561–1612), a courtier often claimed as the inventor of the water closet, reported an occasion at Wardour in the early 1590s at which a conversation about sanitation first prompted his interest in the subject. Apart from Harington, those present were Arundell and his son Thomas, Thomas's wife, Mary, her brother Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, and Sir Henry Danvers. However, fifty years later Wardour Castle still depended on medieval garderobes as privies.[12]
In his final months Arundell was in pain from bladder stones. Following his death on 24 December 1598 he was buried at the parish church of Tisbury. In his Will, proved on 6 February 1598/99, he gave £2,000 – at the time an enormous sum, equal to almost twice the annual income of his more powerful connection the Earl of Southampton[13] – to the poor.[10][14] As Custos Rotulorum of Dorset he was succeeded by Sir Walter Raleigh.
Posterity
Arundell's son Thomas distinguished himself in battle against the Turks in the service of the Emperor Rudolf II, who created him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. This foreign title annoyed Queen Elizabeth, who in 1597 imprisoned Thomas Arundell in the Fleet as a suspected Roman Catholic spy, but nothing could be proved against him and Thomas was soon released into Arundell's custody.[15] In 1605, some years after Arundell's death in 1598, his elder son was summoned to the House of Lords by King James I as Baron Arundell of Wardour[1] and was briefly suspected of being one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators.[9]
^ abcGeorge Edward Cokayne & Vicary Gibbs, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, vol. I (London: St Catherine Press, 1910), p. 263
^ abcd'Wardour Castle' in John Preston Neale & Thomas Moule, Jones' views of the seats, mansions, castles, etc. of noblemen (Jones and Co., 1829): "Sir Thomas Arundell, second son of Sir John Arundell, Knt. of Lanherne in Cornwall, lineal descendant of Roger de Arundell, recorded in Domesday Survey to be possessed of twenty-eight manors in the Counties of Dorset and Wilts... His estates were confiscated, and Wardour Castle was granted to the Earl of Pembroke, of whom it was soon after purchased by Sir Matthew Arundell, eldest son of Sir Thomas Arundell..."
^Harry Wright Newman, Anne Arundel Gentry (Baltimore, MD, 1933), p. 240
^Aaron Lewis Mehring, The Ancestors & Descendants of Henry Howard (1966), p. 6
^G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), pp. 6, 27
^Leanda De Lisle, The Sisters Who Would Be Queen; The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine & Lady Jane Grey (London: HarperPress, 2008), pp. 59, 162, 172, 252-53, 289-90.
^S. T. Bindoff, The House of Commons: 1509-1553 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), p. 336
^H. R. Woudhuysen, 'Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–1586), author and courtier', in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2007)
^'Privy Politics' in Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford University Press, 2001) p. 56
^G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 15–21
^Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry: a study in colonial and medieval families (ISBN1461045207), p. 45: "SIR MATTHEW ARUNDELL died 24 Dec. 1598, and was buried at Tisbury, Wiltshire. He left a will proved 6 Feb. 1599 (P.C.C. 12 Kidd)."
^G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 59