Sir Matthew ARUNDELL HOWARD

Born: 1535, Wardour Castle, England

Died: 1598

Father: Thomas ARUNDELL (Sir)

Mother: Margaret HOWARD

Married: Margaret WILLOUGHBY

Children:

1. Catherine ARUNDELL HOWARD

2. Thomas ARUNDELL HOWARD (1° B. Arundell of Wardour)

Sir Matthew Arundell was restored in blood two years after Sir Thomas execution and eventually recovered most of his father's property. He was able to purchase Wardour Castle, which had escheated to the Earl of Pembroke on his father's attainder and it became his principal residence. He also maintained a house in London. He was knighted in 1574.

He served on numerous commissions in Dorset and Wiltshire. and served in the House of Commons, representing Shaftsbury in the Parliament of 1555 and Breconshire in the one 1563. In the latter Parliament, he became closely associated with William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and his family and that relationship probably began in this Parliament.

His younger brother Charles was a notorious recusant and his elder son was imprisoned for his Catholicism, but Sir Matthew was never suspected of recusancy. He was appointed deputy Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire in 1589 and held the post the rest of his life.

In 1588 he was listed as among twelve knights with "great possessions" able to sustain a peerage. When he died (he suffered cruelly from bladder stones), he left £2000 for the relief of the poor.

Sources:

P. W. Hasler, Editor, The House of Commons, 1558-1603 (LOndon: HMSO, 1981)David Faris, Plantagenet Ancestry of Seventeenth-Century Colonists, 2nd E
d. (Boston, Mass.: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1999.)

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