Alice FitzAlan was born circa 1350 at Arundel Castle in Sussex, England, the second daughter of the 10th Earl of Arundel, and Eleanor of Lancaster. She had six siblings who included Richard Fitzalan, later 11th Earl of Arundel, and Joan FitzAlan, later Countess of Hereford, Essex, and Northampton. She also had three half-siblings from her parents' previous marriages.
In 1354, at the age of four, Alice was betrothed to her father's wardEdmund Mortimer who would in 1360 become the 3rd Earl of March. The marriage, however, did not take place. Alice married instead on 10 April 1364, 2nd Earl of Kent, one of the half-brothers of the future King Richard II by his mother Joan of Kent's first marriage to Thomas Lord Holland. She received from her father a marriage portion of 4,000 marks.[2] Upon her marriage, she was styled Lady Holland. She did not, however, become Countess of Kent until 1381, when her husband succeeded his father as Thomas Holland, 2nd Earl of Kent.
Lord Holland was appointed captain of the English forces in Aquitaine in 1366, and in 1375, he was made a Knight of the Garter. Two years later in 1377, his half-brother Richard succeeded to the throne of England, as King Richard II. Alice's husband would become one of the young King's chief counsellors and exert a strong influence over his brother which led to the enrichment of Thomas and Alice. Alice was appointed a Lady of the Garter, an order of chivalry, in 1388.
Together Thomas and Alice had ten children:[citation needed]
Bridget Holland (died before 1416), a nun at Barking Abbey.
Later years
Alice's husband died on 25 April 1397. In 1399, King Richard was deposed, and the throne was usurped by Henry IV, the son-in-law of her elder sister, Joan. In January 1400, Alice's eldest son Thomas, who had succeeded his father as the 3rd Earl of Kent, was captured at Cirencester and beheaded without a trial by a mob of angry citizens[4] as a consequence of having been one of the chief conspirators in the Epiphany Rising. The rebels had hoped to seize and murder King Henry, and immediately restore King Richard to the throne. Less than three years earlier, her brother Richard FitzAlan, 11th Earl of Arundel and a Lord Appellant, had been executed for his opposition to King Richard.
Alice herself died on 17 March 1416 at the age of sixty-six. She is buried at Wells Cathedral.[5]