Duke of Norfolk:The Duke of Norfolk Earl Marshal of England, who died on June 24th aged 86, was once embroiled at the periphery of the fractious Irish politics of the early 1980s. He praised the then leader of the Opposition Garret FitzGerald, with whom he had had a meeting, for supporting the proposals of Northern Secretary Jim Prior for a devolved government in Northern Ireland.
FitzGerald was embarrassed because he had reservations about Prior's plans for an internal settlement in the North and denied that he had ever discussed it with the duke who as Major-General Miles Fitzalan-Howard, had been director of Military Intelligence before he retired from the army in 1967. That provided ammunition for Charles Haughey to accuse FitzGerald of plotting with a British spymaster to undermine the Irish Government, and to disparage FitzGerald's plans for an all-Ireland police force which would, he said, result in the return of the British security forces to the Republic.
Born on July 21st, 1915, Miles Fitzalan-Howard inherited his dukedom from a cousin, with some reluctance, in 1975. He had so many titles that it would have taken a medieval herald nearly a minute to shout. Yet he was, for most of his life, set apart from the limelight by the eminence and devotion of his Catholicism. He was Britain's most senior Catholic layman, leader of one of the oldest families in a faith which, for nearly 300 years, lay under a civil and political shadow, until it was emancipated from state restrictions in the 19th century.
His personal librarian John Martin Robinson observed of the whole 500-year Norfolk dynasty: "They were in the middle of things, yet shut out. Their religion, as well as their dukedom, was medieval. With one or two exceptions, adherence to a proscribed religion is their great trait. They have always had an unpompous independence of character."
This divided inheritance left Miles Fitzalan-Howard as a largely invisible duke. His only duty as earl marshal was to organise the state opening of parliament.
His full titles, collected by forebears since the 12th century, were: Earl of Arundel; Baron Beaumont; Baron Maltravers; Earl of Surrey; Baron FitzAlan, Clun and Oswaldestre; Earl of Norfolk; Baron Howard of Glossop; earl marshal and hereditary marshal and chief butler of England; Duke of Norfolk and - as he added in his Who's Who entry - "premier duke and earl".
He tended, however, to be more proud of his 30-year record as an active soldier, military cross-winner and military civil servant before he inherited the dukedom. Although only occasional speeches in the House of Lords brought him to public attention, he was, in private, an active, energetic, trenchant man. His idea of happy exercise was splitting wood, building walls and working with horses.
Miles Fitzalan-Howard, whose titles before he inherited the dukedom were Beaumont and Baron Howard, was the great-grandson of the second son of the 13th Duke of Norfolk. He had known long before 1975 that what he called "the wavy line of the succession" might come to him because of the inability of the 16th duke, Bernard, to produce heirs. "It was just going to bloody well happen, and one tried to prepare for it", he told an interviewer.
He was educated at Ampleforth, the Catholic public school, he got a third-class history degree at Christ Church, Oxford, and joined the Grenadier Guards as a lieutenant in 1937. Two years later, the second World War brought him promotion to command of an anti-tank platoon. He served at Dunkirk and in North Africa. After D-day, he was posted to Washington, where he met his wife Anne.
In 1957, he headed the British military mission to Soviet forces in Potsdam. Later, as brigade commander with the King's African Rifles, he had responsibility for steering the Kenyan army towards independence, winning credit for his determination to integrate blacks and whites.
He commanded the first division of the Rhine army from 1963 to 1965. When he left the army he found what he saw as a second spring, as director in charge of euro dollars and eurobonds at the City merchant bank Robert Fleming.
When he took his ducal seat in the Lords at the age of 59, he did so in the robes worn by his ancestor, the 12th duke, the first Catholic peer after emancipation in 1829. He was briefly headlined as "the reluctant duke who cleans his own shoes".
One of his first deeds was to call his whole family together for a service of rededication and rehabilitation for their ancestor, the Tudor poet Henry Howard, who was executed for high treason. The duke called him "a sublime poet, who suffered unjustly".
In 1982, Queen Elizabeth asked him to officially welcome Pope John-Paul II to Britain on the first papal visit since the Reformation.
In 1980, though staunchly conservative, the duke summoned his powers of organisation, tactics and noblesse oblige to inflict a crushing defeat on the young Thatcher government over legislation to charge for school buses. "Why should we penalise poor people in the country compared with those who live in the town?" he asked.
Four years later, he shocked his co-religionists by denouncing Catholic teaching on birth control to a conference of Catholic teachers. "How can you ask a married couple to do it by thermometers and what not?" he asked. "My wife and I did that - it didn't bloody work. Has everybody got to have eight children like my mother?"
He is survived by his wife, two sons and three daughters.
Miles Francis Stapleton Fitzalan-Howard, KG, GCVO, CB, MC, 17th Duke of Norfolk: born 1915; died, June 2002