[1] His father died when he was three, and he spent some time in an orphanage, where he was bewildered when the head told him he would be the Earl of Essex one day.
Many years later, he received a newspaper clipping from a friend saying that the heir to the Earls of Essex might be an American, Bladen Horace Capell.
This led Capell to correspond with distant and formerly unknown relations.
[1] When the 9th Earl died in 1981, Robert Capell was a grocer in Lancashire.
They had one child:[3] He died in 2005 and was succeeded as Earl of Essex by his son Paul Capell,[1] described by The Daily Telegraph as an "ever so humble" schoolteacher.