Thomas Howard, second Earl of Arundel, was one of the most important collectors of art in the seventeenth century. In addition to amassing paintings, drawings, statuary, and antiquities on an almost unprecedented scale for an English nobleman, Arundel and his wife were also dedicated patrons of living artists. As a consequence of this impressive virtuosity, his book-collecting activities have received comparatively little attention. In fact, Arundel was a book collector of the first rank, and the Howard family--which can also be taken to include the Fitzalan earls of Arundel from an earlier generation--forms an impressive dynasty of book collectors.

In the sixteenth century the bulk of the Fitzalan collections passed to John Lumley, Baron Lumley, who had inherited Nonesuch Palace from his father-in-law, Henry Fitzalan, twelfth Earl of Arundel, together with a collection of paintings and a considerable library, much of which had come, sometime after 1553, from the...