24 May] 1654), née Lady Alethea Talbot (pronounced "Al-EE-thia"[1]), was a famous patron and art collector, and one of England's first published female scientists.

Alethea and her husband accompanied the Elector Palatine Frederick V and his bride Princess Elizabeth Stuart to Heidelberg on their marriage in 1613.

On 30 August 1618 Anne of Denmark provided a grand reception for the Venetian ambassador Piero Contarini at Oatlands Palace.

At the end of the dinner there were sweetmeats, then they stood and toasted Elizabeth, Electress Palatine and Frederick V.[8] Around 1619 Lord Arundel sent his two elder sons to Padua.

The manhunt led to the arrest of many actual plotters, but also of many innocent victims, such as Antonio Foscarini, a patrician and Venetian Ambassador to England (1611–15), who was executed on 21 April 1621, after attending an event at the English Embassy.

[9] The hysteria ended in 1622, and on 16 January 1623, the Venetian government issued an apology for Foscarini's execution, thus marking a scaling back of the manhunt.

Lady Arundel left Venice with letters from Priuli ordering every favour to be shown to her on her journey through Venetian territory.

The king refused to allow Lady Arundel to accompany her husband on a special embassy to Holland, to invite the Winter Queen, his sister, to England.

In 1638 Lady Arundel was indicted for recusancy[13] and debts threatened to ruin the estate, and her husband started the Madagascar plan.

With the departure of the Queen-Mother, Maria de' Medici from England, Lord and Lady Arundel were appointed to escort her to Cologne.

She commissioned an inventory of the contents of Tart Hall, her home on the margins of St James's, which included a chamber known as the Dutch Pranketing Room.

[14] Lady Arundel was not prepared to wait for Marie de' Medici and with characteristic decisiveness set off for the Continent on her own, the reason being, so it was said, that she had a 'mania' for travel.

When he accompanied Maria de' Medici to Cologne, Alethea tried to persuade Urban VIII to allow her to enter a Carthusian monastery.

[16] In 1642, her husband accompanied the Queen and Princess Mary for her marriage to William II of Orange and left straight for Padua.

Then she moved to Amersfoort (1649), and rented a pied-a-terre in Amsterdam at Singel 292, an elegant house, with a courtyard facing Herengracht.

[21] The inventory consisted of 36 paintings by Titian, 16 by Giorgione, 19 by Tintoretto, 11 by Correggio, 17 by Veronese 12 by Rafaello and five by Da Vinci.

Her recipes were published under the title Natura Exenterata[24] Alethea's father Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, was a noted patron of early science, and Alethea herself was the author of one of the earliest printed books of technical and scientific material in England to be attributed to a woman – making her one of England’s first published female scientists.

Tart Hall was built with the advice of the Catholic priest George Gage and the master mason Nicholas Stone.