Lumley inventories

Further inventories were drawn up for purposes of probate on Lord Lumley's death in 1609; and others when parts of the collection were sold in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

The greater part of the Red Velvet Book comprises genealogical material, reflecting Lumley's fascination with his own ancestry.

The earliest and most extensive pedigree, which charts the Lumley descent from a Saxon nobleman named Liulph, is dated 1586, and has been identified as the work of Robert Glover, Somerset Herald.

[11] Arundel inherited some of Lumley's collection of paintings,[12] including the portrait of the Duchess of Milan, now in the National Gallery.

[18] An edited version of the 1609 inventory of paintings was published in Robert Surtees’ History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham in 1820.

[20] It was published again, omitting the description of Lumley Castle but including 20 monochrome plates of the drawings, by Lionel Cust in 1918 in the sixth volume of the Walpole Society.

[21] The Red Velvet Book in its entirety was published in a limited edition by the Roxburghe Club in 2010, in full colour facsimile and accompanied by twelve scholarly contextual essays, under the editorship of Mark Evans.

He also put forward the view that the phrase "done by Seigar" in the 1590 inventory referred to the portrait of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex in the National Gallery of Ireland.