She would inherit a vast estate in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Derbyshire, including Sheffield, which has been the principal part of the family fortune ever since.

In June 1607, Arundel hosted a feast at court and produced a play, The Tragedy of Aeneas and Dido to entertain the Prince de Joinville.

Arundel presided over the House of Lords Committee in April 1621 for investigating the corruption charges against Francis Bacon, whom he defended from degradation from the peerage, and at whose fall he was appointed a commissioner of the Great Seal.

In the debates on the Petition of Right, while approving its essential demands, he supported the retention of some discretionary power by the king in committing to prison.

He was sent to The Hague in 1632 on a mission of condolence to the king's sister, Elizabeth Stuart, recently Queen of Bohemia, on her husband's death.

In 1634 he was made justice in eyre of the forests north of the Trent; he accompanied Charles the same year to Scotland on the occasion of his coronation.

With the troubles that would lead to the Civil War brewing, Arundel decided not to return from the Netherlands to England, and instead settled first in Antwerp and then at a villa near Padua, Italy.

He became noted as a patron and collector of works of art, described by Walpole as "the father of virtu in England",[8] and was a member of the Whitehall group of connoisseurs associated with Charles I.

[9] He commissioned portraits of himself or his family by contemporary masters such as Daniel Mytens, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Lievens, and Anthony van Dyck.

Among Arundel's circle of scholarly and literary friends were James Ussher, William Harvey, John Selden and Francis Bacon.

He had a large collection of antique sculptures, the Arundel Marbles mostly Roman, but including some he had excavated in the Greek world, which was then the most important in England.

Arundel's important library and its collection of manuscripts was inherited by his son, the 15th Earl, and later by his grandson, Henry Howard (afterwards 6th Duke of Norfolk).

In 1666, at the instigation of John Evelyn, who feared its total loss, Henry Howard gave most of it to the Royal Society, and a part, consisting of genealogical and heraldic collections, to the College of Heralds, the manuscript portion of the Royal Society's portion was sold to the British Museum in 1831, and they now form the Arundel manuscripts within the British Library.