Touring in 1600. Bates Ernest Stuart
first chapter of whose autobiography gives a better insight into the psychology, and life on the road, of the picaro than the whole flood of nineteenth-century comment on the subject. At the age of eighteen he found himself with no father, no money, and a mother pious but talkative; after having provided for his needs for a while by marriage, he left home with a horse, a mule, a bed, and sixty ducats. And though what follows belongs more to the history of lying than the history of the world, it throws side-lights. And at any rate, any excuse is good enough to turn to it, for Don Alonzo has much in common with Benvenuto Cellini.
Now we have passed beyond the mediæval types and come to such as are somewhat more prominent in this, than in the previous, centuries. Exiles, for instance. The economic changes that took place during the sixteenth century made it increasingly difficult for the equivalents for Chancellors of the Exchequer to meet the yearly deficits. The legal authorities were therefore called upon to assist, and a working arrangement was established in practically all European countries whereby the political ferment of the time was taken advantage of for the betterment of the finances. Instead of the slow process and meagre results of waiting for death-duties, a man of wealth suffered premature civil death, or was harried into civil suicide. He was exiled, or fled: he had become a tourist.
Inseparable from political is religious self-exile. What happened very often in England was this. A youngster is seized with that belief in the likelihood of an ideal life elsewhere and that desire for a change, which are characteristic of the age of twenty. The theological cast of the age gives the former a religious bias. He escapes. After a time it seems to him that human characteristics have the upper hand of the apostolic, even in Roman Catholics, to a greater extent than he once believed, and that he would like to go home. He lands, is questioned by the Mayor, reported on to the Privy Council, in which report his experiences are to be found summarised.
One class of men, however, which might be expected to provide many examples, is for the most part absent, – missionaries, – occupied at home converting each other at this date, or re-converting themselves. The chief, in fact, the Jesuits, were confined each one to his nation by order, and only in respect of their early training days do they appear as foreigners abroad. Acknowledgements are due, on the other hand, for information received, to captives set free, soldiers, artists, herbalists, antiquaries, and even to those who, so far as we know, only looked on, like Shakespeare; and to many others led abroad by special reasons, such as the Italian Marquis who felt it necessary for him to have a long holiday after the privations of Lent.
But with all these varieties of tourist, we still have not come to the Average Tourist. The type is extinct, killed by reference-books, telegraphy, and democracy. For the Average Tourist left his fatherland to get information which he could not get at home, and he wanted this information because he was a junior member of the aristocracy, at that time the governing class more exclusively than at present. In feudal days isolation was, comparatively, taken for granted, and the fact of that voluntary isolation implied many hindrances to touring. The need of acquiring information of every kind that affected political action had been therefore less realised and the difficulty of acquiring it greater. These years near 1600 are the years of transition, transition to a custom for travellers to
… seek their place through storms,
In passing many seas for many forms
Of foreign government, endure the pain
Of many faces seeing, and the gain
That strangers make of their strange-loving humours:
Learn tongues; keep note-books; all to feed the tumours
Of vain discourse at home, or serve the course
Of state employment…5
Herein lies the unity of subject of this book; not in its concern with a given class of experiences during a given period. Roughly speaking, in the two half-centuries preceding and succeeding the year 1600, the practice of the upper classes of sending sons abroad as part of their education became successively an experiment, a custom, and, finally, a system. By the middle of the seventeenth century this system had become a thoroughly set system, and the "Grand Tour" a topic for hack-writers. Of the latter, James Howell was the first. His "Instructions for Foreign Travel" (1642) may serve to date the beginning of "Grand Touring" in the modern sense of the phrase, while the publication of Andrew Boorde's "Introduction of Knowledge" a century earlier, does the same for this preceding period, that of the development of travel as a means of education.
Delimiting the movement by means of English books suggests that it was a merely English movement, but it was in fact European, though true of the different countries in varying degrees. The increase of diplomatic journeys,6, already mentioned, the core of this development and its chief instrument, was common to all divisions of Europe in proportion to the degree of the civilisation attained. In the Empire and Poland the custom grew up less suddenly; it had begun earlier. In Italy, it began later, since it was not till later that there was much for an Italian to learn that he could not learn better at home. Sir Henry Wotton7 noted in 1603 that travelling was coming into fashion among the young nobles of Venice. In France, an early beginning was broken off by the civil wars, not to start afresh till Henry IV's sovereignty was established. As for Spaniards and Portuguese, they alone had dominions over-sea to attend to.
In England, on the other hand, political reversals being at once frequent, thorough, and peaceable, migrations were very common and usually short. That touring would result from migration was certain, because it familiarised English people with the attractions and the affairs of the continent and with the uses of that familiarity, and established communications. Other special causes existed, too, truisms concerning which are so plentiful that there is no need to repeat them here.
But the certainty of the change did not prevent it being slow. Andrew Boorde, who knew Europe thoroughly, found hardly any of his countrymen abroad except students and merchants, and for the following half century it is the tendency rather than the fact that may be noted, as indicated, for example, by Sir Philip Sidney, who started in 1572, writing later to his brother that "a great number of us never thought in ourselves why we went, but a certain tickling humour to do as other men had done." In 1578 Florio could still write in one of his Italian-English dialogues published in London:8 "'Englishmen, go they through the world?' 'Yea some, but few.'" Yet in 1592 and again in 1595 the Pope complained about the number of English heretics allowed at Venice,9 and in 1615 an Englishman, George Sandys, leaves out of his travel-book everything relating to places north of Venice, such being, he says, "daily surveyed and exactly related." Three years earlier James I's Ambassador at Venice writes10 to the Doge that there are more than seventy English in Venice whereas "formerly" there had been four or five; and when he adds that there are not more than ten in the rest of Italy it must be remembered that he is making out a case and even then refers to Protestants only: between 1579 and 1603, three hundred and fifty Englishmen had been received into the English College at Rome.11
The development, then, of the English tourist may be synchronised with the rise of the English Drama and the expansion of English Commerce. In other words, the preparation for it came before the failure of the Spanish Armada; the actuality directly afterwards. But it could not have followed the course it did except in conjunction with wider causes, which emphasise its place as but part of a European movement. These may be sought in (1) the slight, but definite, advance in civilisation which made people more accessible to the ideas which peace fosters; (2) the greater area over which peace prevailed round about the year 1600: (3) the increase in centralisation in government, which decreased the obstacles in the way of the traveller, and increased the attractiveness of particular points, i. e., where the courts were held.
At the same time the increase in touring which really took place would be greatly over-estimated if one considered the evidence of bibliography as all-sufficient. Almost all that the latter proves is an increase in writing about it, due to the greatly increased demand for the written word which
George Chapman,
Hist. MSS. Com., 1899, vol. 46 (Duke of Buccleugh's
Einstein, p. 380.