Blair Worden

What Englishmen learnt from Europe

The Jacobean Grand Tour is packed with sumptuous detail about a time when Stuarts sent their sons to the Continent for a well-rounded education

The great Ascension Day pageant of the Doge performing the marriage of the sea — already a tourist attraction in 17th-century Venice. [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy]

The pattern of foreign travel by wealthy young Englishmen that became known as the Grand Tour began in the Renaissance and matured in the 17th century. In its origins it was a training for statesmanship. The state’s takeover of the church, which had done so much of the state’s official business, enlarged the employment opportunities of the nobility and gentry. So did the expansion of the government’s administrative resources and ambitions. But with the opportunities came challenges. Monarchs needed their advisers and officials and diplomats to be skilled and knowledgeable. So noblemen and gentlemen urged their sons to look beyond the accustomed pleasures of the hunting field and get down to educational business. They placed them under learned and strenuous tutors, or sent them to the universities and inns of court that grew and prospered under landowning patronage.

Never has the English ruling class been so earnestly educated. Remote as the content of its latinate education may seem to us, it had a practical orientation. Fathers and theorists enjoined the study of history, because the political thought of the period was essentially the study of historical laws and lessons that could be applied to present problems. The development of foreign travel — principally to France and Italy, but also to Spain and Germany and Switzerland and the Low Countries and elsewhere too — had a similarly utilitarian aim. One young voyager after another was told not just to look at the scenery or wonder at the eccentricity of foreigners but to enquire into the political organisation and power struggles, and the military dispositions and capacities, of the countries they visited — information that might not only stretch and nourish the minds of future rulers but be immediately useful to fathers in Whitehall.

The journeys were expensive, and they had their hazards. Some of the risks are remembered by Polonius, whose concerns about the itchy-footed Laertes echo many a paternal warning of Shakespeare’s time.

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