The first recognisable Grand Tourists emerged at the end of the sixteenth century. Before then, in the Middle Ages, there had been mass movements of people from Britain visiting the Continent, but this had almost always been for religious reasons. In 1428, for example it is recorded that 925 shiploads of pilgrims left England for northern Spain and the shrine of St James of Compostella. The Reformation put an end to these pilgrimages. It was not until the end of the religious wars in France, which had lasted from the 1560s to the 1590s, that it was safe for Protestant Englishmen to wander freely through the largely Catholic Continent. Only then did people start journeying again in any numbers.
It must be remembered that the greater part of a boy’s education at that time would have been in the languages, literature and history of Classical Greece and Rome. The aim of the Grand Tour was to allow him, and the Grand Tourists were most frequently but not always male, to set foot on the classic ground about which he had learnt so much. In practice for the great majority this meant a visit to Italy, as visits to Greece were much rarer because of the difficulties in travelling. The Grand Tour was the culmination of the rich young Englishman’s education and he was expected to return enriched with knowledge of the classical past. Civilisation was considered to be the legacy of Greece and Rome and the young man was expected to return after his lengthy and costly journey with the socially desirable skills of the connoisseur of the classical world.
Indeed it was the classical world which was of primary interest. Anything Romanesque or Gothic was excluded from the itinerary. Henry Swinburne writing in 1783 considered the magnificent Norman cathedral at Monreale near Palermo ‘a very disagreeable specimen of Gothic taste’. Palladian and Baroque architecture and post-Raphaelite painting and sculpture were included however.
Apart from the art and classical ruins there were many other things to do and see, starting with the natural beauties of the landscape. Impressive natural phenomena Vesuvius and Etna attracted many visitors as did the famous glaciers above Chamonix. There were famous personalities to see and meet for these young men of rich and influential English families. The Royal courts in France and in Naples were a major centre of social and cultural life in Europe at that time. There were operas to see and there were all the processions, music and relics of the Roman Catholic Church which the Protestant Englishman enjoyed with a mixture if guilty fascination and amused superiority. There was also the hope for those in ill health of a change of temperature, medicinal waters and a different diet.
Last but not least there was for many the attraction of behaving badly away from home. The gaming tables in the European cities were famous for their heavy wins and losses, and in that environment it was easy to find the services of prostitutes of either sex. We read articles in newspapers today and see television programmes rightly deploring the exploitation of what is called ‘sex tourism’ Unfortunately this is nothing new and some of the Grand Tourists were certainly more interested in debauching themselves than visiting the classical ruins.
Many of the young men travelled with a tutor who was often either a clergyman or a fellow from one of the University colleges. These tutors, nicknamed ‘bear leaders’ was supposed to oversee the young man’s morals and studies and look after the practicalities of travel and accommodation. The presence of these figures indicates that there were deeper reasons behind the growth of the Grand Tour. The state of the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge was a major factor. Of his time at Oxford the great writer Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) said, ‘I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.’ Because of the lack of organisation and real study many fathers chose not to send their sons to university at all. In the whole of 1733 Christ’s College Cambridge admitted only three students. The time between school and marriage had to be filled somehow and preferable in a way which allowed to young man to let off his high spirits without doing harm to his family’s reputation and also to acquire at least a veneer of culture. The growth of prosperity in England at that time was also a contributing factor. England was an expanding economy on the brink of the Industrial Revolution with extensive trade with the American colonies and India. This financial expansion meant that not only the sons of the aristocracy were travelling on the Tour, but also the children of the newly emergent, influential educated middle classes.
We should not underestimate the difficulties and inconvenience of travelling such large distances at that time. The books written by the Grand Tourists are full of complaints about the roads, the food and the accommodation they found on the road. The machinery of modern European tourism – good roads, railways, air travel, hotels restaurants, credit cards etc. – was completely absent. Eighteenth century Europe was potentially dangerous and very uncomfortable place in which to journey. Restaurants as we know them did not exist – they were to come into being after the French revolution when they were started by cooks made jobless by the fall of their aristocratic employers. The roads were universally poor with the best being in France and the worst in Germany. But these were nothing compared with the inns were travellers had to sleep the night. James Adam, younger brother of the famous architect Robert Adam, stayed at Capua in 1760 and he paid dearly for trusting the quality of the bed in the local inn:
Half and hour after going to bed I was so attacked in flank, front and rear by six battalions of bugs and four squadrons of fleas that I was soon put to flight and obliged to take my night’s quarters upon three straw chairs in the middle of the room.
The most important travellers took their own artists with them to record the sights, like walking animated cameras. Lord Palmerston took William Parrs, while William Beckford had J R Cozens as well as a personal physician and a harpsichordist. To our great good fortune a man called Richard Payne Knight took with him to Sicily the great watercolorist Jakob Philipp Hackett, whose pictures today are expensive collector’s items.
After 1763 the Grand Tour was truly at its height. Paris, Venice, Rome and Naples were the preferred destinations and these cities were flooded with the English. Not only the sons of the aristocracy and the very rich but also lesser gentry, literary figures and the middle aged accompanied by wives and families. In these latter cases the main purpose was travel and entertainment rather educational.
But even as the Grand Tour reached its height it was shortly to decline. The end of the eighteenth century also saw the end of the Grand Tour. The unrest caused by the French Revolution made travel difficult in France, and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars caused disruption on an even greater scale. By the time Europe had settled down and travelling had become safe again, the world had changed. The spread of railways and growth of hotels made travelling easier. There was also a change in attitude and taste. With the growth of the Romantic Movement and the onset of the Victorian period Italian Gothic supplanted the High Renaissance and the classical as models of study. Shorter holidays were sufficient for the more earnest and less riotous Victorians to absorb the natural and architectural beauties. The Grand Tour, lasting two years or more, as a formative experience for the young rich hedonistic Englishman had come to an end. However, it has left us with a rich and amusing literature which provides us with excellent descriptions of what it was like to live and travel in the Europe of two hundred years ago.